E-mail I sent out
I put together this e-mail for someone that I contacted in regards to checking out our game. Figured I might as well post it here, enjoy :).
Hello,
Our indie game development studio, Textual Indices, has released a game for the Android platform. We just formed the company in late February and started work on Refraction right away. We released the free version on March 30th and then the paid version on April 11th.
Being students still, this is the first time any of us had done anything on this scale, so it has been a huge learning process and so the game itself has been in constant development and upkeep since we released it and will continue to be worked on for the next several months at least.
We initially began working on it because the three of us were itching to do some software development beyond what little code snippets our professors had us working on. When we came up with the idea for Refraction we were all really pumped about it and talked about how the game would work for days on end. Since we were all so excited for how fun of a game we thought it could be, we decided to dive right in and give it a shot. None of us had worked in an Android environment, well any development environment really, and so we spent a lot of time googling and browsing stackoverflow.com, but we were all so engrossed that we spent nearly eight hours a day, seven days a week each working on it.
When we initially released Refraction Lite on the 30th of March, we didn’t know what to expect, so when we started getting comments of people who really liked the game we were so happy. Before that we were left wondering if maybe only we thought it was a cool concept and no one else would.
Well, not only were we getting comments of people liking the game, we were getting comments on people crashing… a lot. So then we had to learn how to debug, and man, that takes a whole lot of time haha. It’s been over a month since we released the free version and I can proudly say that a good majority of the bugs in the game are gone.
Along with bugs, we also had players requesting features and gameplay changes, so we went for it and did what we could to really alter the game to our players tastes, and the way the game has evolved from March 30th to now is incredible and has been quite fun to see the transformation.
The game is definitely targeted at people wanting a brain intensive, challenging game, and doesn’t hit quite as wide an audience as a casual game might, but we’re okay with that, we like that the people we get buying our full version are gamers a lot like ourselves, who enjoy a deep challenging experience.
The most up to date versions are available on the Android Market as Refraction Lite(Free) and Refraction($2.99). We also have the lite and full available on the Amazon market, but they are not as up to date since they must be reviewed prior to posting by Amazon.
The only differences between the lite and full is number of levels and the lite has a small advertisement bar on the pause menu. The lite has 20 levels unique to the lite version, while the full has 120 levels with more coming soon.
Feel free to get ahold of us with any questions or comments :). Thank You.
Brandon Risell
Textual Indices
www.TextualIndices.com