Merry Christmas

The Machine is on sale right now over on Impulse. Go go go!

Do you have the baubles?

The Machine has just received its Christmas update! We’re proud to announce that there are now -

15 new ‘overtime’ levels, which even the most hardcore machinist should find taxing.

2 new machine pieces - move blocks through space and time with the teleporter and wrap them up with the wrapper!

3 new awesome tunes to listen to as you build

New customisation options let you control the look of the world, as well as letting you try out 2 new ‘themes’ - want to play in space or out at sea? Now you can!

The new level structure makes it easier to try out different levels if you get stuck.

And if this wasn’t enough - we’ve added snow!!!

The Machine reviews by Captain D

Captain D has posted a review of The Machine at http://captaind-pc-gaming.blogspot.com/2010/11/indie-puzzle-game-review-machine.html

Pop on over and take a look at what he's got to say :)

The Machine - Community Levels.

Wow! The community levels that are appearing at the moment are fab. After spending ages developing the game it’s great to be able to play levels we have no idea how to complete.

We’re working on a little update for The Machine at the moment. We’ll announce just what soon. But currently we’re in danger of dropping behind schedule because we’re playing your great levels.

Better get back to it now, the Bossatron approaches.

The Machine 1.02 released

The Machine v1.02 has just been released. This fixes an issue some people were having loading the community levels. To get the update open Impulse and check the updates tab. Thanks to those who let us know so we could get it fixed.

We’ve also increased the bosses literacy stats (he can now spell ‘us’)

Some more reviews

A couple more Machine reviews over the weekend.

John Bardinelli's review at JayIsGames.com is here.

And we got a bronze star from Andrew Williams over at Bytten.com here.

The Machine - Reviews

There have been a couple of reviews of The Machine over the last week. We’re obviously quite biased toward it so here’s some links to some objective points of view.

DIY Gamer - Mike Rose recommended the game out right! http://www.diygamer.com/2010/11/casual-contraptions-machine-review/

Gamezebo - 3.5 out of 5
http://www.gamezebo.com/download-games/machine/review

We were naturally horrified when Jon Mundy pointed out we spelt ‘us’ wrong! I have been on the naughty step since then. I can only say it will be rectified in an update.

The infamous Level 23 of The Machine

Every game has one, that level that sticks in peoples minds because it is so elequent and perfect and darn right tricky to get past.

The machine has a level just like this, level 23 and we've had a fair bit of correspondence asking how this level can be completed. Some people don't believe it can be completed, but us being us we've decided to help you all out and give you a series of clues on how to solve it.

And there's also a complete video solution further down if you just want to know how it's done!

The Machine - Released on Impulse

We’re pleased to announce that earlier today The Machine was released on Impulse.

Check out the product page and news article.

It’s a proud moment for us to see our little game tootling off with all those other games and making its way in the world. We’d like to say a huge thanks to the folks at Impulse for all their help, especially Larry Kuperman and Brian Clair.

Whisperings in the Bumpkin Barn

Since out last postings we've mostly been discussing what to do next. There's still more happenings with "The Machine" but we had been looking for something new and exciting to do as a team.

The afforementioned "Penguin Block Pushing Fun" was fun enough, but completely throwing ourselves into a remake of an old project didn't feel very motivating and we soon started talking about games on a larger scale that we wanted to create.

Then, after not being able to agree on a game that we both wanted to work on someone we know came up with a great concept for a game...which we completely changed. For the better obviously, we added blocks! Honestly, blocks make this game better.

So now we're brimming with ideas and, more importantly, playable concepts of the game. So we're already in the design and prototyping phase of the project and we're going great guns at the moment. We have some music (what a surprise) some basic models and this time there's a story planned! Wooooo...

Stay tuned over the next few weeks for when we start to reveal our new masterpiece!

A quick update from the Bumpkin Barn.

Firstly - a massive congratulations to Andy who got married to Jo this weekend. Here's a pic of Andy and me in our finery.



Secondly - a quick update on things game related. We will soon be releasing details of our next game, which is for the iPhone and web. Prepare for some penguin based block pushing fun!

Thanks

Just a quick post to say thanks to everyone who has given us feedback about The Machine. We've already released an update that includes some of the suggestions from our Bumpkin Buddies out there.

Thanks for the support!

The Machine update

There has been a small update released for The Machine. This update prevents the Wakefield exploit.

Please release me...

The Machine is now released. Check out the home page for more details, the epic promo video and to play!

Release candidate 1 - soon

The title of this post has to be the kiss of death but I do intend on having release candidate version 1 of The Machine ready really soon. I'd still like to add some more features but these can be added in later.

To 'celebrate' here's a few artlets I've been working on.

Trying to be clever

Hey, I sold another copy of Block A Drop Christmas Rush...in May :o

Anyway, we at Bumpkin labs are still working hard on our new iPhone shooter project. Obviously that's not a project that involves shooting iPhones. It's going pretty well but my reluctance to learn anything new means I avoided using any kind of physics engine to model the in game entities, and now I'm paying the price.

I have a fairly complex collision set to deal with involving irregular polygons (regular ones are just boring) so now I'm having to invent complex ways to detect collisions. Again because of my lazyness means that enemies are just exploding randomly at the moment and causing the player damage. I need to work more on this but I'm confident I'll get it finished by mid-year and polished for autumn!

I've also made some good progress with menus and the like, getting some of the best UI feedback from testers that I've ever had! Some of the sound effects are also in there which have added tons of atmosphere and "Umph!" to the gameplay.

Expect more news with possibly first screenshots soon...ish!

Bugettes

Unfortunately I'm not talking about long bread rolls. Found a couple of bugs in the machine that are taking some tracking down. Fortunately in his noodley wisdom the fsm gave us logging and taught us to implement it in advance so it shouldn't delay things for to long.

Site update

Given the homepage a bit of a spring clean. If you want to follow us via our new Facebook page there is a 'fanbox' at the bottom.

The drag of completion

Once upon a time there was a man who started a project to make a computer game. Then he thought, wouldn't it be cool to have user levels and then to add it to Facebook. If this were 'The Hogfather' then there would be a feature creap gnome hiding in the under the stairs by now.

So I, Rich Textformat do solumnly swear to the noodley one that The Machine will get no more features until it is released.

So what needs doing? The user levels menu needs sorting out, the pay system, the new combiner model needs adding and some more levels. Oh, and some menu music.

Let's do it!

How many enemies does it take...

To make a game interesting?

I've been putting a bit of thought into this over the last couple of days as I'm seriously hoping to have the main mode of the new project in it's first completed state by the end of this weekend.

So far I've 3 enemies of varying strength all approaching at the same speed. I know that's not enough so I have plans for zig zagging enemies and enemies approaching in a spiral, but just how many do I need?

Currently I'm thinking of having 10 different types, and even perhaps bosses, although I'm not certain about that yet. Nor am I certain how many waves there should be in total. Currently 100 seems about right. Because of how chains work, scores can vary amazingly within the first 5 already depending on how good a shot you are!

There's still a ton of work to do of course (this is only 2.5 weeks old after all!) But it's already great fun to play with.

Open Feint Integration - Go!

Oh yes, the new project will undoubtedly feature open feint, the online highscore/challenge/achievement system.

You're probably aware of the advantages of this but if not then it's just a cool way of keeping track of how you've done in a game compared to the rest of the world, and your friends! I've integrated it into the new project already and it's looking pretty good!

I've been working on the leaderboards for now (it's a bit lonely having the top score all to myself!) But soon, once the survival mode of the game is complete - and it's not that far off - I can start working on the challenge modes.

The other great thing about openFeint is that it can also integrate with facebook and twitter so I'll be trying that out very shortly!

I'm looking forward to this project getting out there I really think it's my best game to date and with these added features should go pretty far!

Free Weekend Results For The SciOmeter

I decided to do a bit of an unnanounced experiment last weekend and put the sciOmeter up for Free for two days! I assume that some sites automatically track price drops and free deals so that's probably why it worked out fairly well!

Overall there were about 500+ downloads and even a rating! What a marvellous rating too, of 2 out of 5 stars! But at least there was an explanation, it's just a shame that they didn't check out the "How It Works" part of the website before posting.

It's back up to .59p now and I'm not certain how many sales it will generate after being free for that time, probably none now!

Anyway, the point of the exercise was to try and spread the app around a bit and to show people how much fun it can be. That's certainly worked to a degree and in hindsight is how I probably should have started with a free weekend to kickstart it...

Main site getting better

After a few friends saying "what's up with your site? It's just a logo!" I've decided to put something temporary and functional up here!

I've still got to put the sciOmeter banner together and the formatting of this column is a bit rubbish, but that shouldn't take too long to sort out!

Rejected!

Wow, a rejection email from CrazyMikesApps - wasn't expecting that but I can understand that people who love iPhone apps might not want to encourage more like the sciOmeter! I'm starting to think I got into this too late?

Anyway, no need to be disheartened! This was an experiment for us anyway and I've been thinking hard about the next app I'm going to work on while Richey is still grafting "The Machine".

Again it will be something small but experimental, but definitely more involved than the sciOmeter!

One idea is to expand upon a PC game I wrote a few weeks ago for a 48hr competition. The game was called "Let Me Pass" and involved moving barriers with gaps in to let little arrows pass by. Any that passed gave you a point. I reckon it would work well with the iPhone.

I think I may have also noticed a gap in the market, a game type that's not been cloned yet! I've always wanted to give my own take on the idea and this seems like an ideal opportunity...

As usual...

I did hardly anything I'd planned to!

But not without reason. The press release I started to write, and then I thought: Hmm, this isn't a game! Gamerelease.net may not be happy if I missuse the press release system.

But that's not to say I didn't keep myself busy. I've been searching for places to review/advertise the sciOmeter and after a previous experience with google-ads (not that they were bad, just a waste of time!) I did a bit of research on which site(s) would be best.

Okay I know this is going to cost me cash, and that's fine. You don't get anything for nothing...well that's not true I guess with free iphone apps but you know what I mean. So I've given myself an *unspecified* budget, but it's not much! After all, I'm getting married this year and that's expensive! Rather than trust random sites about their popularity I made use of http://www.alexa.com/ which is a web statistics site and is a fairly good (although not perfect) indicator of how popular and visited a website is.

According to this, one of the most popular iphone site on the net is http://www.iphoneapplicationlist.com/ now there's no public information about their advertising rates. I've send details of the sciOmeter for their perusal and also sent a separate email regarding their advertising costs - that'll wake em up a bit.

I'm not impressed by that site itself though, it looks unorganised and I wouldn't want to click on anything there. Plus apps get added to the forums at a frightening rate at certain times of day. I don't believe (and this is just my personal opinion) that this is a good place to get the sciOmeter noticed!

Moving on I was being eagle eyed and watching the number of youtube watches of the video go up from 21 to 22 (heh) when I noticed that our channel has a subscriber! And infact that subscriber is an iphone app reviewer called CrazyMikesApps! So I did a bit more research and his site, http://www.crazymikesapps.com/ is ranked at 364, 402 (at the time of writing this) which is supposed to mean it's the 362,402 most popular website in the world. I'm sure that's not specifically true but the point is he gets a fair few visitors. After looking at his advertising services and costs I've decided to go for it and have requested a review & video(or podcast) review along with a months' worth of advertising. I even made that "animated" gif advert especially!

In terms of sales figures I've tripled my sales figures since the other day! That makes it sound so much better than it's actually doing, but it does mean I've had at least 1 sale per day which is encouraging. More than that it's surprising because the sciOmeter has had ZERO exposure out there. It's also nice to see that every copy sold so far has been to someone in a different country so globally it's taking over!

Muhahah...oh wait, I'm not supposed to do the evil laugh until 1 million sales...

Adventures in Marketing: The sciOmeter!

Well although I don't want to completely disclose the total number of sales for the first day to the world, I can tell you that it is larger than Zero!

But although I should be satisfied that it's sold at all, I'm not! I want to see this in the top 10 apps and there must, must be a way to do that. So far my tactics have been:

- To contact a couple of non-game related blogs but related to the subject matter (one rejection so far)
- Contacted three iphone related blogs and trying to get added to some lists
- digg'd, stumbled the app - no additional diggs yet though.
- Shared it on facebook, but no one's bothered to look at the vid
- Mentioned it on the iphone app section of eurogamer

so I've been fairly busy for the first marketing day, but today I've got the whole day to worry about it - and to get my PC up and running again! Stupid HDD crashes...

My plan for today is:

- To contact at least 3 blogs that deal with iphone apps (silly ones if possible)
- Possibly mentioning it on somethingawful
- I've got a google ads voucher - might create an account and do some real advertising
- Write and send a press release using gamerelease.net with which I have an account.
- Add app to iphoneapplist site, which I created an account with yesterday.

So plenty to do, the only problem is that it's going to be difficult to see where I get the most response (if any!) from because I don't receive stats like that from iTunes. Anyway, wish me luck!

New Release! The SciOmeter!

Finally it's out there! It's taken long enough for something that looks so basic but I'm sure it will all be worth it in the end.

Basically the SciOmeter is a scanning application that will display the percentage of science within an object. For more information check out the site: http://sciometer.bumpkinbrothers.com/

For even more information check out the video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu_q4JWW_eQ

I'm still working on the "how it works" page for customers of the device, but it should only be a day or so until it's ready!

A Necessary Change

It's been a few months now since BumpkinBrothers came into being and because of this we decided that there should be a new site - one that didn't use an unworkable blog infastructure.

So we're separating the site and the blog, mainly because we're getting close to game release 2 and 3 and would prefer the site to be less rambly and more focused on the games we have to offer!

So here's the first blog post of, probably not that many! But nonetheless it lives!

Now have I set the feed details properly...