Business

Oh... a new year has come and it's time for a view back on the year past from a Spell of Play perspective.

2009 was a social year for me. TWTPB launched late 2008 and much of my energy went into marketing and getting the word out there about twtpb, hUb and Spell of Play in general. This was also the time when I discovered twitter and I quickly took it to my heart... probably a bit too much There is even a way for you to connect your spell of play profile and twitter profile, via our twitter app Game Twtr

Via twitter we got a bunch of followers and visitors to our website, I tried doing twitter contests, blogging contests, appeared on some pod-casts and also a web show featured the spell of play homepage. We then decided to host a small game development gathering called SoPCon in Gothenburg. We also managed to end up on a list of Swedens hottest small game developers resulting in some local radio and tv-interviews. Things where looking good!

However, as it seems reality catches up sooner or later and I've felt quite uninspired, burnt out, call it what you want after summer. The end result was that I did not manage to pull through the latter half of 2009 and the result is that the number of visitors to the site is at an all time low Not much is happening and I've not been able to do much about it.

I also have not been able to get a real start on any new game projects this year. I'm torn between continuing working on TWTPB (I have some ideas for an expansion), Project L and some new ideas I have been experimenting with lately.

So what is my vision for 2010? What I would like to happen is to get the online community working and have some proper integration with our games. I want the homepage to feel more alive and kicking than ever! I would also like to at least start a new game project. I also have a number of improvements to the hUb backend that I would like to get on.

What will definitely happen is that we'll push our games to appear on Gamers Gate and also a port of TWTPB to XNA -> XBox is more or less done. So I hope we'll get accepted by Microsoft.

I will try to play more games 2010

I hope your 2009 was good and that 2010 will be even better for you!

I've been procrastinating making a blog post for several days now and I might just get it over with Except for my short blurb about my side project making a portal for fun casual games portal I've been awfully quite.

I've been really busy at the University of Kalmar, getting into new courses after parental leave is sure a shift in focus. Also my nice laptop died on me about a month ago, and checking back with HP support I got the message that it would probably take a good 1.5 months more to fix it As it turns out they will probably just give me a new laptop

So what is actually up at Spell of Play you might ask. Well, I've been busy as ever working a bit on updating my shmup game T.W.T.P.B. I'll probably make a release of it soon. Nothing much actually, mostly behind the scenes stuff. Marketing T.W.T.P.B. has also been a big focus.

The shift from development to marketing is not an easy one, but I'm determined to try to sell games and not just make them. This has also made me realize that the Spell of Play games portfolio needs to be widened. Simply, I need more games and as you probably have noticed we did get top-down racing game Roadclub out there just a couple of days ago and more games are coming!

As things progress right now at Spell of Play I'll try to get more indie games out in a near future! So stay tuned, these are indeed exiting times!

I've been preparing a Polish(!) version of shoot em up T.W.T.P.B. Quite cool to see the game in Polish and it also involved converting some of the game to use unicode and not ascii, something I've never done before. It was actually quite painless std::wstring to the rescue.

The reason for the Polish T.W.T.P.B. version is that a full version will be included in exclusively in a magazine. I'll make an announcement when it is released. During this time I've also managed to make some general maintenance, so there will probably be a public update soon.

I kind of like the new twtpb highscores page, there are some issues with cashed content if you're not logged in so make sure you sign up and log in to get the latest info. Also there is some css trouble in IE

I'm thinking of making an extension to this and list the best players in each country. This will be based on what country you supply in your online profile. Could be neat

Feel free to make any site comments/suggestions/requests in the forums.