Dreams are tough to pursue, if they weren’t everyone would be doing it.  In this interview Thomas relates some of his experiences as a serial entrepreneur and how Mirthwerx is the result of a long standing dream.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/roaringwomenradio/2012/05/07/paying-price-for-dreams–how-much-will-it-cost

Our behind the scenes articles have proven popular on GameDev.net.  To date the series has over 20,000 reads.

We just finished the free version of Catch the Monkey and have written a behind the scenes article of our decisions, experience, and lessons learned.  Enjoy!

We’re happy to announce the launch of our new family friendly free game Catch the Monkey Free.

This is not a “lite” version, or crippleware, it’s an entirely self contained free game in the Catch the Monkey universe.

In the free version, the player starts with 10 plants then faces wave after wave of monkeys. The plants you keep go with you into the next wave, so each wave really matters!

To help you along the way, we’ve added several new features:

1. Pink stars rain down gum into the field

2. Green stars give you a trusty plant to protect your plants

3. Purple stars purple stars give you a random star power like Lullaby or farmer speed boost

4. A rain cloud will come every few levels and give you a few more plants

We had a lot of fun making this special free edition of Catch the Monkey.  Download it and more importantly share it with your friends, enemies, and frenemies!

This is a whole new Catch the Monkey experience, not just the typical “lite” game.  This free version is designed to be a quick, fun pickup and play game on the go:

• Protect your limited plants from endless waves of monkey fun!  See how far you can go!
• New types of stars to catch, like raining bubble gum and magical planters

We’ll be sure to let you know once we’ve submitted the free version to the App Store and App World.

Mirthwerx is committed to multi-platform mobile gaming.  We use the industry leading tool
Marmalade to allow us to bring our games to iPhone, Android, Playbook, Windows Phone, and more.  However, it’s one thing to have the tool and another to know how to use it.

We’re starting our multi-platform experience with Playbook ahead of Android for several reasons.  The simplest reason is testing.  It either works on Playbook or it doesn’t.  Android is more fragmented and therefore requires more testing to be sure it’s right.

Mirthwerx is proud to announce our approval to join family friendly gaming association Moms with Apps.  They don’t take just anyone, and founder Laurie Akemann said Mirthwerx is just the kind of people Moms with Apps looks for.

Moms with Apps has three core purposes:

For Developers: To provide collaborative, developer-to-developer support by helping each other learn about the evolving mobile app marketplace. Successful independent software developers will lead to more thoughtful and diverse products in new media.

For Parents: To encourage families to think carefully about how they use technology in the home, and to introduce them to the variety of family-friendly apps in our developer network.

For Kids & Technology: To advocate healthy intersections of kids and family life with technology, where technology becomes an interactive tool for real life, and not a screen to hide behind. We believe there is potential in emerging mobile platforms to meet needs for education, communication and accessibility. We strive for our apps to be high-quality, educational, interactive and useful.

We look forward to sharing with and learning from other developers in the program.

The most effective way to financial success of an app is to be listed high in the app store ranking chart, especially the top 100 paid or top 100 free.  The only way to get there is by download volume.  Obviously, to Apple, if an app sells, and they make 30% on sales, they want to push successful apps in front of as many people as they can.  So if your download volume increases, so too does your rank and it becomes a virtuous cycle.

Dishonest marketing firms either with or without their client’s knowledge, use farms of hundreds or thousands of PCs with fake Apple ID accounts to download an app and falsely increase its volume.

We at Mirthwerx would never resort to this tactic.  But we must admit we do understand the temptation.  Catch the Monkey was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to produce.  We are trying to think of any way possible to get up the App charts so more people can see it and enjoy it.  The allure of bots is powerful.  But like Luke in StarWars, we have to resist the power of the dark side and go forward on our own merit, whatever may result.

This just goes to show with the progression of technology it only increases man’s reach and means, it does nothing to improve his ends.

And not to worry, we’re applying all these lessons learned to our next project!

Today Catch the Monkey has hit the Canadian charts!  In the Games, Family section is a list of the 120 “What’s Hot” games out of the 8,800 titles.  We are #57!  Tell your friends and help us climb the charts to #1!

Our third article giving a behind the scenes view of how we built Catch the Monkey on a PC is up!   Article 3 covers Polishing & Balancing.  Those were crazy times.

These articles have proven to be quite popular!  The first one has hit over 3,000 reads and the second, published just a week ago, is almost at that point.

We’re applying all these lessons learned to our next project!