In an effort to try and increase the visibility of Chromodyne, I’ve done gone and created a Lite version! As it is FREE, I ask you kindly to check it out, as maybe you’ll like what you see

You can get Chromodyne Lite on the App Store here: itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chromodyne-lite/id369298294?mt=8

The Chromodyne Lite Press Release Follows:

Celsius Game Studios is proud to present Chromodyne Lite, the free version of its unique and exciting match-3 puzzle game, Chromodyne! Chromodyne Lite is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, on the Apple App Store.

Chromodyne Lite features a brand new 5 chapter story introducing the player to the Chromodyne as they work their way through the Chromodynamic Academy’s accredited Accelerated Chromodyne Operator’s Course. Through this program, you too can learn the skills necessary to save the world from impending doom from outer space!

“Course?” You say.

“That sounds like it might be expensive…” You say.

You would say that, wouldn’t you?

Well, you might expect to pay tens of thousands of dollars and rack up years of crushing student debt at some “university” to learn how to save the world. Not so at the Chromodynamic Academy. No, you too can learn all this today for the low, low price of FREE!

Not only do you get this valuable training, but you’ll also find that Chromodyne Lite offers fun and challenging 3D match-3 gameplay, colourful and striking visual effects, and an awesome soundtrack by Kevin MacLeod.

If you’re saying: “Well, I can’t possibly go wrong with that! Plus I can’t argue with free… Especially when you put it in all caps like that!” I’d suggest you follow this link and give it a try: itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chromodyne-lite/id369298294?mt=8

For shits and giggles I decided to try and emulate the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey in Blender. I present to you Chromodyne: A Match-3 Odyssey. I think I did a pretty good job, don’t you?

With (many) apologies to Mr. Kubrick.

In other, more serious news not related to me cocking about making movies, I submitted Chromodyne Lite to Apple for approval in the wee hours of the morning. Here’s hoping it won’t be stuck there for long!

They call it the “Race to the Bottom” on the App store, where everyone tends to price their app towards 99 cents because they feel that will compel people to buy their app because it’s so cheap. Well, I’m not so sure that is working anymore. Also with the new finish line apparently being set at $0, I think I’m going to pull out of this race.

Put a big “Did Not Finish” next to Celsius Game Studios in the Great Race to the Bottom as even if we reached the finish line, nobody is winning.

Partially inspired by this Gamasutra article “The 0.99 Problem” by Canabalt Co-creator Adam Saltsman, the huge amount of noise at the 99 cent level, and by the fact that if people want to play my games they’ll also more than likely pay a reasonable price for it, CGS games going forward will not be priced permanently at $0.99. To prevent future cries of hypocrisy I’ll state now that you may see a sale at $0.99, but at the very least that’s the new Free for a Day as far as I’m concerned.

On my part I promise I’ll continue to deliver games that are worth more than 99 cents to you, my wonderful audience.

To that end, the $0.99 “introductory sale” on Chromodyne for the iPhone and iPod Touch will be ending this weekend and as of Monday, April 12th, it will be priced at the still inexpensive $1.99.

Mark it in your calendar. Or not.

Thank you for your continued support

So yesterday I started using a beta version of MajicRank by the most excellent David Frampton of Majic Jungle Software. MajicRank is a tool that scours the App Store for your apps and checks to see if they’re in the Top 100 in any of the categories on the App Store. It’s pretty awesome.

Yesterday being the launch of the iPad in the US, and I having Chromodyne HD available along with the launch of said iPad.

However, whereas the iPad launch was hugely successful, Chromodyne HD? Not so much.

Now from my frantic Twittering, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell… as for most of yesterday evening Chromodyne broke into the Top 100 in Arcade and Puzzle for iPad games. That felt great let me tell you!

Great right up until I got the daily sales summary this morning, that is! Apparently that slight surfacing into the top 100 amounted to 1 sale. Kinda sucks, hey?

I suspect the reason I’m ranking so high in those categories is that there aren’t that many games in those categories (yet) and that Chromodyne is near the bottom of the pile, but the bottom of the pile is so close to the 100 point that a single sale will do something like this. This is quite possibly also why Apple is hiding category views for iPad apps in iTunes and only showing the Top 50 on the device itself.

What sucks for me, with my currently lousy non-existent advertising budget and lack of coverage due to bigger titles getting the spotlight yesterday, is that I can’t actually take advantage of that placement in those categories. Nobody can actually see that my cool little game is in the Top 100!

This is what excitement looks like.

It’s still early days yet and my porting of Chromodyne to the iPad was a fun experience, which effectively didn’t cost me anything except a few days of time. So I’m not upset or anything, and I wasn’t expecting miracles. There are a few pending reviews of Chromodyne so I hope they come out eventually, and that should help

In the meantime, I do want to thank everyone who shared my (misplaced) excitement last night, at least I can say that Chromodyne made it into a Top 100 list!

Well, the iPad is out and Chromodyne was successfully ported after a marathon session of epic proportions. Amusingly, Chromodyne HD was submitted after Chromodyne v1.1 and was approved before. Some may say I amuse easily, but I was amused.

The Port

Thanks to some experience writing game engines for other platforms before, about 90-95% of Chromodyne’s graphics code was already resolution independent. After updating my XCode to the 3.2 Gold Master, I clicked the handy little “Convert this project to iPad” menu option and was playing Chromodyne in the simulator in mere minutes! Though everything else was really horrible looking because none of the 2D assets were scaled properly and some of the menus looked like crap on the huge screen.

So really, most of my time was spent creating high-res 2D graphics (even though the cutscenes are pixel art, for the most part, those are seriously high-def pixels!) and fiddling with the perspective/view on the gamefield because it was way too freaking big keeping the same perspective as the iPhone version.

I don’t know about the final build yet, but the simulator in the GM release of the SDK didn’t have 3D acceleration! I can understand why some devs were reluctant to release their apps sight-unseen to the App Store.

The iPad Only Version

If anyone actually wonders why I went with a stand-alone iPad version of Chromodyne, the biggest motivator is that the app bundle for the HD version with its 1024×768 graphics assets is larger than the 20 MB OTA limit. Basically I still want people to be able to get the iPhone version over 3G.

The Price

I’m also selling Chromodyne HD for $1.99 instead of 99 cents. I figure the larger, higher resolution game experience warrants a slightly higher price point. We’ll see how that plays out in the days to come anyway… at least I can have a sale at some point without going directly to free. Definitely something I regret when I priced Chromodyne originally.

The Numbers

I’m half-tempted to post sales numbers for Chromodyne HD as time wears on. If anything to see how things are going. I’ve seen that the game lists for the iPad don’t have any top lists for subcategories yet, which is pretty bad news for small devs such as myself. Sales for Chromodyne have not been anything to write home about, but they’ve been steady at least.

Anyway it’s been a fairly exciting few days, and at least I can say I was here from the start. Whatever that actually means, only time will tell.

Just wanted to drop you all a note saying that I am forging ahead with my plans to turn Celsius Game Studios into something more than a hobby in my spare time. I really do love creating video games and I’ve been thinking about making my own company to do this for over 12 years now, it’s unfortunate it took me this long to stop being afraid about “what if it doesn’t work” and just realize it’s more important to get out there and kick some ass and do awesome things. I’ll be spending the next few months easing out of my current job before I can fully spin up the turbines at Celsius. However I have started pre-planning my next title, which you will find out about soon enough

I still have a lot of hard work ahead of me, business plans, and funding and all that crazy scary stuff, but rest assured this is the real deal. I just wanted to let everyone know that awesome things are in the pipes, but that I have a lot on my plate right now so I hope you’re understanding while I work on them all at the same time.

To that effect I wanted to say that I’m still working on the 1.1.0 update for Chromodyne, and it will be out Real Soon Now.

Things that will definitely be in the update:

• Improved game timing, reducing the time between a match being made and the play field being active again
• 3D lighting has been improved
• Cutscenes are now skippable
• Improved load times slightly and added spinner when loading

Things that I’m currently working on for the update, which will hopefully make it in:

• Alternate control style, currently testing a few final candidates
• Online leaderboards, working on securely transmitting scores

Until next time!

So, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything to ye old blag. I just wanted to let anyone concerned that yes, I am still alive!

Since I last wrote to you, Chromodyne has gotten two more positive reviews from TruthBombers and AppGirl Reviews, which is always very encouraging.

My Real Job(tm) has been rather hectic as of late, so I’m a bit behind on the first update for Chromodyne, but most of the madness has passed so I’m getting back into the swing of things there.

Speaking of madness, and my Real Job(tm), after quite a lot of deliberation I’ve finally decided that I’m going to follow my dream and try and make Celsius Game Studios into my Real Job(tm)! I have a lot of work ahead of me in the coming months, but I think I have some great ideas to work on that could only be realized by a creative effort with more than just myself working at it. Luckily I’ve got the support of my family, friends and current employer so I think this might lead to some amazing things. Stay tuned for more exciting news as time permits

More shameless horn tooting lies ahead! *toot toot*

DIY Gamer implores the world to “Buy Chromodyne, Now!” I couldn’t agree more!

Touch iPhone Games gets so addicted to Chromodyne that they kill their iPod battery after playing it for longer than expected!

And finally, Keri Honea from Examiner.com says “Fans of this sort of puzzle game should all give Chromodyne a try.” Difficult to argue with, I say.

I’m so excited that people seem to have mostly good things to say about Chromodyne, and that the few negative points will eventually be dealt with as I continue to hone Chromodyne into the best puzzle game I can deliver.

Woohoo! “Our Rating: ★★★½☆ :: WORTH A LOOK”

Another review from another iPhone site, this time it’s 148Apps.com. Some very positive comments about the game, graphics and sounds. A respectable 3.5/5 stars, and they basically say that the game can only get better. Which is true, and I’m making it better right now! :O

The 1.1 update should be ready in the next week or two, I hope. The primary focus is to bring Leaderboards and some social networking integration into the mix, plus some other fun things that will hopefully make it in for 1.1, if not 1.2.

A discussion with some friends about marketing Chromodyne lead to the following madness. With many, many apologies to Mr. Brooks.

Zarlax: “Merchandising, merchandising, where the real money from the game is made. Chromodyne-the T-shirt, Chromodyne-the Coloring Book, Chromodyne-the Lunch box, Chromodyne-the Breakfast Cereal, Chromodyne-the Flame Thrower.”

*FWOOOOOOOOOOSH*

Gary: “Ooooh!”

Zarlax: “The kids love this one.”

Zarlax: “And last but not least, Chromodyne the doll, me.”

*pulls string*

Doll: “Go die in a fire!”

Zarlax: *throws the doll behind him* “Adorable.”