Hello? Are you there, Phat Games?

Happy Holidays and Seasons Greetings all...

If anyone is still reading this blog or wonder about Phat Games and whatever happened to us I suspect I should explain our extended 3 and a half year absence...

Well, it's like this: The entire Phat team was approached by a man in a black trench coat requesting our assistance to save the world from it's own destruction in the year 2147. In order to travel to the future though, we needed to board this crazy man's space ship and fly really close to a black hole at high speeds for a brief period of time - kind of like in the movie Interstellar. Strangely enough, this strange man's spaceship had the ability to travel faster than light through some kind of space warp technology (in order to get to a black hole), but could not actually fly close to the speed of light through general relative terms (thus sending us into the future that way) and as such we needed to go to a black hole to travel significantly forward through time. He promised us that once we helped him save the world of 2147, we would be able to return home some how. None of us questioned the fact that most physicists seem to currently think that travelling backwards through time is impossible. We just assumed they had the technology in the future and this man's spaceship was not equipped with said technology - we are Canadians - a friendly, trusting bunch!

Once we saved the world (I won't bore you with those details) we were directed to a man simply known as The Doctor. The Doctor could travel through time in a 1950s telephone booth. In mere seconds we were returned to the 21st century...however to the year 2014, not to 2011. The Doctor said something about this becoming a fixed point in time now and we could not just hop back in his time machine, so we were stuck 3 years in the future. Oh well.

I won't bore you with the details of what REALLY happened in our 3 year absence but I will simply say that we are back and that Phat Professional Burglar for the Android is nearing completion. Over the next few weeks I will talk about a lot of the development effort, the woes of development, and what we have planned for the Phat Professional Burglar iPhone and Android launches. Why has it been 3 years? I will just say that life got in the way. This is not our full time job (but we would love it to be), and some times life events take us away from our dreams for a little while.

Stay tuned, there is more to come in next while. For now, enjoy these new screen shots!

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!