Adarakion Developer Diary: Issue 51

Issue 51 began quietly at home. He was sitting in his favourite armchair, watching the RoChain scores populate on the high score table online.  Achievement; he had achieved a lifelong dream of actually making a complete game, releasing it to the public and baring his soul for all to pick fault with…  But what’s this, a message from a random stranger telling him how “RoChain was more addictive than Tetris”!  Slightly bemused he looked again, nah, the guy didn’t really mean that did he? I mean, come on, Tetris?  And so it continued – tweets, emails, and messages, all full of praise for RoChain and what Adarakion had achieved over the last 4-5 months purely from evening work (hour here, hour there).  Was it really as good as people were saying?

He needed to break away a little; sure he knew RoChain was a fun (and unique) game in the marketplace, but he was absolutely sure that people were just being nice to him. After all, he has been writing about it for months now, building up a little hype, trying to keep people interested, it will all die down. Surely it will all die down?

But no, they kept on coming. The tone of the emails was also changing a little – “Dude, why can’t I have this game on my iPhone, it would be awesome and I would happily pay for it”.  (Don’t get me wrong, not everyone said that, but you can exchange the word “iPhone” for “Android”, “Palm O/S” or whatever you like really)!

So, he spoke to the team and the decision was unanimous. ROCHAIN IS COMING TO iOS!

Wow, sorry about that, went all novella on you there for a second, but I felt this was the best way to explain how things have been moving over the past couple of weeks.  It’s not only seen the fulfilment of a lifelong dream for the team and I, but also given us serious food for thought.  See, we had planned to release RoChain more as a showcase item than anything else – something that people could play and enjoy for free.  We fully planned to move on at this point, to put RoChain in the bag and start work in earnest on Project Blast!  We can’t ignore the feedback however, and have to look at things from a more “business” perspective. People are saying that they would pay for RoChain (in fact, personal heartfelt thanks to those who have already donated). We can’t ignore the fact that potentially there is money to be made with a relatively small amount of risk.  The game is completed, the cost of iPhone dev license is relatively tiny, we can get a lovely SDK which allows deployment to iPhone for £0. It’s almost a no brainer.

The port process will take a little time whilst we familiarise ourselves with the SDK, get everything in there and then of course submit to Apple to go through their approval process, however we don’t expect this to take MUCH longer than maybe a month or so (all being well).

Depending on the success on the iPhone will determine if we deploy RoChain to Android and others.  The license costs to do so are considerably more than zero pounds, so we need to assess the market properly and see if it is worthwhile.  I guess we could port RoChain again using a cheaper SDK alternative, however I don’t feel that would be an efficient use of our time, considering once we have built the game using our current SDK all we need to do is press a different button to deploy to other platforms – the convenience is VERY attractive… the cost, less so!

So there you have it. RoChain coming to iOS, and that’s fully down to you guys playing the game, liking it, and offering support and feedback – so give yourselves a pat on the back!!

Sticking with the PC version of RoChain for a second, we have identified a fairly major bug.  Not a bug that stops people enjoyment of the game, but a bug which we had all overlooked and actually makes it a LOT harder to rack up the high scores whilst remaining fun… We have fixed the bug but not made the revised version available for download yet.  We are in discussion about how best to approach this (scoreboard wipe etc).  More on this in the coming days.

If you haven’t played RoChain yet – shame on you – head over to www.adarakion.com and follow the links, feedback always appreciated too, you can contact us here (comments below) or via the contact page on the website!