People often ask me – Peter, what are some good writing tips? How can I be a good writer? And I say, the first thing to remember is, if you get started, if you just get started on whatever it is you need to write, like a blog post even, then you can have a drink. Everything after that will either solve itself or it won’t, much like the entirety of life, vitiating the need for questions and clearing the way for a drink.

Once you’ve had a drink (regard, please, how I didn’t start this paragraph with “In all seriousness” or similar), you’ll notice, or remember, that “writing” is the practice of laying down a bunch of words next to each other, much like bricks or cobblestones. I detest this simile, when it is offered as something more than a comical truism, for what it captures as much as for it what leaves out. In other words (more bricks), I immediately stop listening and start doing something else entirely whenever I hear a writer say that a writer should be like, say, a mason, inasmuch as one never hears of “mason’s block”. The writer’s job is to write, this line of argument goes, so write. Nobody will be able to tell the difference between what you meant and felt good about and what you wrote because it sounded okay and wasn’t misspelled. This is nonsense. The reason you hear writers talk like this is simply that recognition of a crude truth (writing is a series of words, just like anything composed of anything else comprises those things) serves as a goad for getting down to business. It’s like insulting someone to start a fight, except you’re the only person in the room. The reason it gets under my skin when I hear other writers adopt this tone is because I can’t tell if they actually believe it or not. Obviously writing is more than laying down interchangeable bricks, or fixing a machine of set specifications, or any of the other similes. Writing is a way of saying something, and if you think of all the things you’ve heard people say, you’ll notice those things can be, among other things, true, funny, beautiful, illuminating, cautionary, diverting, helpful, meaningful, or, conversely, any one of an innumerable different kinds of crap. Writing is both the attempt to find a felicitous way to express something and the struggle to figure out what’s worth saying to begin with.

But that latter part is quite a trick, of course. You can’t make something good by wanting it to be good – this talent would have been noticed, or rather not noticed, as there would be nothing to notice, everything being consequently equally good. That’s where the bricklaying comes in again – often the best way to figure out what’s worth saying is through practices that can seem incongruous or unintuitive, but are in fact vital and effective. Here’s a few of them.

• Get up and walk around. There’s all that stuff about how sitting isn’t good for your spine, rising obesity rates, sedentary something something, everybody’s read about it. Even without meticulously sourced backing on the posture science, though, it’s the staying still in one place part that’ll drag on your mind and make you antsy and grumpy. Moving around and getting a change of scenery can stimulate a flow of ideas and reflection without any of the mental straining that sitting at a desk can lock you into.
• On the other hand, if you’re at your desk, don’t be afraid to stare into space and do (what looks like) nothing. Thinking of the best things to say and how to say them involves, yes, thinking. There’s always a certain guiltiness and embarrassment that comes from having a part of your work process that’s totally invisible and internal, even if you’re working in private. Ignore this. Keep concentrating.
• Don’t be afraid to bother people with your thoughts. Framing the conversation as a request for feedback on a set thought is rarely as productive as finding someone willing to listen to you ramble and think out loud. The responses and questions you’ll get are often equal in value to the clarifying power of simply having to phrase your ideas colloquially and on the fly.
• Don’t be afraid to start typing, no matter what. Even typing long strings of obscenities and non sequiturs can get you into the rhythm of listening to your thoughts and transcribing them, in addition to being intrinsically pleasing in its own right, not unlike cleaning out your bellybutton lint.

None of these methods are guaranteed to help you out, of course. But incorporating them into the rhythm of your work can serve to remind you of two complementary things: first, that writing is an effortful, deliberate practice; and second, that that same practice is only and finally animated by the ideas that fly into, around, and near your head.

-Peter Odom, Creative Director at Minicore Studios

Normally, we here at Minicore Studios strive to create weekly blog posts that offer some kind of insight into the video game industry or development cycle of a small studio. This week, we just couldn’t do it. Why? Quite simply: meat coma. 

The Minicore Team took a field trip to Franklin BBQ this morning - you know, for team building and such. Some say it’s crazy to wait in line from 9:30am to finally get some BBQ 3 hours later. But those people have never had Franklin. Read these articles and then be jealous of us all:

The Best BBQ Restaurant in America

BBQ’s New Battle Breaks out in Austin, Texas

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as praise for this place goes. Some of us have been Franklin Lovers since their trailer days. For others, this was their first trip. And, for our newest team member, Matt, this was his first Texas BBQ Experience EVER. We almost feel sorry for him. How will any other meat ever live up to this? Alas, there are worse problems to have. 

We’ll be back next week with a deep and profound analysis of something or other game’s related. we promise, once we awaken from our meat-induced slumber. 

Whew! What an adventure E3 was! It was such a whirl of excitement I hardly know where to start, so I suppose I’ll just leap in!

I spent the Monday before the expo hall opened watching press conferences and really getting in the mood of the conference, and I thought there were some really interesting looking games. Beyond: Two Souls caught my eye, as well as Assassin’s Creed 3, LogoCycle, the new SimCity (I’m a sucker for citybuilding), and most especially… THE STICK OF TRUTH! I love South Park, and I absolutely cannot wait for this game.

Now suitably pumped to actually get inside the convention center and start watching demos and playing games, I drove up to LA early Tuesday morning, and after spending a thrilling half hour parking the car, I grabbed my badge and headed into the fray. 

My days at E3 blended into one long stream of investigation and discovery, and so I will not bother to differentiate between days here. The most remarkable difference was the LA Kings game on Wednesday, which compounded parking and dining delays abominably.

I spent the greater part of each morning wandering bright-eyed and bushy-tailed through each major booth: Ubisoft, Square Enix, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and EA among others, acquiring flyers, t-shirts, business cards, and amazed looks (yes, girls can in fact be programmers). I spent my afternoons searching for smaller independent games and visiting peripheral booths.

I was definitely disappointed that some large companies had limited their entire booths to “press-only,” including all of Bethesda and nearly half of Ubisoft. Despite multiple recommendations to investigate Watch Dogs and Dishonored, I was unable to do so. I was similarly discouraged by the unbelievably long lines for the few major games with demos. Borderlands 2 never had shorter than a 2 hour wait, and the Halo 4 line was laughable.

Luckily for me, there were tons of awesome games with no wait at all, and quite a few small titles displayed far more creativity and risk-taking than the AAA titles.

Some of the smaller games I came across that I particularly enjoyed were: Theatrhythm, an impossible to pronounce but fun to play 3DS title based on Final Fantasy music, Papo y Yo, a fantastic and creepy puzzle platformer with hints of magical realism and dark origins, Sound Shapes, an adorable music-based puzzle game for the Vita, and Gravity Rush, a darker physics-based mystery game with an immediately gripping storyline (also for the Vita).

I made the line-waiting sacrifice for a few games, including Injustice, a new fighting game from the makers of Mortal Kombat, and the Dungeons & Dragons: Neverwinter MMO, which promised a custom beer stein upon completion of the demo.

While I was impressed with the cinematic style of Injustice, I was also disappointed at the typically sexist way in which Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman were depicted. Hopefully they will be just as badass as Superman, Solomon Grundy, Batman, and the rest of the male characters when the game is officially released.

I spent a fair amount of time watching others play some of the first person shooter demos since FPS-style games are not generally my thing, but I did actually enjoy Aliens: Colonial Marines, because who doesn’t want to play the villain? 

Papo y Yo was easily my favorite game of E3, with its touching but intense plot line, and puzzle style gameplay. I was very strongly reminded of the magical realist traditions of South America, and indeed that was likely an influence in this game, as the idea sprung from the creator’s childhood, growing up in shanty towns in Colombia with an alcoholic father. The game is slated for release later this quarter, and I can’t wait to play it. A lovely touch is the graffiti in the game, which is actual graffiti from the favelas of Brazil, copied with permission of the original artists.

I will definitely continue to watch Papo’s studio, Minority, which is focused on creating “meaningful” games – not shooters or sports titles. Finding a studio with such an outlook is definitely a relief; it gives me hope that the game industry will not always be focused on who can kill who with which weapon in the bloodiest way.

A final shoutout to both Just Dance 4 for Wii and Dance Central 3 for Kinect – I can’t get enough of the dancing games, and I probably spent a good two hours making a fool of myself in front of hundreds of other people.

Indeed, I spent so long at the Wii Dance booth that other attendees started asking me questions about the game. You’re welcome for the free labor, Nintendo.

Overall, I loved being at E3, I discovered a ton of indie titles I never would have taken the time to play otherwise, and I met a bunch of cool people. It was great being back in my home state for a little while and reveling in the glories of smog, skyscrapers, and traffic, and I hope to be back next year!

Take Care All,

Elizabeth - iOS/Android Programmer 

There’s this little thing that happens in Los Angeles every year. You may or may not have heard of it. It’s called the Electronic Entertainment Expo or, sometimes, E3.

The last three days have been chock full of announcements, world premiere trailers, exclusive gameplay footage, and all things gaming. Minicore’s own Elizabeth Salazar was lucky enough to attend - she’s been posting her thoughts and photos to her twitter account @Elizabethinks and will have a full report for us next week. This week, you’ll have to be content with the jealous ramblings of the rest of the team. We’ve been glued to our screens, salivating on our keyboards, and hotly debating the best and worst of this year’s expo.

Shockingly, we have a lot of opinions and got a little long winded in our response to one simple question: What did you like and what didn’t you? Find out what our CEO John, Creative Director Peter, Marketing Director Shelley, and Technical Director Patrick had to say after the break.

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Being asked to animate a character seems like it should be a fairly straightforward task. You’ve got a character design drawn on a piece of paper, and you just need to figure out how that design is going to be blessed with movement. After deciding what technically needs to be done with the character, you can generally expect to spend a week sketching the character, sketching the movement that the character is supposed to perform, double-checking your animation to ensure that all the parts are moving in a believable fashion, and darting your eyes back and forth from the animation project to the initial character sketch to make sure that it’s cleaving as closely to the original design as possible. We animators justify this obsessive-compulsive behavior by calling it “staying on model”, and after a few scant hours, it quickly becomes the bane of your existence.

Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s ineffably rewarding to breathe life into a series of pencil strokes. That said, the truth of the matter is that there’s a certain lack of artistic spontaneity that comes with the territory of drawing the same thing twenty times over, just in a sliiiightly different pose each time. The illusion of life is not achieved without a lot of man hours, a lot of tedium, and a lot of pixie dust (just kidding — it’s usually booze).

Herein lies the rub of animation: it requires a strict balance of wild imagination, and meticulous foresight.

The problem with approaching your task with a predominantly methodical mindset is that you’ll realize that your characters aren’t going to be content with simply being drawn doing a series of pre-calculated movements. If you’re doing a simple walk cycle, for example, they stick their leg out, make contact with the ground, leave it on the ground as the other leg comes forward, the other foot makes contact with the ground, etc. The problem with animating every character walking this exact same way, however, is that they cease being individuals, and are instead only going through the most basic motions of walking. Simply put, not everyone walks the same way. They don’t in real life, and they certainly don’t in animation. Animated characters are every bit as demanding about their individuality as real people, and they want to be drawn independently of the way that other animated characters are drawn. Try to imagine Bart Simpson bobbing along, swinging his rubbery arms to and fro, just like Olive Oyl in an old “Popeye” cartoon. Does it look right? Maybe it does for Olive Oyl, but for Bart? No way - they’re two completely different people. Animating everyone doing the same thing, swaying in the same way, shuffling along in the same static series of gestures leaves your audience bored, and rightfully so. Variety is the spice of life, after all. Being too exacting in your approach to movement breeds wooden characters, and squelches a character’s individual personality and soul.

Similarly, veering too far into the realm of whimsy and creativity will net you an ever-changing character that shifts so drastically in shape, height, age, and physical plausibility that you might as well be Salvador Dali painting at 24 frames per second. I know it takes a lot of time just to animate a frog jumping forward, but without a strict adherence to that frog’s character design, in the space of one second, you could start with a frog jumping forward and end with what looks like a lizard landing on a lilypad just because you decided to get a little fast and loose somewhere around frame 7. And where does that leave the audience? Confused, that’s where! Weren’t they just looking at a frog? Why does that thing suddenly look like a lizard? Is there a reason for it? Is it supposed to be a magical frog that can change its form? Well, no, you just got a little bored and decided you were tired of drawing a damn frog. And I sympathize with you, I really do, but that’s not what this job is about! Without the discipline of staying on model, there’s no consistency, and your audience doesn’t connect emotionally with your subject. They might as well be looking at an abstract painting. It may be interesting and cool to look at, but it’s not a character.

Animation is communication. Striking that perfect balance between letting the uniqueness of the personality you’re animating shine forth while constantly grappling with the reality that this is a performer, an actor comprised of paint or pixel. There are boundaries in how they are drawn, but it is your duty to be as fun and interesting as you can within those boundaries. It can be frustrating, but only if you’re not open to what the actor demands of you.

-Avery Beckett

Lead Animator, Minicore Studios

idrawgood:

So this is just a small snippet of what I’ve been doing at work all week. I’ve been doing thumbnail concept art sketches for mutant animal enemies one might encounter in our upcoming video game, Laika Believes. This is about a third of the doodles I’ve done, but it represents all the animals I’ve been working on. This is not the final designs for these creatures, merely the ones I liked the most. No idea which ones will be going further in the concept phaze, but I’m sure I’ll have more art to show when it gets to that time. My boss was nice and let me share this stuff with everyone :)

I’ll try not to ramble too much. I just want to point out what these things are and let you guys enjoy. These sketches are based on short descriptions given to me by our lead designer, Peter Odom. They’re all numbered, so I’ll go down the list:

First pic: 1. and 2. This guy is a mutant catfish with caterpillar legs

3. and 4. It’s a mutant panther with a squashed bulldog face and lots of long limbs and whiskers

5. Nasty mutant caribou with twisted horns, extra non-functional limbs, and hand hooves

Second pic: 1., 2., and 3. These are supposed to be sort of a cross between a pig and a naked mole rat, maybe? Hairless, gross, and with extra mutant limbs.

4., 5., and 6. Wolverine with the same treatment as the pig/rat. Hairless, gross, and extra mutant limbs.

So I hope you guys enjoyed the peek into my work. I’d love to hear feedback on the designs and if there’s anything you guys want to see more of, let me know. I’ll see if I can share anything else ;D

I remember being in school like it was yesterday. The anticipation of spending a summer lounging around, hanging out with friends, playing games…

Those days are over for us here at Minicore Studios. Instead, we sit for hours making those games we want to play whilst developing hahaha a drinking problem hahahaha. It’s a cool gig, though! We’re pretty excited about everything in our summer pipeline, so we want to share those things with you and give you a rough sketch of when those cool things will be available.

I think one of the first things we realized when fleshing out the character of Dr. Phineas Phraud — protagonist of our acclaimed Tanks for the Memories Android game — was that no matter where the game took the character, we wanted to know more. We assumed that you wanted to know more, too, which is why we’re hard at work creating Minicore Comics. You’ll see Dr. Phraud and other characters (and maybe thinly-veiled versions of ourselves) in richly-drawn, brilliantly-written comics. The first comic is sitting on our computers ready to be posted and I can tell you now that it’s pretty great. I don’t want to overstate or overhype, but it’s literally the greatest thing I’ve ever seen or will see in my life.

MInicore Comics will go live in early June. We’ll keep you posted.

Since we released Tanks for Android back in April, people come up to me and say, “Hey John, when are you gonna release the derned thing on iOS devices?”

I always say, “Well, first of all, I cannot believe that in the year two thousand and twelve you still say ‘derned’ like it’s a thing. Second of all, it’s coming soon!”

It’s a noncommittal answer. I know. I hate doing that. I’m still not going to commit to a hard date, either, because when we’ve done that in the past, we faced problems we could have avoided by just taking a breath and pushing our deadline by a day or two. That said, I can commit to a bunch of cool things all happening very close to one another. Tanks for iPhone/iPod Touch will come out sometime in late June or early July. An iPad version will follow by a week or two. I’ve seen the progress everyday and I can tell you that it’s GREAT. Seriously. It looks so good on Retina display devices, you’ll do a quadruple take and call your chiropractor. It’s as responsive as ever, too.

Coupled with the big release, we’ll be coming out with Game Center support as well as leaderboard support for the Android version. Now you can show your buddies how much better, stronger, cooler, and more well-adjusted you are. Your score in Tanks is a direct measurement of all of those things. For you Kindle Fire users, Tanks will go live on the Amazon App Store the same week Tanks for iOS comes out. You can read Fifty Shades of Grey and fire up Tanks for the Memories to work through your obvious problems ALL ON ONE DEVICE. Synergy.

All the while, we’re moving fast on Laika Believes. There are so many systems working together in this game that prototyping phase alone will last a while, but man oh man is it fun so far or what? All of the cool things we’ve discussed in the media and hinted at are coming together rather nicely. There’s such a great story that serves as the sturdy, majestic backbone of this awesome game. Can’t even tell you how jazzed we are about it. We are really looking forward to moving past the “tell” phase and into the “show” phase, which is why I can say that before the summer months wind down, you’ll be seeing Laika Believes in action.

Where will you see it action? Well, if you’re in Austin in early July, you’ll be able to see the game at Rooster Teeth Expo (RTX). Have you heard of RTX? Only in its second year, the dashing folks at Rooster Teeth have created a major conference brand that has grown exponentially from last year’s event. Awesome. Come out and see us. Will you be in Seattle for PAX Prime? We will be! We’re looking forward to showing you everything we can when late August rolls around. We’ll also be releasing shots and video periodically through the development process, so even if you can’t make it to Austin or Seattle, you’ll be connected to us. Awwww. Community of game love!

Whew. I’m exhausted. We’ve got lots to do and I need to get back to doing it. As always, feel free to drop us a line at contact@minicorestudios.com, on Twitter @MinicoreStudios, or on our Facebook page.

Best,
John Warren (@johnewarren)
CEO, Minicore Studios

A few weeks back, we decided that it would be fun if we could share more about the main character of Tanks for the Memories, our first game. Dr. Phineas Phraud is such a quirky and interesting character, but you only get a little taste of his wackiness in the game. We had been discussing a webcomic that revolved around the daily grind at a little start-up indie game dev studio, but what about a webcomic tie-in with our newly released game starring Dr. Phraud? Brilliant! Well, we thought it was brilliant. So our creative director came up with a fun script and I started working on the art and the rest is history!

Okay, so it’s not quite history yet.

I am working on finishing up the coloring for most of the pages and we are in the process of creating MinicoreComics.com, where we will house any and all of our comic creations. The final product is right around the corner, but here’s a little sneak peek and some info on my creative process.

(I’ll warn everyone right now, I’ve never actually drawn comics before. Sure, I’ve been reading them since I was in grade school, but I’ve never really had the gumption to just draw one. Always wanted to, though. With that said, bear in mind that this is a learning process for me and the way I draw these might change for future stories. Probably will, in fact, just for the sake of exploration of style).

So, with no further ado:

Step 1: Script! Okay, duh. Can’t have a comic without a script. Our creative director, Peter, wrote up the first little story for Dr. Phraud. He also drew some mock-up sketches of how he envisioned the panels would look on page. The word “sketches” is used as loosely as possible here. Peter’s skills with a pencil pretty much extend to allowing him to write legible words. But in all seriousness, the mock-ups were really useful. I had my own take on things, but he gave me a nice foundation to build on. I broke the script into what I thought would be the best arrangement for the panels and moved on to the next step.

Step 2: Sketch it out! I drew up this sketch in Manga Studio Debut 4. You can see the shapes of the panels and blocking for where I figured the word bubbles would go. I printed this in blue so that I could easily draw the final images over my sketch. This way the sketch lines would be easier to remove and clean up once I scanned the image back into the computer.

Step 3: Final pencils! Kind of a jump here. What I actually did was print the blue, sketch it all lightly in pencil, then go back and darken all my pencil lines with a softer, darker lead pencil. Why did I choose pencil instead of ink? Good question. Don’t get me wrong, I LOOOVE to ink my art. But for this first comic, I thought it would be interesting (and perhaps a bit less daunting) to try a style that looked more like real media. There’s a good chance I’ll try inks for the next story, but I like how this came out for the first one. So I scanned it, took out the blue, cleaned up the fuzzy parts, and prepared to color.
Step 4: Color! As I said, I wanted to make this look a little more sketchy/real media, so I used brushes that simulated that texture. This was colored in Adobe Photoshop CS5.5. It’s a program I’m very familiar with, so I figured that would mean I could finish it quickly. It was fun making color palettes for the setting and characters. I think it might still be a bit bolder and warmer than I really like, but it’s a learning process.

Step 5: Words! Okay, this really isn’t much of a visual leap for this page. There’s really only two word bubbles on this one. Other pages will have more, I promise! I’m not sure whether I finished up the words in Photoshop or Manga Studio. I did, however, tighten up the panel lines and such in Manga Studio. It’s a great program for comic layout, I must say!

That’s pretty much all there is to it! I hope this was at least a little bit informative. It’s been fun to work on this. I’ve never really drawn up backgrounds and objects like this, so it’s been exciting to see my art grow. If anyone out there has questions about my process, the tools I’ve used, or art in general, feel free to ask me any time.

Keep an eye out on this blog, our main site (MinicoreStudios.com) or follow us on twitter (@minicorestudios) for the launch of Minicore Comics and more adventures with Dr. Phraud!

Thanks for reading, folks!

- Michelle Oglesby Cunnigham, Art Director

With the recent release of our first game, “Tanks for the Memories”, Shelley asked me to talk about some of the things we learned throughout the process. So after some long and serious debate (note: it was neither long nor serious), I decided to talk about playtesting.

Now we are quite a small studio and are still learning how to do this whole game dev thing. We’re picking it up quickly, but there were three main challenges we ran into with playtesting.

1. We were very particular about not wanting to  show off our stuff until it was ready.
2. We didn’t know how to reach out and find people.
3. We didn’t know how to deal with the responses we got.

Let’s take a second to break these down:

Challenge One: the impulse to not show your stuff off till it’s “ready” is common, but it’s also BAD! Why? Because it’s never ready. Most games are never really done, and waiting until you are happy with what you have to let people play it will mean that you will not start play testing till it is too late. The whole point of play testing is to make sure that the game is fun - but you have to make sure to do this when you still have a chance to make the gameplay better.

We didn’t really start testing with people until it was too late. Mostly this was at the conventions we went to (GDC, SXSW Interactive, and PAX East), so a lot of it was “past the point of no return”. Trying to get any real impression of the game in these environments was also hard, because of all the distractions surrounding players. What I am trying to say is, start testing early, earlier than you really think you should. This is to help you refine your mechanics and make sure you’re on the right track with your gameplay. So you still have programmer art in there? No big deal. Functionality is missing? So what?

Test whatever you can, whenever you can, and make sure it works. If it doesn’t you have time to fix it. The later in your dev cycle you are when you find out something isn’t working the way you want it to, the more time and money it costs to correct. If your game is pretty much done when you find out something is wrong, chances are that it just gets tweaked instead of overhauled.

Challenge Two: finding play testers. This seems like maybe it’s not that big a deal, just invite whoever to come in and play your game - friends, family, everyone. On the surface it seems like any feedback is good. But friends and family are terrible playtesters. They aren’t going to give you as honest of an opinion as you need. Plus they most likely already have a good idea of what the game is. This means from a testing standpoint, their receptivity is compromised.

What you need is to reach out to the community and ask them come in and test an unreleased game. Great places for this are colleges (this is where we got some of our testers), coffee shops or really anywhere public. Mostly you just need to find a range of people who have no idea what your game is or even who you are to come in, sit down, and try to play the game. That way you really get feedback you can use.

Challenge Three: what you do with the feedback you get is crucial. This is the big one; the reason why you are playtesting to begin with. This is also one of the hardest things to do. You have to start by realizing that everything you hear and see from your testers has to be filtered. For most of us this is really hard. When you see someone getting frustrated - even angry at the game - or not having fun with it, you can’t help but want to explain yourself or tell them what they are doing wrong. Don’t. Thank them for coming in and then sit down. Really think about what was going on when they had that reaction - was something missing? Is there some way to communicate in the game itself what should be happening?

Don’t take reactions at face value. Just because someone wants to go faster or wants stronger guns, don’t assume that giving them what they ask for is the solution. Maybe the levels need to be redesigned, maybe enemies aren’t numerous enough, maybe you need to show the enemy’s health bar. The point is don’t just trust your knee-jerk reaction to feedback - digest it, think about your game, and look for the right solution to make it a better experience.

Playtesting isn’t about getting a pat on the back for making a great game - that comes from fans when you release it. Playtesting is about identifying areas where you can make the game better to reach those lofty goals of perfection we all have. Use it right and it can really improve the quality of your game.

- Patrick Cunningham, Technical Director

If you have any specific questions about this post or just in general, please let us know! We’d love to hear from you!

We are in the process of publishing a free version for Android and the iOS versions will be available in May 2012. We will, of course, keep you posted on all of the above! We’re super excited to have our very first game published! Let us know what you think!