ErnestSzoka

Only One is out, and despite being a huge relief that it had finally released, I’m now back in crunch, fixing bugs and adding features trying to prevent that inevitable slide to obscurity that most apps face.

Since Feb 7th downloads are over 30k, with now at least half of it now coming from (of all places) South Korea (#5 in games there), while currently not getting noticed anywhere else.

The game got over a 1000 ratings in both Android and iOS mostly 5 and 4 star, and got a respectable 4.5/5 review from Touch Arcade. It’s gotten a lot of praise from a lot of people who have personally thanked me for making this game and some negative feedback regarding the amount of popups asking for IAP (I’m diligently trying to amend in the next update). So it’s back to work, time to see how far I can take this.

Game is done, approved by Apple, ready to go and apart from a few small bug fixes that are queued for the next build, everything is complete!

It’s been a long journey, getting this thing out and the past few months were all about  balancing, bug fixing and adding a few nice features like gamepad support for Android (still waiting on Corona to add it to iOS in the SDK), earthquakes and the ability to rebuild your character .

Here is the final Trailer

The thing that gets you most after you’ve been working on a game for so  long is it becomes harder to enjoy playing it and at the same time harder to work on.  It really took a lot of discipline to muster the endless hours of playing the game over and over again and constantly taking notes on how to improve, balance and polish it up.  I don’t think I can ever be 100% happy, there’s always a new idea I want to put in, or a value I want to tweak, but at some point you have to stop and just put it out there and see how people respond.  If this game does well, I will definitely look forward to keep working on it!

 

So after spending a second day figuring out Final Cut Pro I managed to concoct a pretty neat trailer for my game. And here it is:

I wanted a quick way to show off the combat, enemies and special abilities in just over a minute and avoid doing the more ponderous gameplay videos I’ve done in the past.   Notable features not shown off before is the bubble, whirlwind and  dart ability, red wizard and big slime mini-bosses and berserker at the end.  I also show the ui where ability upgrades and configuration happens (notably this part of the trailer cause the most drop in viewer attention according to youtube’s analytics)

I ended up throwing up the trailer up on reddit /r/indiegaming and managed to get some respectable amount of time on the frontpage garnering a total of 700 hits in just under a day with some fairly positive comments.   I’ve been noticing a lot of ppl posting comments about wanting the see the game on Android and it’s been slowly steering me towards doing one.  Nexus 7 is on order and it should be fairly easy to get it to work on Android since I’m using Corona SDK.

Right now I’ll be focusing on finishing up the last bit of abilities, a final boss, In app purchase system and another enemy character.

 

 

 

 

A lot of work has been done on Only Once since I last showed it  off. New background, clouds, abilities, enemies and tons of improvements

One of the new enemies is the Wizard. The wizard is a an enemy in Only One that shoots fireballs and warps (blinks) away from combat when you get to close. He’s a tricky bastard

 

 

 

So after 1 month of work I finally got something I’d like to show off, there is a possibility this thing could come out soon or I could work on it and flesh it out more. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Only One is game where you kill enemies and throw them off a sacrificial pillar in the sky with your magic sword as you gain power and abilities to ultimately become the ‘Only One’ left standing!

currently in alpha

 

 

Finally finished my first indie game, what a relief. I learned so much and had so much fun doing it.

head on over to buzzattack.net to get itunes and googleplay links to the game!

So I submitted 8 days ago and based on current approval rates I should be due any day now.   In that time I have an Android version ready to go, have been fixing up the website, taking screenshots and getting a sales pitch ready for when I spam game review site inboxes.

Oh and I got this nifty little video that shows the game in action including the dynamic orientation switching, controls and multi touch zooming

 

So I’m almost done, almost!!! Spent the past week working with my friend Jon on this new wicked trailer for BuzzAttack. Been fixing bugs, going crazy with game release anxiety and just trying to figure out how am I supposed to sell this thing. Free + 99 cents. Make a trailer, make a shoddy website, spam my friends on facebook and getting ready to spam game sites.  Man whatever happened to build it and they will come, can’t it just sell itself?

Anyway we recorded the clips with Elgato game Capture HD (my only gripe was couldn’t do it at 60 FPS), built it in Adobe premiere and we just used the game music to fill in the rest. Certain features were added just to make it look cool for the trailer, the green glow for bug repellent, energy halo for hyper juice and the chomp and thud for when Gus our hero dies at the end (guess I spoiled the ending)

Enjoy!

 

 

The blue fly in Buzz Attack is a very unique enemy, he has no direct attacks and is useless on his own, but give him some cannon fodder flies around him and he will use them as ammunition and fling them at you.  The projectiles are very hard to block, but it is possible and you can get am achievement from it!

Check it out in the video below

So in the past few days I’ve finished up Beta3, revamped the main title screen added support for twitter and 20+ achievements and threw together a new video and posted it on www.buzzattack.net