#ponq

[toothtwelve]

Rapid testing FTW! (Programmer's diary - Entry #3)

Hi once again, last time I was writing something about testing the game and the return of this process. Today I'll go deeper in this issue. Testing is a neck breaking point of development, but there is more behind it, than just checking that every line of code works properly. That's what developer must examine, but good developer must examine reactions of potential players. Just give your dev version to your parents, siblings, whoever you have by your side and watch. There he gets stuck, here she can't orientate and this is so great even 4 years old kid can understand it. Those are things that you as a developer can't determine on your own, 'cause you know the game 'to the bone'. It is pretty important to test your game on wide range of different people, from little children to your granny. Each time give your game to someone who never saw it yet. Return to those whom you showed your game when there is progress, I did this with my father and the reaction 'I see... progress' told in Vader's voice gave me feeling that I am superhero. Trust me annoy everyone with your game, feedback (even when it is bad) is in development one of most prized things. See 'ya later Peter

[toothtwelve]

The Very First Game UI Design

Hey there,

ponq was my first experience with game UI, so i had to learn from my mistakes (and there were a lot of them!).

The first idea of ponq design was something like "space" style. Everything should have been floating in space, with nebulas, stars and other elements like ufos and rockets. 

This was the very first background:

There were no floating nebulas, and stars and no elements like ufo. Everything had fixed position, and it was looking kind of "stucked"

Also the ball and its particle effect was little bit different, the only thing which is still same in ponq are the bats.

Old ball:

Here is an image from game with the old design, you can see that the skills (i will talk about them in one of the next posts) are on the top of the screen, also the effect after ball has an different colors. Finally in this version were the floating nebulas, which were looking cool, but after some time we decided that it is too disturbing and "heavy" for this kind of game...

In next post i'll talk about newer design, which were more casual and lighter.

Have a nice day.

Cya, Johan

For more updates follow us on twitter: https://twitter.com/ttwelvegames

[toothtwelve]

Logic behind marketing of ponq

Hello 

We would like to tell you something about marketing our app for IOS and ANDROID. Today we are going to talk about basics and global strategy involved in marketing our game. Due to pretty much non existent budget we need to rely heavily on the inbound marketing. So basically creating a lot of quality content very quickly and catching attention of the audience with creative usage of social media and blog. That of course includes building relationships with journalists and preparing launch audience for the first wave of downloads. 

Right now our presence is mainly on twitter because we use it as our main source of engagement with audience. Right now we are in process of improving our reach on other social media like Facebook and LinkedIn. Blog and our closed beta should greatly help with that.

Predrag