The game was built with Cocos2d-x [1], a C++ port of the excellent Cocos2d game engine, and Marmalade [2], our cross-platform SDK/OS abstraction layer so we can port it quickly to other platforms like Android, WP8 and BB10.
The main reason we went for the freemium model (aka free with IAPs) is because, as a first-time developer building a new IP, it's basically impossible to get your game noticed if you charge money for it. Competing with free is a really hard sell on an App Store with 700k+ apps... If we were already well known (e.g. NimbleBit) or had some solid IP backing us up (e.g. Star Wars) I think it would still be perfectly feasible to make a successful premium game, but we have neither for now!
As for the engine - Cocos2d-x is already cross-platform, including the platforms you've listed, I believe, so I didn't quite understand where does Marmalade fit?
Cocos2d-x handles the game engine side of things really well (scene graph, asset management, input handling, etc.) and all that runs cross-platform without any issues.
But Marmalade comes in real handy for all the platform-specific stuff like in-app purchase support, game services (achievements and leaderboards) and the like. The Marmalade team provides us with custom-built extensions for each platform. And if ever we run into anything else they haven't built for us already, they have an excellent Extension Development Kit (EDK) that lets us easily call native code (Objective-C for iPhone, Java for Android, etc.) from within our main C++ app. We've been using it extensively, in fact [1], and we're really pleased with it.
Finally, as a nice little bonus, their deployment and signing tools are also really slick, as they let us deploy straight to an iOS device with two clicks from our Windows machines, which is much appreciated by us non-Mac OS X fanboys!
Comments
Great game! Reminds me one game on NES.
Since you posted on HN, some technical details wouldn't hurt I guess - what engine, tools were used, etc...
Also, free apps with IAPs are really trendy nowadays. Is the market really bad for "old school" paid model?
The game was built with Cocos2d-x [1], a C++ port of the excellent Cocos2d game engine, and Marmalade [2], our cross-platform SDK/OS abstraction layer so we can port it quickly to other platforms like Android, WP8 and BB10.
The main reason we went for the freemium model (aka free with IAPs) is because, as a first-time developer building a new IP, it's basically impossible to get your game noticed if you charge money for it. Competing with free is a really hard sell on an App Store with 700k+ apps... If we were already well known (e.g. NimbleBit) or had some solid IP backing us up (e.g. Star Wars) I think it would still be perfectly feasible to make a successful premium game, but we have neither for now!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocos2d
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmalade_%28SDK%29
Thanks for the interesting answer!
As for the engine - Cocos2d-x is already cross-platform, including the platforms you've listed, I believe, so I didn't quite understand where does Marmalade fit?
Cocos2d-x handles the game engine side of things really well (scene graph, asset management, input handling, etc.) and all that runs cross-platform without any issues.
But Marmalade comes in real handy for all the platform-specific stuff like in-app purchase support, game services (achievements and leaderboards) and the like. The Marmalade team provides us with custom-built extensions for each platform. And if ever we run into anything else they haven't built for us already, they have an excellent Extension Development Kit (EDK) that lets us easily call native code (Objective-C for iPhone, Java for Android, etc.) from within our main C++ app. We've been using it extensively, in fact [1], and we're really pleased with it.
Finally, as a nice little bonus, their deployment and signing tools are also really slick, as they let us deploy straight to an iOS device with two clicks from our Windows machines, which is much appreciated by us non-Mac OS X fanboys!
[1] https://github.com/dblstallion