Bauble Disaster

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!

Our first mobile* casual game Bauble Disaster has been released today!

Bauble Disaster features a global Highscore list, unique Achievements and a selection of great and well known christmas songs performed by Kevin MacLeod.

The game is available for mobile devices (awaiting approval) and can be bought in our shop for Windows, MAC and Linux systems.

This time we decided to sell our game for a small amount instead of giving it away for free or just accepting donations. All sales will help to realise our new projects. The price is 0,59 EUR or US $0,79.

*Unfortunately we ran into some issues and can not yet support native iOS and Android apps, but it should run well on newer devices. An upcoming free update will include additional songs and a music player. Read more about it in our development blog.

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.