My first game

I just submitted my first game to the Windows Phone Marketplace. I decided on the name Cloud Catcher.

It’s a fairly simple game, cards with clouds on them drift across the screen from right to left and you have to tap on the two that match in each column before they reach the gold line.

I’m interested to see if I can get any sales on this game. I think not having a trial is going to hurt me because its difficult to judge this game without playing it. Finding the matching clouds seems easy when they aren’t marching off the screen.

If I decide to do a version 2.0 of this game, I would like to figure out some good way to do a trial. Maybe it only allows X matches per game or something. (Time based trials don’t work well on WP because users can uninstall and reinstall after the trial is up and there is nothing the developer can do about it.) I would also add sound effects and music. I usually play games with the music and sounds muted, but I know it can add a lot to a game’s feel. And maybe another mechanic, like birds would block some of the clouds and you’d have to tap them first before you could see where the match was.

But for now I’m pretty happy with my first real video game. It’s always been a goal of mine to be able to make video games, and while I will probably not make any money off it, at least I’ve got a completed project. (Depending on how well or poorly  it sells, I may start posting code from the game and talking about it here, but I don’t want to just post the whole project and have someone completely rip it off, even though I know there are sites that just rip XAP files from the marketplace already.)