Development Blog

We are happy to announce that we are working on a new game called "Lunar Catch".

It is an Action/Ball and paddle game inspired by the classical game "Pong" but it has some new twists like multiple characters with unique abilities and talents. You may already know some of them like the evil Moon Raccoon or the brave Corgi General from our past game "Moon Raccoon".

There are currently three game modes planned: Singleplayer, Multiplayer (1vs1) and Co-op Multiplayer (2vs2). But not all features are fleshed out yet, and we are still in an early pre-alpha stage. If you are interested in alpha- or betatesting our new game you can sign the form on this page and help us with your feedback.

More details can be found on the gamepage here.

We are currently working on the next update v1.2 for ESO Research Assistant (ESORA).

Our latest app tracks research and feeding times for The Elder Scrolls Online. It seems there are some problems with approving apps on clay.io right now but we hope it can be sorted out soon.

The changes so far:

• we changed the style of the buttons at the bottom and moved them to the top of the app window
• we added a new settings screen to:
  • enable/disable sound notifications
  • enable/disable color coded countdowns (not done yet)
• we added some achievements (just for fun)
• we started to work on support for multiple char profiles (available in another upcoming update)

ESORA is currently available for only $0.99 (about 0,72€) and includes free feature updates and support. Additional char profiles might be available as In-App Purchase (IAP) in an upcoming version.

The latest beta build of Construct 2 added support for Crosswalk, a possible new way to publish our games for Android. It's a Chromium-based app engine and has some advantages over wrappers:

• WebGL support (which Crosswalk enables for all devices)
• Memory management so large games keep running smoothly and don't crash
• Fast startup times
• Letterbox fullscreen modes supported
• Web Audio API support for reliable audio playback and advanced audio effects
• Web Workers for faster pathfinding
• Latest JIT-capable V8 Javascript engine for native-like physics performance with asm.js
• Full DOM support: all form controls work; support for web-based services like the Facebook plugin and Clay.io
• Support for XML parsing
• Support for web fonts
• Regular updates to bring the latest new technologies and performance improvements as they arrive to Chrome

And Intel is providing the build service for free!

There may be some issues to resolve before it's ready for publishing, but once those are fixed it should no longer be necessary to use any non-browser wrappers on Android any more. We will try Crosswalk after the holidays and use it to publish our games for Android if it works well.

Merry Christmas from the whole team!

CocoonJS is a great service from Ludei to create native apps for iOS and Android. But when we compiled our first builds of Bauble Disaster we ran into some serious issues:

• Some actions were not working as expected or working at all on Android
• The signed .apk file did not install properly despite all tools ran successfully on it (signing, zipalign)

And we can not build for iOS until we get an Apple Dev Account for $99/year.

We will try to resolve these issues but unfortunately can not tell when we will be able to publish native apps. But the game should run well as HTML5 app in the browser on newer devices.

Since christmas is almost upon us we decided to release the game now and try to publish a native Android version in the future. A free update containing additional songs and a music player will be available soon.

We are making good progress on Bauble Disaster. We fixed most of the initial problems and the core game mechanics are done. Only the Clay.io implementation for global highscores is not working properly, yet. Because christmas is coming closer every day it seems we have to delay some features like the music player - a seperate part of the game where you can listen to great christmas music from Kevin MacLeod. This and any other features that we need to delay will be available in a free update for the game. 

A few new background images were added today and we tried to create our first Android package with CocoonJS from Ludei to improve performance on Android devices. Unfortunately we have no Android devices to test everything and we had to borrow a tablet from someone. We ran into some issues and hope to be able to solve them tomorrow.

If you are interested in betatesting and have an Android device we would be happy to hear from you. Just fill out our betatester application form.

Since we have no Apple developer account yet we can only publish our games and apps as installed HTML app and not as a native iOS application, which would boost performance significantly.

We will have to see how well our first mobile game runs on different devices when it runs as HTML app. If your iOS or Android device is not older than one or two years it should run very smoothly even without a native app. If no unforeseen problems occur we should be able to release Bauble Disaster in a few days.

If you have any issues with our game let us know. You can post in our official support forums or send us an email. Your (constructive) feedback is always welcome.