After lots of rumors and speculation, Apple finally presented their iPad officially. Hooray! And with all the press coverage it has gathered, absolutely everyone should be aware of it by now… even if he doesn’t want to (but who wouldn’t? everyone loves Apple now!).

As iPhone/iPod developers we were thrilled to know that Apple was expanding the “i” family, but now that we’ve got it here we ask ourselves if it’s really something to get excited about, especially after all the “meh” first impressions that it has caused among the press. Well, since we’re not experts in market analysys and all we care for the iPad are games, we do have quite some interest in this new platform for several reasons:

• SDK: making it cross-compatible between iPhone and iPad means that our framework will be compatible from day 1, making the transition between platforms incredibly easy.
• Compatibility: iPhone games might not look great double scaled to the iPad resolution, but even so our already published  games will be available in a new platform with no extra cost at all.
• App Store: although there are quite a number of things we don’t enjoy about it (submission process, content objections etc.) it has been proved to be a great way to distribute games worldwide for small companies like ours.
• Increased resolution: we discarded some game ideas because of the limited resolution of the iPhone screen, which we might consider again for the iPad. Furthermore, being just over the double of the iPhone’s (480×320 to 1027×768), it will be relatively easy to prepare graphic resources to be compatilbe with both platforms.
• Pricing: expecting it to be priced around the 1000$ mark, it’s  nice to see that Apple has adopted a more aggressive pricing strategy on this one.

Still, as many have pointed out, and even if we only care about games, there are a few questions that we can’t ignore when considering the future and viability of this platform:

• Concept: the iPad is essentially a big iPod Touch, not a replacement for a laptop,  or a console, or a phone, or a music player… not even for a portable eBook reader? Does it really have a target consumer? Moreover, will this consumer be using it regularly after acquiring it?
• Controls: the accelerometers are a nice idea for controlling a small and light handheld device, but we’re not so sure about it when it comes to something bigger and heavier which one has to hold with both hands during a whole game.
• Camera: where has it gone? Not really essential for most of the games, but augmented reality experiments could definitely benefit from a higher screen resolution.
• Pricing: sure it’s cheaper than expected, but it’s still more expensive than a PS3, PSP, Xbox 360 and even a laptop, while some could feel it offers less, if different, features.

Knowing that it comes from Apple, it’s hard to think that the iPad can be a commercial failure, but it’s still possible that it becomes a second line product such as the Apple TV. Only time will tell but, as developers, we can’t afford to ignore it, especially since the big players are already presenting their high budget productions and, as time goes by, it will become harder and harder to get some visibility for independent companies like ours.

So… Hello iPad!

How hard is easy and how hard is hard?

That’s a question we asked ourselves a few times when discussing the difficulty of Quiz Game Land: on one had, we wanted a game that would provide a real challenge to hardcore gamers, but on the other hand we also wanted to appeal a wider audience, since the iPhone is more of a casual gaming platform. In the end, we decided to try and make everyone happy by including questions that ranged from pure basic knowledge (i.e. What’s the color of Mario’s cap?) to the most specific gaming facts (i.e. How is the 3r installment of the Knightmare saga known as?).

Was it a good idea? Let’s find it out with the help of some info we’ve gathered since the game was released.

Quiz Game Land has about 1000 gaming questions, categorized in 8 levels of difficulty. At the beginning of each game,  players are asked to select between 3 difficulty levels  (easy, normal and hard) to start a 3-stage journey with questions ranging from levels1 through 5, 2 through 6 and 3 through 8 respectively, where difficulty rises as stages are completed and only the final boss asks the highest level questions.

Apparently this was a nice way to please all potential customers, but along with the game’s first user-reviews came the first complaints about the game being easy. D’oh! Asuming that it was true, we quickly started writing harder questions for the first update, but a few weeks later we were surprised to see that, according to our stats, most of the people were playing the game in Easy and weren’t able to reach the end. Up to date, this has been the trend among our players as we illustrate in the following charts:

Percentages of players by level

Percentages of players by level and reached stage

As it can be seen, the lower difficulty level is the most popular and the hardest the least. It’s important to note however, that players playing in Normal and even Hard are more successful in the game, reaching more frequently stage 2 and 3 than those playing in Easy.

On a different registry, the fact that the questions are segmented in 8 difficulty levels results in fewer questions per level, which, although the game uses weighted probability algorithms to elude repetition, leads to a higher chance that a question is asked again in a following game. This is not a problem for players who usually get through a couple or three stages, but those always stuck on the first stage can have the feeling that there are not enough questions in the game.

To sum up, we have the following facts to analyze Quiz Game Land’s difficulty:

• Some customers complained about the game being too easy.
• But the stats show that the majority of players find the game too hard.
• Users playing in higher difficulty levels are more successful.
• If fewer difficulty levels were made, keeping the same number of questions, there would be less repetition in the first stages.

So, did we get it right or wrong? Unfortunately it’s still not easy to tell since, although it seems pretty clear that our costumers prefer playing on Easy, we wonder if that is precisely because our game is still unknown for the vast majority of hardcore gamers who own an iPhone (if they actually do). Given that Quiz Game Land was largely ignored by most of the gaming-specific press, it is certainly a plausible reasoning. We will still be supporting Quiz Game Land but, for the moment, our next games are being designed for a more casual market.

On a final note, according to our online records no one has been able to defeat the real Game Master yet, which rises a further question: is Quiz Game Land really too hard even for hardcore gamers? We think not. Probably the correct question to ask ourselves is related to the previous conclusion: are enough hardcore gamers playing this game?

But that’s an answer that only the real Game Master knows…

Welcome to our new Development Blog!

From now on we will be using this blog to post updates on our work in progress, details on our games, future projects,  random thoughts and all sorts of stuff related with our activity. Actually we were planning to open this blog a while ago, but we were either too busy or too lazy to do so…

Anyway, we hope you enjoy it!