Movies and Mobile Games

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Lime

Have you guys seen The Dictator movie? I haven’t yet but soon I will. Did you guys know there is a mobile game about the movie? It is called The Dictator: Wadiyan Games. It is available for free for both Android and iPhone. It already has between 100,000 to 500,000 downloads.

New marketing dou!
This is becoming a new trend in the entertainment industry. Movies come out with mobile games to support them. The first time I saw this phenomena was before the movie, Dolphin Tale, came out. They released a game, Dolphin Tale: Fling a Fish, some time before the movie release. The mobile game can build up an audience for your movie, but also movie makers can make money from the game as well. While the game can introduce some people to the movie, I think the movie can introduce a ton of people to the game. Imagine all the people who come to see the movie and really like it. At the end of the movie you can let them know that there is a mobile game about the movie available for their phones. There is a good chance that people who like the movie, will download the game. It is great marketing because people, who see this promotion, a lot of times are already interested. I would dream of this kind of exposure for any product I release.

While this approach wouldn’t work for every movie, it would work for many. Upcoming July 3rd both Spider Man movie and mobile game should be coming out. I think this is a great movie to have a mobile game for. The reason why I say this is because you have to consider the audience. Is the audience fond of mobile games and is it willing to buy the game? In Spider Man’s case, I think most of the audience will be young male adults and teenagers. That being said these groups are one of the groups that spend the most time playing mobile games. Also, Spider Man is already famous so that gives it a huge advantage.

In the new world, every movie will have a mobile game to go with it
I think this trend has a lot of potential and will be pursued more and more by different studios. When you compare hundreds of millions of dollars that it takes to create a movie to an amount of money it takes to create a mobile game, it is a big difference. Where a mobile game could cost $200,000 to develop, it might make sense for studios to set some money to create a game about the movie. In the end if you monetize the game as well, there is a big chance that it will bring the money back, which would not include all the promotional benefits.

When did mobile games got so good?

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Lime

I still remember when I got my first mobile phone back in 2003. It was a Siemens phone! It had a “bubble game” on it that I use to play pretty often. This was prior to touch screen phones, so I had to use tiny keyboard to play it. The bubble game was in “duck shooting” style except you shoot balloons instead of ducks. The balloons would rise from bottom to the top and you had to shoot them before they escaped. This game is so simple that I could recreate such game in an hour. Well, maybe not an hour, but you guys get the point.

My first Siemens phone!

Remember the classic Snake game? The other day, I actually found it on Google Play for free. So I had to download it and play it for good ol’ time sake. It made me think how much the games have changed in such a short time. It wasn’t so long ago that games with complexity of snake and poor graphics was a common thing on the phones. To make the situation worse, there weren’t any places to get any new games so you were stuck with the games the phone manufacturer put on the phone. Now, there are so many complex games available on the market that it’s hard to choose what to play. When did things change so dramatically?

I think one of the most important events was when Apple released the first iPhone on June 29, 2007. It was the first widespread phone that used multi-touch interface as the main form of interaction between user and the phone. The significance of this event is that, from that point, games could be played using a touchscreen rather than a phone keyboard. I don’t think game like Angry Birds would be possible if not for the touchscreen. Furthermore, iPhone was the first smartphone that was actually smart. It had from 4 to 16 GBs of storage, a nice processor unit that was under clocked to 412MHz and 128MB of memory.

Since then, mobile phone hardware got better and better. Not too long ago Galaxy Nexus came out and it has 1.2GHz dual-core ARM processor with 1GB of memory. That is a lot of computing power for a phone. Such improvements in mobile phone hardware made way for games much complex than classical Snake.

Check out an upcoming game, Dead Trigger, by MADFINGER Games

If you watched the video, you can see how stunning(in a zombie kind of way) are the graphics. While console and PC games have been like that for a long time, I’m very happy to see that mobile games are going in that direction. This game is a good example that shows what is possible on a phone. While this game is gory and won’t appeal to everyone, there are many different styles of games that have excellent HD graphics and gameplay that you will enjoy.

Mobile revolution started when the first iPhone came out because since then, mobile phones have reached insane heights. We live in an age where we do everything with our phones, from sending an email to playing an interesting game. To finish my post, I just want to say that I have no doubt that mobile games will be getting better and better as long as mobile hardware is improving. I hope our studio will be able to break barriers of what games on mobile phones are capable off. I can’t wait to see what the future brings! Happy mobile gaming!

Why one should play mobile games?

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Lime

I was taking a public speaking class and I did a speech about benefits of mobile games. So I thought I would write about it here as well.

I’ll begin with the most simple, but the best reason to play mobile games. Games are fun and entertaining! It doesn’t matter who you are, you can’t argue that statement because games imply fun and entertainment. It wouldn’t be a game if it wasn’t fun or entertaining. You could argue that a certain game is not fun, but maybe it is because that specific game is not your type. However, you are in luck! What makes mobile games special is that there are many great free or inexpensive games available. It doesn’t matter what kind of person you are and what kind of things you like, you can find a game that is your type. It is just a matter of navigating through the app store to find a little gem that you will enjoy. Since a lot of games are free and many have free lite versions, you can try out many games for free to find the game that captures you. Don’t forget fun is good for everyone!

Inside of game, Zombie Dash
Simple survivor game, Zombie Dash

I was a big fan of PC games and use to play them all the time. Since days where I had a lot of free time and not much responsibility, I stopped playing PC games. I still play mobile games though! With the studying and working I do, there is not much time in my day to sit down and play a game for an hour or so. However, I carry my phone with me almost everywhere I go and when I am waiting for a class to start, I will pull it out and play some “Towers N’ Trolls”. While, I can’t really dedicate an hour at my house to play some video games, I can definitely find 5-10 minutes here and there to play. I think that is one of the main advantages of having games on your phone. Furthermore, if I’m stuck in a long line to get coffee at Starbucks, I would usually become really bored and impatient. This can lead to having a bad experience that day because I’m not very fond of waiting, but now in such situations I grab my phone and play a game.

Fruity Tales android update

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Lime

Version 1.2 is out!

Lately I have been playing around with this website, but that does not mean that I forgot about our game. My team and I have been working hard to prepare this new release for Android! The update was released on Google Play and submitted to Amazon Appstore as well. However, Amazon Appstore takes about a week to review, so it should be out on Amazon next week.

We have added a three star rating, where you attain one star for beating the level, two stars for collecting all fruit crates and three stars if you collect all the crates in the air. Furthermore, we have added an accomplishment for perfect aim. Also, we fixed some minor bugs here and there.

Here is a new video!

On another note, we got iOs developer’s license last friday and I ported the game on my mom’s iPad. It looks excellent, so be sure it will come to Apple Appstore very soon!

EA Games shows their true colors

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Lime

I was reading latest gaming news and came up on an article that really upset me. Apparently, EA Games released a message to their mobile game, Rock Band, users saying that from May 31st the game won’t be playable anymore. I think this is outrageous, specially since it was a paid game. I saw the story on Android Community website and thought it was definitely worth mentioning here.

After looking into the story more, I read on Joystiq blog that Electronic Arts claimed that the release of the cancellation prompt was an error. As a mobile developer, I really don’t see how that was an accident. You just dont have a game kill-switch accidentally go off. If it did go off by accident, then it still was pre-programmed, which doesn’t make the situation any better. One of comments on the article was

“since when error can type a complete sentence?”

, which I think clearly explains what happened.

I think the reason why EA Games didn’t go through with game cancellation was that it caused an uproar from many dissatisfied gamers who were asking for refunds. I think denying the right for paid users to play the game is clearly a shady move and then not taking responsibility for such action is even worse.

Shame on EA Games!

Fruity Tales update

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Lime

While the game was officially out on Google Play on April 14th, we didn’t have a video to go with it just yet. It was on our to-do list for awhile, so I am excited that we can finally cross it off!

Furthermore, we have few more things important things on our list. One of our next upcoming moves is to release the game on Apple Store. Apple takes some time to review new applications and usually finds some things that need to be fixed before they will release the game on their store. That being said, we are working hard to make sure that Fruity Tales will pass with flying colors!

Also, we just been approved as Nook developers. This means the game will be coming out on Barnes & Noble market soon!

Happy Monday!

Finally working on the website

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Lime

I have been working on LimeBlast Studios for close to year, but started creating the website just now. It might seem like a delayed matter, since website should be one of the first things that a company should create. But in our defense, we all got
caught up working on our first game, Fruity Tales. Only after we released the game on
Google Play and Amazon Market, we realized that having Facebook page as the main
visitor destination is just not enough at this point.

Funny thing is I haven’t created a website since High School sophomore year, which has been a really long time ago. Well actually thats not right, I learned a little Ruby on Rails last summer, but that experience was not relevant to this website. So pretty much for this one, back to ground zero. However, I didn’t have hard time to jump back into website development. This is due to the awesome tools available that make website creation a breeze. It is actually fun working on the page, as I spend the whole weekend messing around with it.

Anywhooo, enough of my rambling. Welcome to our website!