The final post about Jewels (no promises!)…
A few weeks ago I finished the biggest update for Jewels yet (and most probably the final big update), with some often requested features. The most important of them is of course the Global High Scores (or leaderboards), courtesy of the Scoreloop service. This has been well received among the players, and there are some insanely good scores on the boards already — in fact it didn't take but a few days for the first killer scores to appear. 😄
I'm proud to say that my own top score for the Normal playmode is currently on the quite respectable ranking of 70141.. 😛 I did a bit better in the Timed game, ranking at 8167 at the moment. 😉 So yeah, there are some good scores about. On the Finland list I'm at rankings 41 and 11 respectively, yay!
I also completely redid the old and ugly Android-menus for something that works (and looks) a bit better, plus made some long overdue fixes here and there, but I guess I should've blogged about the release earlier; these other changes are not that interesting.. 🙂
Also, this seems like a good opportunity to announce that there probably won't be any bigger updates for Jewels later, I will do some bug fixes and like but nothing major, I think. I need to focus on other things, and due to a rather big personal event (of which I'll post about a bit later) I need to priorize my time better. Nevertheless, I want to thank all the players, especially those numerous people that play the game regularly and keep it prospering on the Android Market! So thank you! 🙂
Some Android Jewels statistics
It's been a while since I first released the Jewels on the Android Market. I suppose it is a good time to look up some statistics, so here you go! 🙂
| Number of installs total: | 1,225,864 |
| Number of active installs: | 971,566 (79% of total) |
| Times played daily: | Well over 1.2 1.3 million |
| Ratings: | Rated 17,738 times (4.5 / 5 stars average) |
So it's been a blast, I still cannot understand why it's been so successfull. Ok, mostly because it's Bejeweled, but there are loads of other B-clones on the Android Market, so that doesn't explain it entirely. I guess there just was a (big) niche for a free & polished B-game. 😛
Although some people have complained about the addition of ads — which are only in the main menu and not some distracting blinking colorful banners either, I need to clarify — turned out it really was the best thing to do. I'm not allowed to share any numbers, but it's been waaay over my lowly expectations.. 😉
I'd like to express my gratitude and thanks to all those numerous active players, and of course to the good folk at Google AdSense for making this possible! I had never anticipated it, but turned out that ad supported apps and games are indeed a viable business model. 🙂
…and still it's only the second most popular free game on the Market; I cannot beat that bloody Solitaire for the life of me! 😉
Server problems
This website has been down for some days now. I've moved to a new server and things are up and running, but there might still be downtime in the future, I fear.
You see, all this is my fault, unfortunately. 🙁 I did an update checker in the Android-version of Jewels, that contacts the server to see if an update has been published. I had not anticipated the success the game would get, and made it simply to check for updates every time the game is started. This was a huge mistake, in retrospect. 😛 I don't know why I didn't realise the potential problem of checking for updates too often.. My website account was closed because of too much traffic to the version check script. So that's why this site was down for several days.
I've deleted the script, released new versions of Jewels that contact to a static HTML-file (previously the script was PHP, which in turn increased the stress on the server) and — importantly — not every time the game is started. Still, looking at the access logs on the new server, things look unnerving. Many people have not updated the game, and thus there is loads of requests for the (now deleted) old update check script. I might need to take out the update checking altogether, then again most of the people won't probably update to that version so… 😛
Let's hope that more people update to the latest Jewels and this huge rush of requests starts to calm down. Otherwise I'm looking at my account suspended, again.
Vote for Driftmoon!
Driftmoon, a role playing game in development by my co-worker Ville has made it in the TOP-4 final games at a contest held by 2BeeGames. This is the final week of the competition, so take a look quickly and cast your vote! Driftmoon seems very promising and reminds me a bit of the good old Ultima-games (mainly VII/VIII); definitely worth trying if you like role playing games.
Check out Ville's games at www.monkkonen.net or head directly to 2BeeGames in order to check the finalist games. You can place your vote in either of the sites. 🙂
Jewels for Android released!
Just wanted to announce that I've finished the Android port of Jewels. It is now available through the Android Market, for free. 🙂 The comments so far have been very positive, thank you. I'll probably release an update later with some fixes and tweaks, but after that I think it's time to start thinking about the next project.
I'll write something about the porting experience from programmers point of view later; it definitely has been interesting as I have not done any mobile coding before this.
UPDATE on 13th of November:
Now that Jewels has been on the Market for a week, I'd like to share some statistics with you. Turned out that the game is a huge success (ok, it's mainly because it's Bewejeled, but interesting still), I had not anticipated this at all! At first I thought it'd break 5000 downloads before the last weekend (the game was released on Thursday). It did, Sunday the downloads were over 16 000. On Monday, it was over 32 000. And now, it's over 100 000 installs, 92% of them active (i.e. still on users' phones)!
Jewels is actually the second most popular (free) game in the Market right now with a average rating of 4.5 stars (596 ratings at the moment), only behind a Solitaire-game. Very nice. 😄 I've actually gotten more comments about Android-Jewels in a week, than I have from all my previous games combined during all these years, wow! So there's definately market for good Android-games. I'm planning to make something a bit more original next, so stay tuned.
Of course, it's not all roses: I've released about a dozen updates but still there remains some mysterious bugs that don't occur in most of the phones, but do in some.. Partly that is because Jewels was not originally writting for phones (XNA as an environment is way simpler than Android!), and partly because I've probably screwed up something (my first Android app, after all). I will definitely try to design the next game to more solid and not so prone to these various bugs and crashes. But one thing bugs me: the Anroid phones are truly different from each other, although in theory the same code should work in most of them, in reality it won't.. I've seeing reports of some really weird crashes that really should not be happening. 🙁
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