Phat Update

Greetings all!

Phat Professional Burlgar is on track for an August release date for the Android. We hope to have the iPhone version ready soon after.

Based on the global downloads of the free version of Phat Professional Burglar and the feedback we received we will make some enhancements to the user interface and we will add multiple language support.

Zazumo - our next Windows Phone 7 game - is coming along nicely as well. More details on this game will be available in the coming days and weeks.

Setback

We've experienced a setback that will delay the planned release of Phat Professional Burglar for the iPhone and Android.

Unfortunately, our cross platform strategy to use MonoTouch and MonoDroid for our deployments of Phat Professional Burglar blew up in our face recently due to the uncertain future of Mono after the acquisition of Novell and layoffs of virtually all the Mono staff.

We are looking into other options to release Phat Professional Burglar for the iPhone. The Android release will continue to be developed in Java (we briefly stopped the Java development because of the release of MonoDroid).

Phat Professional Burglar is now available for free on the Windows Phone 7. If you don't already have it, please download it today!

Zazumo, our next Windows Phone 7 game, is under development and rapidly nearing completion. We will post more news as it develops.

Phat Professional Burglar - Android and iPhone update

The iPhone port is largely done. We are just waiting on the completion of the registration of "Phat Games Inc." as a corporation before we send it to the iPhone Market place. Should be another month or so. These things are slow in Canada.

The Android port is making good strides as well. The game is running on the Android phone, loading and rendering content, but there is no user interface aspect to it yet... that's next. The only snag I really ran into when getting it to run on my phone is that GLES 1.0 requires all textures to be in powers of 2. I may have to go through and modify a lot of the content we used for the other 2 versions of the game, but this is hardly a big deal. As a tip for developers who want to develop on the Android and use OpenGL, if you don't have your textures in a power of 2 size, all you will see is a white screen on your phone. Unfortunately, Googling this problem didn't provide me an immediate answer. I had to spend some time digging around on a few forums and blogs to find the solution to this one.

Aside from Phat Professional Burglar we have 2 other games in the pipe line that we will give formal announcements about very soon.

Phat Professional Burglar Android Port

Good evening blog readers,

Tonight I have started getting ready to start the Android port of Phat Professional Burglar. Considering I have never coded an Android app before I expect there to be a learning curve and it might take a little bit of time to accomplish.

Tools:
Eclipse
Android SDK
ADT Plug-in for Eclipse

I will probably post about my progress... or lack there of...or I may not. Ideally, this will be the only Android port we do coded with the native Android SDK.

The hope is that MonoDroid comes out of beta and we can primarily do all of our coding using the Microsoft frameworks.

Phat Games vs The Internet

One of the games the Phat team is working on stars a character named Zazumo. We haven't came up with a title for it yet, but it will almost certainly have the character's name in it. As an experiment I thought it would be interesting to see just how much of an impact could be made on the internet by a small indie game development team. Not surprisingly, the word "Zazumo" doesn't come up very much in day to day life, and as such doesn't have much of a footprint on the web. As of today, April 3rd 2011, a google search for "Zazumo" returned only 321 results. How many results will there be after Phat Games pollutes the internet with a multiplatform release of our game? Start placing your bets!

Phat Professional Burglar Price Drop

Good news everybody! Tonight we will be dropping the price of our game Phat Professional Burglar from $1.99 to $0.99. The full version of PPB comes packed with 50 levels adding up to 15-20 hours of play time for the average gamer, or roughly 10 cents per hour. We feel that at this price point we are giving a fair amount of value for the price. Unfortunately, the Windows Phone 7 marketplace does not scale the product prices internationally according to foreign exchange rates, which makes the game much more expensive in non-US regions.

After looking at our first week of sales data we see that about 10% of our US trial downloads have resulted in purchases which is the expected rate for a quality mobile game. When we look at the rest of our numbers we see that the conversion rate from trials to purchases is much lower. In particular we are getting a lot of trial downloads in Australia, but very few of them are turning into sales. Initially I figured that Australians were cheap, but upon further inspection I found that the game was priced at $3.00 AUD, which is actually worth more than $3.00 USD. We are seeing a similar phenomena in Europe where the game is priced at 2 Euros.

In the end we think the game is worth 2 loonies, but anything higher than that is pushing it. Pricing the game at $0.99 USD should put us right in our value range in the international regions. Cheer's Australia, enjoy!

iPhone and Level Pack for Phat Professional Burglar

The iPhone port of Phat Professional Burglar is underway. It will be available in the iPhone market place in a short while. We are using Monotouch and Monotouch XNA to do the port - thanks to Apple for lifting the restrictions on their market place.

Also, the first level pack of Phat Professional Burglar is in development and should hit the Windows Phone 7 as an update this week!

Windows Phone Metro reviewed Phat Professional Burglar

Windows Phone Metro has reviewed Phat Professional Burlgar with glowing reviews!

Windows Phone Metro

Phat Professional Burglar - Available Today on the WP7

Download and play your very own copy today!
Phat Professional Burglar

10 Levels are available in the free trial, with an additional 40 in the $1.99 paid version.

How to complete level 2 of Phat Professional Burglar

Phat Professional Burglar sent for certification (WP7)

Today Phat Professional Burglar has gone for certification. Expect to see it on the Windows Phone 7 app store in a few days!

Phat Memory Lane

Blair found some backup cds from one of his old computers with a lot of the old Phat Games stuff on it. There was even some really old stuff on there from when we went by "Lightning Productions". Some of the games were pretty fun, a few were hilariously bad, and a couple we never got around to finishing. Here a couple of screen shots of some games that never made it past the early stages. It is too bad really, I would have liked to play these.

It gets closer...

As April quickly approaches so does the Windows Phone release of Phat Professional Burglar! Most of the work on the game is complete. We are just finalizing some of the sound effects and music, and you should be able to download it from the Windows Phone App Store in a few short weeks!

What tools do we use?

We've had a couple questions about what tools we used to make Professional Burglar, so I figured I may as well blog about it.

Code
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Visual Studio 2010
C#
XNA Game studio
Windows Phone 7 SDK
Phat Games Engine/Game Editor - A .net based game engine and game editor. We are considering open sourcing this in the future once it becomes more mature (I'll probably post more on this in a bit).

We will be using Monotouch for the iPhone version of the game and are evaluating Monodroid for the android version.

Artwork
-------
Inkscape - an open source vector drawing utility.
Paint.Net - A freely available raster drawing utility.

Before and After Screens

Here are some screenshots of the old dos version of the game and the new mobile version. The new version has higher resolution graphics, and we added a lot more contrast between the backgrounds and foregrounds to help with visibility on the small screen.

Phat Professional Burglar goes mobile!

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the release of Phat Professional Burglar. Today, Phat Games officially announces that Phat Professional Burglar will be available for download on the Windows Mobile Phone in April, with releases planned for the iPhone and Droid later this year. Stay tuned, Burgals' entrace to the little screen is only a few short weeks away!

A little hint...

Greetings,

Our first game that we are launching is an enhanced version of a game we launched a decade ago. It's a puzzle game, involves money bags, and a little guy named Burgals. Can you guess what game it is?

It's launch is very close and you will be able to download it from the Windows Mobile Phone Market Place. A wider release on the iPhone and Droid phones is a possibility in the near future as well. More news to come next week!

Accepted To the Windows 7 Marketplace

Shortly after uploading a fake app to the marketplace I received an email from Microsoft's identity verification provider, geotrust. They emailed me a form to fill out and sign. It was pretty simple, I just had to write my name, the date, attach my driver's license, and add my signature. I took a picture of the filled out form and emailed it back to them. A couple of days later the process was complete. We are now one step closer to launching a game on the WP7 platform.

Windows Phone 7 Marketplace for Canadian Developers

I just thought I'd share some of my experiences with getting signed up to publish to the marketplace. Although the development experience for WP7 itself has been quite pleasant, getting on to the marketplace has had a few hiccups.

First off, it costs money to create an App Hub account, about $100. I think there is some free option for students, but I didn't get into that. I created my account with the same windows live account that I use for my XBox, and during this process they decided to automatically bill to the credit card I had associated with that account. No option was given to select a different credit card. In my case this was an ok assumption on their part, but in general this isn't too great of an idea.

Next, they need to verify your identity. To do this they have a third party provider, GeoTrust, email you and gather some information. After waiting two weeks (or one fortnight for the nerds out there) without hearing anything I looked into the matter a bit more. It turns out that you need to submit an app to the marketplace before they verify you. Additionally, to unlock your phone for testing purposes you need to be verified. I can understand a need for verification, but I don't understand why I need to submit an app to start that process. The process requires you to submit an app which has never been tested on a real device.

After submitting a fake app I got a notification from GeoTrust saying that they will send me some more stuff in 1 to 2 business days. This is where I sit right now.

Cheers

We're still alive!

Well, it has been a long time since the phat games team has done much game development, but the desire to create hasn't died. We've been doing some work for a mobile game over the past month and things are coming along great. I'm looking forward to making our first official announcement shortly, and hopefully our first release shortly afterward.

Cheers.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Phat Games blog!

After years of silence, Phat Games, creators of such games as Snuff, Holy Conquest, Kids of Karendow and Phat Professional Burglar, is returning to the Internet! Check back often for updates on upcoming products hitting a variety of mobile devices and any other commentary we feel like sharing!

Blair