headjump.de

Where are all the cool articles?

Wow… at first my plan was to post a LOT of articles, concepts, development notes and even more here shortly after my game pirategolf has been released. The idea was that through the game maybe one or another individual finds the way to my homepage and is motivated to subscribe to the feed if there are lots of cool new articles out ;)

But as you can see: there is no such thing like a “lot of cool articles” right now… I just didn’t find the time. Next to my full time job in web-development-stuff I’m still doing some non-exclusives for pirategolf and sometimes it can be really tricky to get a customers highscore API running.

Love it or hate it

Let me just recap: the game is out in the wild for 7 days and a few hours now and already got a fine amount of views ;) That just blew my mind :). I got really addicted to check the statistics every 5 seconds to see the number grow!

The feedback on my game is really wide ranged. Some hate the game. Most complain that it’s too short – and they are sort of right ;). Some hate that it’s not a real golf game. Some say that the story is stupid. Some hate shooting in the air (I think it’s the best and most fun feature the game has to offer…). Some hate that it’s so easy. Some players love that you can shoot the ball anytime you want. Some find the length of the game perfect. Some love that you can just play the game for some minutes “without pain” and still have fun with it. And some even noticed how much effort and passion I put in making the game.

It was really interesting (and sometimes really really painful) to see what kind of feedback the players came up with. It’s also interesting to see the game performing absolutely different on different platforms (e.g. the version on newgrounds, which also features newgrounds medals, runs well and got an average of 3.92/5 rates and 8.6/10 reviews (update: 4.05 / 5.00 ratings and 9.0 / 10 reviews on Okt 10 ‘09)

It took me some days till I managed to not take every single bad rating personal…

All in all the game is a success and performs really well – must better than I thought of before!

The “lot” will come

I still plan to post some articles on the making of the game ;) At least I want to show you that I got good reasons for the decisions I made while developing the game. Why is it so short? Why does the ball shoot at full power? Why can I shoot in the air? Why is the game so easy? Why is there a cheesy story? I’ve got answers to all those ;)

I also did a lot of sketches and concepts while developing, so I guess it won’t be too difficult for me to just scan some of the sketches and put them up here in the future.