The End Of The Road
…for Jewels, that is. Okay, that was overly dramatic, I'll be the first to admit it! 😄
Anyway, all jesting aside, it is time to move on. What I'm announcing is that I will not be actively supporting Jewels (nor iJewels) from this point onwards. Not to say that I've been very active lately in any case, but better set it straight out.
Instead I will be focusing my development efforts (time limited for various reasons — not the least of which is the fact that I'm working at home with a little child roaming around.. 🙂) toward my next game. Not to worry though, I have a feeling that if you liked Jewels, you'll going to like the next game even more… 😉 The project is advancing slowly but steadily; I've written most of the technical back-end code and can focus on building the actual game play on top of the thing. I do have to draw all the artwork as well, so it is not going to be finished any time soon — hopefully sooner than later, though!
And no reason to worry, my dear Android users, despite my venting earlier I will be releasing for Android as well, and making sure both versions (Android and iOS) are on even ground this time. To be honest I've been using an Android device as my daily driver for almost a year now, it's good to be back! 😄
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Speaking of Android: the first mobile version of Jewels was released in late 2009 for Android, so I've been supporting this one game for over two years now (you could count the original PC-version from 2007 as well, but I didn't work on that but a few months in total). One thing is certain: mobile devices sure have changed a lot since 2009, my ancient by today's standards HTC Hero running Android 1.5 was cutting edge tech back then!
If you think the Android-version of Jewels is really crappy compared to the iOS-version (released in late September of 2010), you are entirely correct — after all it was the first thing I wrote after I got my Hero, and it was hastily ported from the earlier XNA-test project I had done (a.k.a the Jewels PC-version).
It would be interesting to take a look at the horrible internals of the Android-Jewels and see what I would do (and will do, for the next game!) better this time around. So that is precisely what I shall do: when I get the chance I'll write a post-mortem about Jewels.
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To close this post, let's have a look at a few statistics for Jewels:
That one is the for Android-version. 21 million total installs during these two+ years. Only 6.26 million currently active (i.e. on users devices), though. The largest active installs I've seen was between 8-9 million. ~150 thousand ratings with average rating of 4.4 stars. For the iOS-version (courtesy of AppFigures):
About 4.25 million downloads. I couldn't get the average rating across all countries, so the stats above reflect US only (easily the largest of my user bases). Still pretty good. 🙂
Looking at the volumes, I'd hazard a guess that Jewels is the second most downloaded mobile game from Finland, after that one franchise involving pissed-off birds… (Do correct me if I'm wrong!) Not too shabby for a crappy first attempt at doing a mobile game. 😉
See you for the Jewels post-mortem later, bye!
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