Nomuda Games | Official Blog

Hey all,

The Nomuda team is feeling good and successful with Episode 1 selling on the Android and Amazon marketplaces, but by no means are we sitting back sipping lemonade. In fact, we’re chugging along pretty aggressively at the next episode.

What’s the next episode about, you ask? Well, sticking to our identity as one of the only mobile games following an episodic content format, the next eppy is a natural extension that immediately picks up the story of Reedu where Episode 1 leaves off. If you’ve played and beaten that one you know exactly what we’re talking about…the discovery behind the 5-headed Meat Trap. If you haven’t gotten to the end of the episode yet, there is much to be revealed that will help segue into our next soon-to-be-released title.

One of the new rooms

We’ve got new puzzles in the queue, a new villain to beat, and the artwork that’s been coming in has been amazing to say the least. There are small tastes on our facebook page and oh, look at that, a little preview here as well.

So, fear not, we’re in the kitchen, putting something together that’s going to be stronger and oooooh weeeeee so much fun! I wish I could tell you more about the surprises, but then they wouldn’t be such anymore. So I’ll keep mum for now and keep coming out with more as we keep ramping up to our next release.

Jacob

Reedu has been available for over a month now, and we’re excited to release our first update (now available on the Android Market and Amazon App Store).

As promised, everything we changed has been driven by fan feedback – both from user reviews and email.  Remember, you can enter to win a FREE copy of Episode 2 just by sending us bugs, puzzle ideas, storyline theories, or any suggestions on what you’d like to see in our games!  Send those to fate@nomudagames.com.

On to the update!  Here is what we added in version 1.1:

• Mini-game mode with two scoring options
• OpenFeint leaderboards to track your high scores and compete against your friends!
• Downloadable Wallpapers (thanks to Paul Wilks at Android Tapp for the suggestion)
• Faster, streamlined navigation – thanks @Dan
• Fixed all reported bugs (particularly random items appearing and navigation lags) – thanks @Clouzot
• Revised permissions – thanks @Kai for pointing out we need to remove ‘permission to take pictures’ and @mkr and @Ben for pointing out that we need to exclude tablets (unfortunately we still don’t support those)
• Support for larger screens – we do however now support 960 x 540 screens like the Motorola Atrix, HTC Evo 3D, and Droid X2 (all tested and confirmed working)

Keep those suggestions coming as we will push another update with additional mini-games as soon as we can get them finished!

Pollen Attacks!

Well, Nomudians, after a year and a half of toil, testing, de-bugging, compromising, brainstorming, tweaking, skyping, sketching, mailing, and good old fashioned thinking the inaugural episode of our first title, “Reedu: The First Explorer” has finally been unleashed on the Android Market for all to enjoy. It’s simple to find if you have a Droid. On your phone, just go the marketplace, search “Reedu” and it should pop up for you to choose and download. Or on the Internet you can get it here. Not much press out about us yet, but there has been some thanks to Appmodo. Hopefully more in the coming days and weeks. 

I know that many of you more dedicated readers have been following the evolution of Veridia for some time now and it’s been a good test of patience for all of us. For the fans, a long wait while we kept grinding away in the Nomuda Labs promising good things in the works. For the Nomuda team, an equally long wait as we’ve been sculpting our hard lump of clay into a piece we can show to the public. And while the programming side was enough of a challenge there were also artistic hurdles, HR issues, the ever-present $$ situation looming, and other considerations all coalescing which really gave us a humble look at what it takes to get something seemingly simple off the ground.

Ocean View

We highly urge you to check out the game and let us know what you think. The visuals are only a part of the whole. The puzzles are a whole different element we NEED feedback on so we can make the one in the next game even more fun, more addictive, and more appreciated. Of course we think we’re great, but the outsider perspective is what we’re really looking for. Anything you can contribute will help. Collaboration not just within our team but with our fanbase is crucial. Why? Because we want to make dope games, that’s why! Plain and simple. Not saying anything about the games out there now, because there are MANY great titles, but we don’t want to dilute the market with drivel and there seems to be a niche in the episodic, story-driven sphere that we hope to fill not out of necessity but because we’re good at it. So please get our email addresses from our webpage or Facebook page and give us a holler.

More to come about the release and hints on the future of Nomuda in the next post.

Jacob

Just back from my first trip to Austin for SXSWi.  It was a little bit like trying to drink water from a firehouse, but I thought I’d pass along some of the most coolest companies, apps, tools, and ideas that I encountered in Austin.

1.  Game Salad – making games for iOS has never been easier with this streamlined and user-friendly (and FREE!) tool.  I got a terrific demo from Joe at Fire Maple Games, the studio behind the eye-popping Secret of Grizzly Manor, which I will be downloading on my old iPhone tonight!  The bummer is that Game Salad only works on a Mac and only supports games for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

2.  Uptime Wars – This app by Brian Dols is way more fun than most battery monitors since you pit yourself against all other users for who keeps their phone powered on the longest.  It also graphs battery level and temperature, so as a data geek I find myself checking it way more frequently than I should.  Hey Brian – what’s that do to my battery life?

3.  21 hours/week – you’ve seen her Ted talk, you’ve read Reality is Broken, but seeing Jane McGonigal speak live was one of the most inspirational experiences of my life.  She drove home the benefits of gaming, and emphasized the importance of spreading the word about the ’21 hours/week’ figure – the point at which the positive impact of playing games falls off, and some of the negative things (addiction, strained relations with friends and family, even depression) associated with gaming start to impact the player.  So keep it to 3 hours/day!

4.  Burn Notice – I know Harris watches Burn Notice and I’m about to join him.  I met USA Network’s VP of Biz Development and found out about all the cool gaming and other social applications they are working on for their shows.  Time to lay the base with the TV show to keep an eye on where this is going, because they have some really innovative ideas.

5.  Qriously – Christopher Kahler has built an awesome tools with a host of interesting applications.  For developers, Qriously can help you both monetize and learn what users think about your app.  For ‘askers’ (don’t call them advertisers!), Qriously is a resource for attaining limitless relevant consumer insights.

6.  Austin – my first trip to Austin was amazing.  Between the Texas Game Incubator (website coming soon, apparently) and the incentives for video game companies offered by the Texas Film Commission, is Austin the future home of Nomuda Games?

SXSW – hotel already booked for next year.  Can’t wait.

Gorgeous photo by Kumar Appaiah

As I’m hoping you all have seen, every Friday we post a riddle on our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/nomuda) for anyone to try to crack. So far, someone has cracked the riddle each time. You may have asked yourself, why not put up harder riddles? Well, in this blog I wanted to give a brief explanation behind why we choose the riddles we do.

Of course we could choose riddles that stump MENSA members, but really what the fun be in that? This is a game company, remember? Entertainment is key. It’s not in our interest to try to belittle our fans’ intelligence or seem superior in some arcane way. We want the riddles to be answered.

Why choose those specific ones, though? Good question. We have a sort of “code” around the riddles. There are tons and tons and tons to choose from, but we hold it high on our list of requirements that the riddles are simply riddles, not tricks. If the answers to any of them are something so far out there that there’s no way a logic deduction could be reached through the wording, it doesn’t get picked. Some answers we’ve seen have been more than ridiculous. We want to give you a sporting chance. The answers tend to be buried in the wording somehow or hinge on real world assumptions.

They’re supposed to make you think and we don’t really want them to be so easy that a first grader can crack them but we want them to be challenging. Not impossible (or improbable), just good, clean fun.

Jacob

Broken Android

This may qualify more as a rant than a blog. I’m not on Android #3 since first converting in October. Yes, my third Droid in 6 months. Why? Well, let’s see…

Droid #1: Hardware problem caused the phone to turn off under its own accord. Because of this I missed a few morning alarms if it decided to turn off during the night as well as missing other important things (like say, calls) during the day. The Sprint store tested it and determined, after multiple annoying visits and tests, that it was a hardware problem. So, when I put up enough of a fuss haggling for them to accept blame, they issued me a new (re: re-conditioned) phone.

Droid #2: This one started spontaneously to turn the Airplane Mode on. So no calls could be made, no texts received, no 4G available, no nothing really. Again, after an hour on the phone with tech support and another two trips to the Sprint store until they did “tests” and again determined it was a hardware problem, thus issuing me another re-conditioned phone.

So here I am, now on Samsung Epic #3 with pretty close to zero confidence that it’ll function without problems for more than 3 months. I can’t believe one of these costs $400 with all of the tech issues inherent in it. I also now know that at the Sprint Repair stores “repair” means wiping the phone clean then handing out a new one which leaves the customer with the wonderful taks of setting up the email accounts, voicemail, and all personalized settings from scratch. Again. It is a royal pain in the butt. The techs at the store think that downloading apps from the open source Android market leaves the phones susceptible to viruses and that is a common source of problems. An acceptable excuse except that 1) on the two previous phones it was proven that the problems were in the hardware of the phones themselves and had nothing to do with the apps and 2) it undermines the confidence a customer has for downloading apps. One of the main reasons for having a Droid is to get the apps, but if its probable that getting apps will ultimately be th downfall of your phone then, hell, where’s the fun or incentive in getting apps?

It’s a comedy of errors right now that I hope Sprint can remedy sooner rather than later. Otherwise, I don’t care how high the termination fee is, the next problem with bad customer service and I’m outta there.

Jacob

Veridia Villain

As I tend to say before starting anything new that’s worthwhile and potentially a momentous occasion, And here…we…GO!*,this past weekend Nomuda Games launched the beta version of our very first game to 25 lucky (and generous) participants to see how it functions.

What is a “beta version” some of you may be asking. Good question. Basically, it’s just a test sample of a nearly complete product. Not ready for the masses yet, but ready to see how it fairs with an unbiased audience. Kinda like a market research study.

We know that what was sent out isn’t picture perfect and there’s still a list of glitches we’ll have to iron out, but after 14 months of planning and preparing we’ve finally gotten to a level where we can show the game to others.

Now, we wait and see. These next two weeks are going to be critical and extremely nerve-wracking. We won’t be resting on our laurels while we wait for feedback. We’re already working through some of the problems we know exist and are putting a spit shine on everything so that in a couple weeks a final final FINAL version will be ready to hit the Android market.

Wish us luck as we get closer to completion. It’s been a long road but we can see the finish line. Well, for this episode at least. Right after it’s published we’re going to start going full blast on Episode 2, which you get a small glimpse of in Episode 1 if you stumble across the right…um….device. I’ve said too much already. More to come.

And here…we…go,

Jacob

*Bonus points if you can name the movie this quote refers to.

Let's get ready to rumble!

I know we’ve been going on and on about the statistics saying Androids are on the rise. A bar graph here. A pie chart there. But honestly I hadn’t been seeing this “revolution” taking place for myself. Until this past weekend.

There I am having dinner with five others when I bring up that Nomuda has a prototype ready and looking for beta testers. I ask the table who has an Android and to my surprise two others did. Including me, that made for 50% of the table. The other three had iphones and there wasn’t a Blackberry to be seen.

It seems like not too long ago trying to find someone I knew with an Android was nothing but a pipe dream. So are the tides really changing? It is where I am. How is it where you are? Notice them popping up more?

Jacob