Hey everypony! It feels like it's been a while. We've been really busy with a few different things for the last few months, and I just wanted to take a minute to give some updates on what the heck we've been up to since the last time we posted here.
Happy FEZ day, everyone! I had the honor of contributing to FEZ in as a backup animator in a very part-time capacity over the last 2.5 years or so, and it is pretty thrilling to see it out in the wild after all that time.
However, I also wanted to let you know that the other* IGF Grand Prize-winning game I have been honored to contribute to (in an even smaller way) is having a sale this weekend, to celebrate adding support for the new iPad's crazy retina display. I think this is the first time Aquaria has supported a resolution as high as 2048x1536!
Where to even begin? I guess we'll start with this: Canabalt is a proud participant in The Humble Bundle for Android #2! It's such an honor to be up there alongside these other indie classics. This is our first bundle we have ever participated in, directly, so I am very curious to see how it works out in the short and long term.
At the end of 2011 we finally released an update to our popular game Canabalt that had support for something like 15 languages. If only for the sake of our own unreliable memories I wanted to record some of the things we learned during that process. This is not, by any stretch of imagination, a mandate to localize your own software, or, if you decide to, to do it this way. It is simply a public recording of our experience and our plans for the future :) Much of what is recorded here will have to do with iOS specifically, but likely applies to other platforms as well.
I don't know if you all remember or not, but about a year ago, as part of a holiday indie iPhone games charity sale, we opened up the source code for Canabalt to the public. Canabalt was still earning more than half of our monthly revenue as a company, and had only been commercially available for a little over a year. In the meantime, Canabalt had become quite popular and revived the auto-runner genre of one-touch games for the iOS platform. We thought that would be a good time to open source the game. The results of this decision, though not what we expected, have been very positive.
It is our great honor to have the opportunity to publish our friends' award-winning action-adventure game Aquaria, which is available right now on the iTunes App Store!
Aquaria for iPad Teaser Trailer from Kert Gartner on Vimeo.
Hey everybody! I am super excited and proud to announce that Bit Blot have decided to partner with us to publish their award-winning action-adventure game Aquaria for the iPad this winter. As you can see from the video, this version has received a lot of improvements, mostly to take advantage of the new touch-screen interface. Otherwise, the game is fully intact, including the enormous world to explore, all the crazy boss fights, unlockable powers, and so on. We'll have more information available soon, but for now, enjoy the video :)
On Tuesday, September 13, 2011, Jesse Brown wrote an inflammatory article about video game developer tax breaks for the Canadian news organization Macleans, which understandably irked many of our Canadian developer friends. In the article, he slams the Canadian game industry for gaming the tax system to get undeserved subsidies and public support for their private enterprises, consisting primarily of horrible, violent games.
Unlike my esteemed Canadian colleagues, I am not actually mad at this Jesse Brown character at all. He did something irresponsible, and wrote an opinion piece that lacked research and comprehension. But check out the first sentence of his article:
The New York Times has published an exhaustively reported piece exposing the cocktail of deductions, write-offs and tax credits that make the video game business one of America’s most heavily subsidized industries.
In this situation I can only use the somewhat damning metaphor of placing a steak in front of a dog, telling him not to eat it, and leaving the room for the next hour. If you come back and the steak is gone... well, the dog did eat it, but it's hard to blame him. The New York Times, one of the most widely respected news institutions in the world, published a lengthy article about US corporate tax breaks by David Kocieniewski on Saturday, September 10, 2011. This is a hot topic right now, especially after the whole Warren Buffet thing. The issue I have with this new article is not that it sets out to expose US corporate tax loopholes; it's that it makes grossly inaccurate implications about the video game industry as a way to get attention. It's blatant sensationalism and is the primary source of the Macleans article.
It only takes a few minutes to illustrate the many ways in which the Times' article contradicts itself in the name of moral populist outrage. In the third paragraph of the article, Kocieniewski quotes a source who claims that:
After upgrading to OS X Lion, I launched cfxr and was dissapointed to discover that preview of sound effects was extremely choppy. Exporting sound effects still worked perfectly, but it's a bit frustrating to not be able to hear a live preview.
After a little bit of poking around, I discovered what could be considered a bandaid fix: a few lines of code added in, and now previews play back fine on my machine.
This is in no way meant to be the absolute correct fix for cfxr (I'm simply not familiar enough with the code to know). However, it seems to work well enough for me, so I thought I'd share.
You can find my patches to the cfxr project at my github project page, or you can download a precompiled binary: cfxr 0.2.0-osx-lion-patch.zip.
Wow! Yesterday, we asked our community of friends and fans to see if they could help us translate our App Store display text into some other languages, to help with visibility in international storefronts. The response was HUGE: we have a French translation in our hands already, and we have volunteers committed at least four other languages in less than 24 hours. So, first and foremost, thank you!! That is so awesome.
However, it turns out that in order to update your app store text to support more than one language, you have to resubmit your application. We're already working on a big Wurdle update, so we'll be able to update that text when we submit that anyways, but we didn't have any updates planned for Canabalt... until now. This seems like a perfect excuse to update Canabalt to support more languages too!
So, like our app store text, these are the languages we'd like Canabalt to support next:
French
Italian
German
Spanish
Japanese
Chinese (simplified)
Other languages we wouldn't mind having include Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Swedish and Norwegian. And if you're interested in helping to translate into any of those languages, you can find the source text here, on our company website. For completists, you may note that this source text includes the data for all of the in-game epitaphs! Volunteer translators will have their chosen name displayed in the "About" screen in-game for each language. If you are interested in helping with this translation, please contact us directly, and we're looking forward to working with you! Thank you!
PS: If this goes as well as the app store text we are interesting in translating Wurdle and Gravity Hook HD too, but one step at a time...
