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It seems recently Koreans have been getting into iPhones. The reason I noticed this is that a game I helped to create (programming) is climbing up the top paid charts in Korea. We never really thought about different countries in the process of making the game but it's just kind of cool that I've been following pro Starcraft in Korea for many years and now our game is doing well there.
I made a previous blog post about the game, Legendary Wars, that looked like spam basically and it got no replies (rightfully so), sorry for that. I won't link the game here myself to avoid such a thing; people may do a pretty simple search to find it if they like.
The game has actually done really well since release 1 year ago, it has broken a lot of the app store curses of games having a very short lifespan for sales. We also have in app purchases but they are not pushed on the user and you can complete the regular campaign without buying anything and without grinding. I think this is one of the reasons our in app purchasing % is really high as well.
The basics of the game is that it's castle defense game, but it has a lot more control. You have to click on miners (Starcraft APM yeah!), and you have control over individual units movement and special attacks if you so desire (More APM!). It's much more filled out than any other castle defense game though, with many upgrades to get, a long campaign, and several different modes of play.
edit: I had a nice PM from a nice student interested in game development that had some questions. So perhaps that's how to make this blog more interesting. I could answer questions about the development of the game, and also some new stuff we are working too. To start, the team is spread out over Canada and the US, when we started we had people in Calgary, Alberta, Canada (myself and a friend), people in California and people in Texas, and now we have a part of the team which has moved to New York and I've moved to Edmonton, Alberta.
How my friend and I got involved in the game was that we were using the cocos2d iPhone game engine to make some little mini-games (terrible ones) since we had never made games before. Someone on the forums had some money and time and artist friends and wanted a game made, and we were recommended since we had helped people on the forums with various programming problems.
So we started development with another programmer that was working out of Texas (though originally from Canada). At one point when I moved to Edmonton I had to get a regular paying job and so I had to basically drop out towards the end but I was still in contact with my friend who continued working on the game full time in Calgary. Legendary Wars has done well enough though for me to quit my regular job recently and go back to working full-time on the sequel to Legendary Wars, Monster Wars.
  
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TBH I think the reason you are not getting many replies isn't because of the idea of it being spam. It's just because blog posts rarely get many replies anyway unless they are either a) controversial or b) blogs from a community figure or c) blogs about a community figure.
I haven't even got an iPhone so I can't really comment on the game but good luck with it!
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Example: Replies: 1 (well 2 after I post this) Views: 183.
A lot of people just read and don't reply.
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You are probably correct. I should have included a funny flowchart (my best received blog post to date).
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I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say, I'm glad your game is doing well? :d
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On January 19 2012 04:41 HoMM wrote:
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say, I'm glad your game is doing well? :d
That's a great response actually. I often wander in to blogs and threads where people post a lot of "good job OP" type of stuff and I think that's awesome, especially when it's about something the OP has a lot invested (time, money, emotion etc.) into. Those little responses are helpful and nice to read. So thanks for that 
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hmm sounds interesting but how are you supposed to click individual units on a itouch? the screen is just so small T_T
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Nice job! Your game sound fun, but I have no idea how people play games on touch screens. I may be old fashioned but i need buttons.
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Is the game also for android?
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On January 19 2012 06:35 Swilvan wrote:
Is the game also for android?
Not right now but a port is being worked on.
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Canada13389 Posts
On January 19 2012 06:39 GogoKodo wrote:Not right now but a port is being worked on.
well then i will reply to future posts
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On January 19 2012 04:47 Br3ezy wrote:
hmm sounds interesting but how are you supposed to click individual units on a itouch? the screen is just so small T_T
There's 3 lanes of units so each unit is pretty large. When there is a lot going on you probably wouldn't select individual units, there are additional controls to help move everybody at once, or move everybody of a particular unit type at once. Individual unit control is more important in the early game when there isn't as much happening to help build up your army without making too much damage so that you can get a big force for the later parts of the level where you go for the kill on the boss unit or the castle.
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How does one begin to learn to code a videogame (on any platform.)
I have always had pathetic attempts at coding things in general. I kind of just look up for example 'how to code javascript' and learn a few terms, and not know the next step of learning.
This way I learned how to make a website that looks like it is from 1999, and how to math functions, prompts, and loops in java.
I have also done an interesting summer camp where the leader gives everyone a flash code to copy and paste, then teaches us to know which variables to modify and how to add in sprites and all that jazz.
However, I did not really learn much as it was mostly just following along with the teacher.
Do you know any good way to measurably learn how to code in a language. I want to learn C++ as it seems that is the
video game language. However I don't like the way I learn to code where I look up random things, try to understand the code and then I only know like one function and I can't really do much.
I'm only 16 so I can hardly go take a university course. But I did sign up for the online stanford CS 101, and the AI courses. Perhaps they will be useful.
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Sounds pretty sweet, you should throw up a few pictures of the game in action. GL in your sequel! ^^
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On January 19 2012 13:10 Thaniri wrote:
How does one begin to learn to code a videogame (on any platform.)
I have always had pathetic attempts at coding things in general. I kind of just look up for example 'how to code javascript' and learn a few terms, and not know the next step of learning.
This way I learned how to make a website that looks like it is from 1999, and how to math functions, prompts, and loops in java.
I have also done an interesting summer camp where the leader gives everyone a flash code to copy and paste, then teaches us to know which variables to modify and how to add in sprites and all that jazz.
However, I did not really learn much as it was mostly just following along with the teacher.
Do you know any good way to measurably learn how to code in a language. I want to learn C++ as it seems that is the
video game language. However I don't like the way I learn to code where I look up random things, try to understand the code and then I only know like one function and I can't really do much.
I'm only 16 so I can hardly go take a university course. But I did sign up for the online stanford CS 101, and the AI courses. Perhaps they will be useful.
I think I'm one of the outliers on this since most people you ask about coding would tell you that they at least did some self taught work before taking courses at school. Certainly there are a lot of code tutorial sites and self-learning tools available nowadays so it's definitely doable. For myself I never coded anything before I went to University, I originally started in Engineering and it had a programming course that I really liked and I didn't much care for any of my other courses so I switched to Computer Science.
One thing that a University does is teach fundamentals before you even touch code, which I think is a big failing of most tutorial coding sites. People want to code something and see results and they don't necessarily care how it's working. I'm not sure the best way you could learn the fundamentals of computing science on your own, but there are probably various Universities that have intro computer science courses available to watch, I would really suggest that.
Learning to code a video game from scratch is a lot of work as games take from many very different areas of computer science. There are game engines and frameworks (cocos2d, Corona SDK, Unity etc.) that lessen the burden a lot so I would suggest starting with those things.
For learning to code a specific language starting from scratch I would google for beginner tutorials and also do lots of searching on stackoverflow.com. I also think another good way to learn is to try and find a well commented open source application on something like github.com. Careful not to go for a really big project as it can be a very daunting task. Also actual books, dead tree stuff, are really great, you can do some googling and look at amazon reviews to find good starter books for most any language.
Starting with c++ has positives and negatives and everyone will have different suggestions for first languages, or useful languages. Back when I was in school I definitely preferred Java even though I started with c++. These days I would recommend something like Python.
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On January 19 2012 13:24 RaLakedaimon wrote:
Sounds pretty sweet, you should throw up a few pictures of the game in action. GL in your sequel! ^^
I don't have any cool screenshots on hand since marketing stuff really isn't up to me, so if you like you could check out http://livgames.com/legendary-wars.html for a little (old) trailer video and a few screens. The game is actually big enough that if you do a google image search for Legendary Wars you'll find stuff, youtube too (reviews, walkthroughs etc.)
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Nice game idd and did you made that game with Cocos2d?
I'm also working with Cocos2d and I'm glad to see fellow TL users doing well :D
How long did you two programmers spent on the game before the release?
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On January 19 2012 17:53 shannn wrote:
Nice game idd and did you made that game with Cocos2d?
I'm also working with Cocos2d and I'm glad to see fellow TL users doing well :D
How long did you two programmers spent on the game before the release?
It's made with cocos2d with tweaks and a lot of stuff on top.
The game took about a year which is probably a lot longer than needed, but the team is pretty inexperienced with game making.
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Sounds pretty cool, I've always liked castle/tower defense style games, pity I don't have a smartphone 
I'd be interested in the "balance" of it, such as are there more difficulty levels? Just because I feel something like this, if your micro is amazing at the start, the bonus will kind of grow through the game (or the advantage you get)
Am I right in thinking this, or is there something I'm missing :D cheers and keep up the good game-making!
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On January 20 2012 02:48 Khazroul wrote:Sounds pretty cool, I've always liked castle/tower defense style games, pity I don't have a smartphone I'd be interested in the "balance" of it, such as are there more difficulty levels? Just because I feel something like this, if your micro is amazing at the start, the bonus will kind of grow through the game (or the advantage you get) Am I right in thinking this, or is there something I'm missing :D cheers and keep up the good game-making!
There are multiple difficulty levels to play through. In terms of actual "micro" I was kind of half joking as the game is geared mostly towards casual players so that they can easily control a lot of units. There is some control available at the beginning of each round so that you can take less damage and build up units and money so you can mass up stuff later in the round.
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EPT
