If you follow me on twitter or the like, you may have heard by now that my latest Windows Phone game was just recently released called Beards and Beaks! I’m pretty happy with how the game has turned out, and thus far we’ve gotten pretty positive reviews with an average of four stars, and a large amount of the negative reviews were due to the fact that you can spend money beyond the actual cost of the game (which I can understand the reluctance there).
We had a lot of things we wanted to accomplish with this game, and while it isn’t perfect (what game is?) we did get the big ticket items we wanted in there! We wanted to come up with a game mechanic we hadn’t really seen before that worked well on the phone, and we wanted to enable premium downloadable content on the device. Based on the reviews so far, I think it’s safe to say we accomplished the former, and the latter is pretty easily quantifiable, so I feel really good about how the game ended up!
There are also a lot of misconceptions though, or features people are just unaware of! One of the biggest complaints I see in the reviews is that people think that you have to spend actual money to use the mushroom powers, which simply isn’t true! Now granted, you certainly *can* spend money to use these powers more frequently, but your mushroom power bar slowly refills over time. If you played once a day, you would notice that every day you would have a new full mushroom bar!
We also have quite a few more leaderboards than it seems most people realize. When you click the leaderboards button on the main menu you will see three leaderboards at first, but did you know the list of leaderboards at the bottom is scrollable? There are quite a few different leaderboards you can see if you scroll that list down! That isn’t even the start of it, every single level in the game has two leaderboards as well (best score and best time)! If you click the button next to the score or time on the level information tab, you will be taken to those leaderboards!
We also have quite a few levels. There are thirty in the base game when you first download it (seven in the trial), and another 15 in the first level pack (which is absolutely free)! Which brings the number of levels for free up to 45. There’s also currently another premium map pack available for $1 (another 15, up to 60 levels), and that isn’t the last map pack the game will see!
Anyone who’s seen my gamertag probably realizes that I love Xbox 360 achievements, and if you’re like me, you’ll be happy to know that getting all of the achievements in this game won’t be a lesson in frustration! It’s possible (albeit unlikely) to get every one of them in your first playthrough of all the levels if you know what you’re doing (and get a little lucky)!
I’m also giving a performance talk at Gamefest in Seattle next month in which I go into the nitty gritty details on the performance gotchas we ran into during development of the game, along with how I found them, and what I did to fix them. The title of the talk is “Performance Patterns and Pitfalls for Windows Phone Games” if you want to find it in the list!
If you are going to be at Gamefest come find me to chat! Maybe by then someone will know what a Bleego is.
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