Cradle of Rome 2 is a big disappointment for me. Maybe I would enjoy it more if I haven’t played Cradle of Rome 1, but I have, and CoR 2 was nothing new to me. Also, matching mechanic seemed aged.

Bejeweled 3 looks pretty nice and has few new twists. I enjoyed it much more than CoR 2. I also noticed all the hard work PopCap put into promoting B3, giving out netbooks for best photo of your jewels is one example of that. Because of that it was funny to see that PopCap was late to deliver B3 download on their own site. GameHouse and iWin (maybe other sites too) offered the game on Dec 7th, but PopCap was late for some reason and delivered download links a day later.

Playrix launched their newest match-3, Farmscapes, exclusively on their own site. Initially I was disappointed that I had to go through another “I want to be a HOG but I am match-3″ scene, but luckily it was short and part after that was a bit more of point and click adventure than HOG. Still, it was surprise that I had to wait so long to play regular match-3 mechanic, but overall I liked the game, probably the most out of 3 mentioned titles.

The world has a lot of holidays and you can’t keep the track of each of them, but it’s good to know at least the most common one (for the world) or the most money squeezing ones.

Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, traditionally the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Basically, people go out to retail stores and malls to buy things. Cyber Monday is online world reaction Black Friday. People spent their money from home.

It’s good to have the list of those holidays and make your marketing up to date. We indie’s don’t need to follow big companies, but at least we can try to get best examples of them. It’s also good to know about holidays because they may get in face of your game launch. I started the launch of Dress-Up Pups last week. I was about to send press release about it until I realized that it’s Thanksgiving day and either nobody is at work or gives a damn about my games. If I sent my PR that day it would probably got lost in dozens of emails by Monday morning when everybody gets to work.

That said, today is Cyber Morning, if you want you can take advantage of it and save 25% on your order of Anawiki Games :D

I typed “casual games recession” in google and one of the articles that appeared on the list: Real Games executive tells how the recession will affect casual games. It’s old article from February 11th, 2009, but at least there’s a possibility to check whether it was true or false.

One thing that I noted I wanted to repeat is this line:

“The market has the opportunity to be ten times the size it is today,” Barbour stressed. “Why don’t we do something to build the bigger market?”

That’s the words of John Barbour, CEO of Real Games (at least of the time of writing mentioned article). Mister Barbour, what can we do to make it bigger?

So we’re certainly not 10 times bigger today. I hear that most portals noticed a drop in revenues, not only we’re not in bigger market, but  we’re in smaller. I make more money from my games than I did, but I don’t feel like market in general is growing. There are places dedicated to casual games that please me with their revenues and places that make me disappointed.

I just hope that we, as casual game industry, stopped price wars, and prices will eventually rise.

I read (I can’t remember where) that it’s as hard to sell a pair of shoes as it is to sell something more expensive. The work is the same, but the sales commission is much greater.

Unfortunately we developers have little influence on the price of our games (except for our own sites). Keep in mind that it is better to make a bit better game to sell it for a bit more than make it look cheap and sell it cheap. Your efforts to market the game will be as hard or harder to promote cheap looking game, but revenues will be much smaller.

Anyway, my list is short this year:

1. I will play more games
2. I will release a game every 2-3 months

The first one is quite easy to achieve, just needs a bit of balancing. You can’t play too much because you won’t be so productive anymore. And if you don’t play enough you just miss on all those great ideas that come to your head when playing others games (and a lot of relax).

The second point sounds a bit crazy. It takes usually more than 3 months to create a decent game. So how I want to achieve that? It’s possible because I want to finish 2 games I started in previous years (and one is 3 years old, but luckily the art is still up to date). But that’s just two games, so only 6 months out of 12. For the other 6 months I plan to be very uncreative. I was quite creative for the last 3 years and it didn’t pay out that much, so I am going to create a bunch of clones. Or spin offs of our own games. This way I can save a lot of development time and probably some in development budget.

Will I see 4 more games in my portfolio by the end of 2010? Time will tell, but I strongly hope so. I started to believe that I can’t risk 9-12 months projects that don’t sell well.

My sales have dropped, but that’s not surprising to me. I focused on development on a new game and completely abandoned marketing and if you do so your revenue must drop. Still it didn’t drop so much. Even portal sales hold still and are still above the level I expected them to be after a year of my game release.

My sales dropped by expect them to recover once I make a new release. The question is, will that be enough at this current state of the market? I would say so. I play at stock exchange and stock markets keep recovering since February so I would be surprised if casual games don’t recover soon. Still all those price wars, etc. make me wonder.

Before I went to the shop I browsed hundreds of reviews. I didn’t want to buy high end stuff, but I also didn’t want to buy crap, and I didn’t want to pay for power that I won’t need. And it had to be silent!

Finally I decided to buy AMD Phenom II X3 720 processor with GeForce 250 GTS, 4GB of RAM, 300 GB HDD. I also got Be-Quiet DarkPower power-supply. Processor came with box cooler, but it was too noisy and I decided to replace it with Scythe Ninja II. It is a huge monster and can operate in fan-less mode. After replacing processor cooler the next noisiest thing was gfx card… it had built in dynamic speed cooler, but even at the lowest speed it was too noisy for me. I replaced it with the one that came with Ninja cooler (12 cm).

Now the noisiest element is HDD… but only when it’s reading or writing stuff  and it doesn’t do it often :)

It probably wouldn’t be worth investing 1000$ only to get more quiet working space, so let’s talk about performance. How does 10 times faster  sounds to you? It exceeded my expectations. I was killing myself developing Pony World Deluxe with over 10 minutes compilation times in debug mode and now it’s less than a minute. I hesitated to add music to my games because decoding ogg’s took to much time when loading the game 100 a day, now I don’t care.

Will it help me sell more games? I don’t know, but for sure I increased comfort and performance of my workplace.

Stealing is always easier option and it doesn’t matter if we talk about software or phisical goods. Suprised? Well, keep in mind that if you want to buy something you need to either earn enough money before you can buy it or you need to worry about your credit score, fill out all the papers, agreements, blah, blah. For some goods like cars you need to wait couple of months before they arrive… and you’re paying customer… wtf? You could just walk out of your house and break in to the car of your choice. That’s just 30s job if you got some experience in it.

Just because thiefs have easier life doesn’t mean you have to steal. I don’t say we should make the life of paying customers harder, but it will always be harder to aquire goods legal way than stealing them.

Just don’t do it.

Find a game that you like to play and would like to develop and clone it. Really! It’s so much easier and you’ll get things done so much quickier. And when you’re small, you shouldn’t waste to much time on research. It’s not that you won’t be able to develop new and fun gameplay mechanic, but the chances are minimal… and you’ll either find it on the first try or give up in the middle of the project.

This is my third innovative game (after Runes of Avalon and Pony World). We will make it fun. It’s fun already, but can you imagine how much effort it took to make it fun? How many times I wanted to quit and would quit if my partners didn’t push on me to move further?

Generally, innovative games are too risky… but may be also very rewarding as everything that is risky (have you put your savings in stocks lately?). What’s your take on this?

In the beginning of my blogging experience I decided that I’ll post only when I’ve got something valueable to say. And for couple of days it was the reason I wasn’t posting. You can’t get new results or experiments in just couple of days. But then interesting things started to happen, but I still haven’t posted. Well, after another google dance almost all my websites has been hit with new low Page Rank. For unknown reason this blog went down to 0 (zero!) from 3. ANAWIKI main site went downt to 3 from strong 5. And I was expecting a rise in Page Rank. That really put me off from bloggin for quite a while.

Another thing is that March was really bad in terms of sales at some channels. Not that much in direct sales, but after nice spike in February sales in March were disasterous. I’m happy that March is over because April and May sales look so much better.

It’s about time to start posting again. It’s about time to realese new game… but my current game will not be released for 2-3 months at least. Maybe it’s time to release another freebie.

It’s time to work harder… there’s a beatiful car that I want to buy and it’s easier to buy one when your pocked is full of cash ;-)