The Qwak website has been down, for about a week I think. Someone (*ahem* not too far away) forgot to renew the domain registration, so the whole lot went (site and mails). I’ve renewed now with my domain registration company and so it should be back up soon (I hope). Hope it hasn’t caused too much inconvenience, or cost me thousands in lost sales…
It’s only been 4 days, but Qwak is selling well, and it’s been featured by Apple, and I’m getting some really great feedback. So, here’s what I have planned for the first update…
Continue:
I’ll be adding in an option to continue your game, from where you were before you switched your iPhone off, or, took that important call etc.
Difficulty:
I’ll be making the game easier and will include 2 difficulty settings. A new easier (default) setting, which I’ll call ‘NORMAL’. Plus, keeping the existing difficulty setting, which I’ll call ‘NINJA’.
Controls:
I gotten a mixed response from people regarding the on-screen controls. What I plan to do is add in an option to re-size the controls, and an option to swap UP and FIRE. Also, the dark area that comes up, behind the controls, when your duck is on the bottom of the screen, I’ll add in an option to make that bigger (helps avoid obscuring duck with fingers etc).
Online High-scores:
I always intended to have online scores in the game, the only question, is do I use a pre-existing solution, such as OpenFeint, or do I roll my own? If I use OpenFeint, I could also add in achievements, and all the other OpenFeint stuff. If I roll-my-own, it would just be high-scores (no achievements) and it will work more like the desktop version of Qwak, and better integrate with the game (same look and feel etc).
Let me know what you think about that, please leave a comment!
Anything else?
If there’s anything else you’d like to see changed or added, please leave a comment (leave one anyway) and let me know.
Thanks for your input!
They’re talking about the PC and Mac version of Qwak (which the iPhone version is a port of), but anyhow, here’s what Retro Gamer CD had to say about your favourite platformer…
A lot of commercial games claim to have a long history; there are plenty that have seen sequels and spinoffs across many different platforms. Few of them have dared to stay exactly the same throughout their lifetime. Usually there’s a feature added, or a part of the gameplay changed… sometimes just minor tweaks, and other times, great sweeping changes. In the big-business world of multi-million dollar game franchises, the old adage “if it ain’t broke…” got thrown out of the window (and dare I say kicked into the gutter) a very long time ago.
I love getting mail from people, no matter if it’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’, it’s all good feedback, and lets me know what I’m doing well, and what I’m doing not so well. Here’s one of the good ones, Ryan Hayward talks about the PC version of Qwak…
Don’t they look beautiful?! All 5, each one more gorgeous than the next, just sitting there, looking cute, and waiting for you to use and abuse them! (the poor things).
Okay, so if you run an iPhone games news site or blog, please grab one or more of these gorgeous screens of my soon to be released iPhone game Qwak, and stick them on your own site for the whole world to see.
The screen above shows Qwak (the little red duck) lost and alone in the snowy wilderness that is the Arctic. Plenty of yummy sweets to collect in the Arctic, cute dolphins too!
The screen above shows Qwak (the little yellow duck, why does he keep changing colour?) fearlessly dodging some nastly looking black spikey ball things, I think he’s hoping some magic bubbles will come out of those bubble machines he’s standing on!
The screen above shows Qwak (the little yellow duck) exploring some long lost abandoned mines. Those purple 5 egg things, allow him to dispatch his enemies with dinosaur eggs, which crack open on impact and shower out a bunch of goodies.
The screen above shows Qwak wondering around some cold dank castle, he’s trying to figure out what those little coloured levers are for, and which one he should pull first! Wonder what’s in that wooden treasure chest too…
The screen above shows Qwak (ouch, he’s under attack by a little red fish) exploring the catacombs below some long lost ancient pyramid, somewhere in Egypt! Apparently there’s lots oh hidden secret passageways and things to discover…
Don’t forget! Qwak will be available for your iPhone very soon, it’s not an easy game, but it will test your ninja skills to the limit! Also, Qwak has it’s own site here: http://www.qwak.co.uk (game-play movie there too).
Thanks for looking, and thanks for supporting the little guy and indie game dev! Please spread the news! Thanks! Jamie. 
I like running … OK, I love running..
I’ve done around a dozen half marathons now, and loads of 10k races. My personal best time for a half marathon was 2 years ago, when I ran the Sheffield Half in 1hr 38m 15s. Which I was very happy with my performance that day. I ran a consistent 7m 30s per mile, from start to finish; and was completely out of gas by the end of it.
All too often, I set off way too fast, and run out of steam on the second half of the run, so to my mind, a consistent run, is a perfect run.
Well, it’s Sheffield Half Marathon 2010 in 6 days time; I’ve been doing extra training runs, and feel I could be within striking distance of a new PB. I don’t like to tempt fate, so will just do my best on the day, and see how it goes. Woo Hoo!
For the past month or so, I have been super busy working on an iPhone version of Qwak, and so far, I’m very pleased with the results, the game plays very well on the device and looks pretty good too. There’s lots of action, and thanks to a little under the bonnet, jiggery-pokery, I’ve managed to get the game running at a silky smooth 60 FPS (frames per seconds).
I’ll put some video up of the game running at some point, but check the screens out for now (you can click on them). As you can see, it pretty closely resembles the PC / Mac version, and although the iPhone (and iPod Touch) is a relatively low-powered device, I’ve not really had to cut it down to size much. So far, it’s got all the bells and whistles of it’s big (desktop version) brother.
I’ve recently been playing around with the iPhone SDK, and getting to grips with iPhone development.
What you can see here, is an extract from a texture atlas I’ve just created, consisting of all the sprites in Qwak. Actually, there’s not that many! The original texture atlas is 1024 * 1024 pixels in size, and there is plenty of room to spare.
What’s more, the iPhone can probably fit 4 or more of these in to video ram (depending on your texture format). By my standards, that’s video-ram-a-plenty!
I used my own tools to create texture atlases, and it’s super easy to access all your sprites from within your games’ source code. Check out my other site for more info: http://www.dev2ool.com
A few people have been asking me for more stats on the Qwak sale, and I also wanted to waffle on a bit about the experience. Okay, so I didn’t actually do much promotion for this at all, I made a post on the indiegamer.com forums, the TIGsource forums, and perhaps one or two other smaller forums, then I sent out a newsletter to all the subscribers on the Qwak mailing list (which isn’t that big), and that was about it. Read more »
Here’s my Google Analytics showing traffic before, and then during the 7 day sale period. As you can see, before the sale, I was averaging 50-70 visits per day; during the sale that shot up to almost 2,000 on a couple of days.
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