Antair Games An independent game developer blog

Not too happy with this week, it was much more productive than any recent week, probably since we released Sneezies, but it went by way too fast, I feel cheated!

First up, a reminder. This weekend is the your last chance to enter the Great Indie Bake Off, and show some edible love to your favorite indie games. There are twelve cakes in the contest so far, but if you rustle up an entry this weekend you still have a very good chance of winning some great prizes. The poll for the contest will run next week. 

Sneezies got some great new reviews this week. iPhone School liked it, Frapstr loved it and wrote a very detailed and thoughtful review, iPhone App Reviews also raved about it and had some great suggestions. AppCraver gave it 9/10, and for any Spanish readers, Actualidad iPhone liked it too.

Last week I was talking about Tweetbacks. I removed them from the blog for now, at least until I get a chance to take a look at Tweetsuite, a great looking Wordpress plugin will all kinds of cool Twitter features.

I haven’t installed the Invisible Shield yet, the installation looks like a bit of an event, so I’ve been putting it off, but impressions here as soon as I get to it. They recommend not using the device for 24 hours after installation, so it probably needs to be done at the weekend.

Last week I offered to try to post a glimpse of our development progress once a week. Here’s the last screenshot I took before we added meaningful graphics to the next project:-

Still nothing to do with pirates :). As things stand right now, we’re re-evaluating a couple of other ideas, so the whole project might have changed by next week. It’s always hard to decide which game idea to make, there’s always so many good ones to choose from, and there are so many different factors to take into account.

We had settled and got a nice prototype up and running, but a couple of ideas came up that might be a better fit for us right now. We’ll see.

— ELSEWHERE —

Wolfire fail whaled on Vimeo for removing their awesome game design tour videos, but it looks like they’ve landed on their feet. Sounds like David might be getting a feature slot for the tours on GameTrailers, it’ll be well deserved if it comes off.

Lot’s of talk around Twitter and the blogs about iShoot this week. It’s good to see an indie success story make it to the top with a quality game. It’s funny the way these stories always get reported though, there’s always millions of dollars sitting out there just waiting for YOU to pickup that crusty old Mac book… There’s no silver bullets to guarantee success on the App store, so anytime you see anyone suggesting how to rake in some of this gold rush glory, take care. A lite version won’t do it, building a better fartbox won’t do it, and calling it “i” something won’t do it. You can make good stuff, market it all you can, and ultimately hope that you catch the imagination of the internet, and/or that Apple puts you on their featured lists. You might make millions, you might do alright, or you might not make much of anything. There were 300+ new iPhone apps released just last night, they can’t all be success stories, many (if not most) won’t even break even. If that sounds a bit bleak, fear not… there is a solution. The geniuses at atebits have put together the App Store Popularity EnhancEr (PEE), guaranteed to cut through all the difficult stuff and make sure *your* app is destined for the top. Great work guys :).