Rake in Grass wishes you a great and happy new year!

We are pleased to introduce you some of our upcoming projects for the first half of 2010.

Unnamed Role-Play card game

One of our main projects is a Role-Play game with card battles. The game is designed for both hardcore and casual players. It brings an exciting story with a great gameplay based on a fantasy world full of heroes, warriors, elves, dwarfs and monsters.
Estimated release of the game: summer 2010. The game has no official name yet.

Be a King 2 - a casual strategy game

Our second project is a sequel of our casual strategy game ‘Be a King’. Be a King 2 brings all the fun features of the original game and also several new features like new quest buildings, a fog of war, and levels prospecting.
Estimated release of the ‘Be a King 2’: March 2010.

Crystal Cave Casual - a logic game

Our third game for the first half of the year is ‘Crystal Cave Casual’. It is a new version
of  the ‘Crystal Cave Classic’ designed for casual players. The game brings 90+ new levels full of logic riddles together with some actions in addition.
Release of  ‘Crystal Cave Casual’: February 2010.

We hope you will stay with us during 2010 as we continue to bring you more great games!

Hello!

With a new iPhone game – Crystal Cave Classic – we bring a new giveaway on Twitter to you. You can win all of our games on a CD. To enter the giveaway you have to:

1. Follow our Twitter channel @rakeingrass (http://twitter.com/rakeingrass)

2. Tweet some info about our giveaway, but you have to add @rakeingrass to the message (we will be able to find your tweet then)
Here are some examples:

@rakeingrass is giving away their games for Windows, Mac and iPhone at http://blog.rakeingrass.com/?p=77

Win a pack of @rakeingrass games, check http://blog.rakeingrass.com/?p=77 for more info

@rakeingrass giveaway – win their games at http://blog.rakeingrass.com/?p=77

etc.

Prize:

• The three fastest tweetters will receive Crystal Cave Classic for free for any platform they choose*.
• Another two randomly selected tweetters will also receive Crystal Cave Classic for free for any platform they choose*.
• One randomly selected winner will receive the CD with all our games!

The giveaway will begin on September 26, 2009 and end on October 11, 2009.

* If you choose iPhone/iPod touch, we will send you a promo code. You need an US account to be able to use the promo code.

The giveaway is finished!

Because there were not many people who joined the contest, we will giveaway our game Crystal Cave Classic to all who participated.

Hello,

We want to update you on what we are currently working on. There are two main projects both suitable for iPhone and iPod Touch, one for Windows and Mac OS X too.

First one is called Crystal Cave Classic and will be hopefully well received especially by players who loved our Archibald’s Adventures.   But this game will be suitable also for other logic games lovers. They will appreciate more than 100 levels set in various settings like ancient India or Egypt. We are doing everything we can so that the game could get to the gamers till the end of the summer.  The game will be available for Windows, Mac OS X and iPhone/iPod Touch. The Win and Mac versions will probably contain a level editor too.

Crystal Cave Classic for Win/Mac/iPhone Alpha

Crystal Cave Classic for Win/Mac/iPhone Alpha

The second game is called Undercroft and players may know this concept mainly because this game for iPod Touch and iPhone is a remake of previously released PocketPC version of the same name.  As well as original game, this one will also remain epic RPG game with fantasy setting. Concept is similar to Dungeon Master but is improved with many original features and better user interface. By playing it, you become a leader of a group of adventurers fighting against hordes of beasts in tombs, forests, wild mountains etc.  As we see it now, the game should be released some time during the autumn.

Lite version of Westbang was approved by Apple, so now you can test the casual difficulty of the game on your iPhone or iPod touch for free. The full version of Westbang has three difficulties: good, bad and ugly. The lite version allows you to protect several banks on the good difficulty (bandits are a little slower and if your sheriff dies, you can try the level again).

Note that the 1.0 version of Westbang has issues with music and sounds, there is static during playing. We are aware of this problem and 1.1 update which fixes this problem was already submitted to Apple and should get available soon.

But there is simple temporary workaround: in the options menu lower music and sound volume to minimum (but not to mute). This reduces the static and makes the sounds to play at normal level.

The lite version of Westbang and the latest update of Archibald’s Adventures are not affected by this bug and should be working fine under 3.0 OS.

Boovie…

Our new action game Westbang for iPhone and iPod touch is available on App Store now. The approval process took 10 days and we are happy that the game made it without problems. Check out the trailer:

Westbang is a fast and funny rendition of a classic game concept! Fight many enemies, test your reaction and compete for the highest score on a way to become a legend of the old West!

To celebrate release of Westbang, our previous iPhone platformer Archibald’s Adventures is on sale now for a limited time on App Store.

Hope you will enjoy the game  Have a great day!

Boovie…

We haven’t updated the blog with some fresh news for some time, but don’t worry, we are still alive and working on something

First of all we are proud to announce, if you haven’t noticed already, that Larva Mortus is available on Steam now. You can visit the game’s page here. The free demo is almost identical to the demo from our site, but the full Steam version contains support for several achievements. They aren’t anything extraordinary, but this was our first game for steam and we are happy we have been able to implement at least something for the release.

Being the first of our games for Steam, we are eager to see how big market is the Steam for independent developers like us. I would mention that few year ago we tried to offer Jets’n'Guns to Steam, but we were rejected. Maybe the Steam was not so indie-friendly that time. But the success (or failure) of Larva Martus will show, whether we will be trying to get more of our games on Steam.

When talking about reaching multiple platforms, I would like to say few words about our experience with PDA and Pocket platforms. Undercroft was developed only for Windows Mobile, while Archibald’s Adventures was ported for both Windows Mobile and old Palm OS. The conclusion is simple: we won’t be developing for Windows Mobile or Palm OS anymore. The old Palm OS is dead for some time, so I wasn’t suprised here (porting Archibald to Palm OS was because of nostalgia than anything else). But Windows Mobile was disappointment for us. Undercroft was not so bad, but Archibald’s Adventures was a flop. It’s a little sad for us because many limititions and restrictions in the game was caused by the requirement that the game must run on Windows Mobile. I don’t think that the main problem is in the game itself, but getting a game to customers is really hard. The web sites which sell windows mobile software are really terrible. The forms for uploading games were not working, no reply when trying to contact support, terrible documentation for developers, even design of the webs are often ugly. Now I know why Apple’s iPhone and App Store is such a success and everybody is trying to create its copy.

So no more games for Windows Mobile from Rake in Grass. We will see if Microsoft’s App Store (ups, of course I meant to write Marketplace will change anything, but I doubt it will change anything for us. I don’t think we would like to bother again with supporting several resolutions and different devices when we have iPhone with its simple OpenGL, hardware accelerated graphics and nice resolution.

So what’s coming next? This year will be probably “iPhone” year for RiG. We still have plans for some bigger game for PC (and we will see how the Steam will go), but we want to make some dent into the iPhone market as long as it is still possible for independent developers, before the market gets occupied by big publishers.

RPG fans should not miss our port of Undercroft for iPhone and iPod touch. It will probably take some time before the port is completed, because Undercroft was designed for 320×240 resolution and that is really small compared to the iPhone resolution so entire user interface and inventory needs to be redesigned. It is also possible that the game will contain update with new content, which was never released on Windows Mobile, but we are still not sure if this will come with the first release.

But the game which will be released before Undercroft and which is almost finished is Westbang. Inspired by some great games from 8-bit and 16-bit era, this is remake of Westbang game created by two of Rake in Grass members before the Rake in Grass was formed.

The main purpose of the game is test and finish our new small engine we are preparing for our next games. That’s the reason we have choosed not-so-complex game, but we hope the game will be funny anyway. The main gameplay is simple, but we concentrate on stylish atmosphere with gorgeous graphics and nice western music. The game will also include online top scores.

That’s all for now, have a great day!

Boovie…

On 8th Januray 2009 Archibald was released on iPhone App Store. It took almost two months from the time the game was running on our iPhone to the time is was released on App Store. But we are happy Archibald finally made it

Finally we have finished Palm OS port of the Archibald’s Adventures game. Few weeks ago I was decided not to bother with the Palm OS platform, although the game’s engine was 90% Palm OS ready. The game was randomly crashing on my Palm Tungsten E and if you have been ever developing for Palm OS, you know that debugging is really painful. Also the life of the Palm OS platform seems to be at its end.

But once we finished the Pocket PC version of the game, I thought to myself that it would be shame not to invest few more days into finishing the Palm OS version. More than two years ago when I’ve got first idea about the game, having fresh new Tungsten E in my pocket, I was eager to make some game for it. So at the beginning the game was aimed mainly for Palm OS, with intention of porting it to Pocket PC platform later. But things often don’t go as intended.

Initial graphic concept of the game

Because development for Palm OS wasn’t really easy (everybody was waiting for Palm OS 6 and for easy way of making fully ARM native application – which sad to say never happened), we decided to re-aim the game for PC, Mac and Pocket PC, letting the Palm OS version stuck in “we will see later” state.

So with Pocket PC version completed, I have decided to give the Palm OS one more try. We don’t expect many (any?) sales here. Finishing the game for Palm OS was just more a matter of making it done and beating the problems with the plaftorm than anything else

So we hope there will be at least few people who will enjoy the game on the Palm OS, even if the requirements of the game are relative high.

Also note that the Palm OS version of the game has all features included, no feature was stripped from the game. This includes:

• 8 different music tracks (MODs)
• more than 80 ingame sounds
• all 114 levels

There also few restrictions of the Palm OS version:

• movement in the game can be controlled only by stylus, hardware buttons are not supported
• only low-resolution graphics is included, I think there isn’t Palm OS powered device with VGA resolution 480×480 or higher anyway

Boovie

We are proud to finally announce Archibald’s Adventures for Pocket PC and Windows Mobile platform. You can now enjoy the game even on your handheld devices. The mobile version includes:

- All 114 levels from the original game
- Support for both low-resolution and high-resolution devices, including but not limited to 240×240, 320×240, 320×480, 480×480, 640×480 and 800×600
- Support for any screen orientation (landscape, portrait)
- Support for Pocket PC 2003, 2003SE, Windows Mobile 5 and Windows Mobile 6 powered devices

Of course you can try the demo version, which includes 30 levels from the game. The game requires stylus and touch screen.

If you have already ordered PC or Mac version of the game, you don’t need to buy the game again, although we would appreciate any support. Just use the registration code from your PC or Mac version and it will unlock the mobile version. Although we know that this decision can make the game more subject to be pirated, it just feels right to us.

The game supports virtually any screen resolution and orientation. The minimum supported resolution is 240×240. If your device’s display has smaller resolution than 480×480, the game uses low-resolution graphics (tiles 25×25 pixels). If your device’s display is 480×480 or bigger, the game uses high-resolution graphics (tiles 40×40 pixels, same as PC and Mac version).

For now only English version of the game is available, but we are working on locatization for other languages too. Czech and Russian versions are already finished, German and French are in progress. New Archibald’s Adventures release with all languages is planned at the beginning of 2009.

Along with the multi-lingual version we plan to release update with at least 50 new levels. But don’t expect some easy levels for kids, that will the hardest levels in the game

For those of you who are wainting for the iPhone version: altough the game is completed, we have run to problems regarding Apple and App Store, so the game won’t be released on App Store sooner than in Q1 2009.

Boovie

Hello friends,

Here is the first video of Archibald’s Adventures running on my iPhone device. Only few things need to be fixed before the game can go gold:

We need to polish default controls a bit, we are still not sure how to combine virtual gamepad and mouse-like controls. Maneuvering Archibald using a finger the same way as using a mouse on PC can be a bit confusing if virtual gamepad is visible on screen, mostly for people who don’t have experience with PC version.

Also we need to go through all levels in the game and fix few places where the game gets more difficult on iPhone than on PC, mostly because performing several actions at once is not so easy with one finger

And of course we need to test the game on iPod Touch and original iPhone, but I don’t expect any problems here.

Several technical details about the game:- Archibald will run locked at 30 fps on iPhone. At this frame rate the CPU usage is about 35% on average, which is fine and won’t drain battery too much and the gameplay is still smooth enough. Without locking the frame rate the game’s fps varies between 45 and 60 (depending on amount of rendered graphics).

- All sprites and textures are loaded at startup and occupies 12MB in memory (textures are stored in format using 2 bytes per pixel). Only images from intro, outro, credits and ingame texts are loaded and unloaded dynamically on demand.

- Most textures are same as in PC version. Only fonts, intro, outro and few other images are special. Levels are rendered scaled down to 80% in comparison with PC. Bilinear filtering ensures high quality of the scaling.

- Sounds and music are not different from PC version. For music we use MODs with up to eight playing channels. Because of the MOD format we are able to keep entire music under 900kB in the application bundle.

- Size of the entire application bundle is 9.1MB so far.

Boovie