Cat in a Box Games should come back! Maybe resurrect Blue Attack?

Discussion in 'General Game Discussion and Questions' started by jakooistra, Sep 27, 2013.

  1. jakooistra

    jakooistra Well-Known Member

    Jan 19, 2009
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    Hey guys - I've been trying my hardest to do game dev in my spare time, and it is SLOW. I want to produce more content for you guys, become better at being a game dev, show some love to my un-updated properties, and bring back stuff that has lapsed in the app store (Original Blue Defense, Blue Attack).

    But I am one man, with no funding, and a day job and a family. So my labour seems to mostly be in vain. Too slow to be meaningful, too sparse to be satisfying.

    So I want to try something new.

    Kickstarter just came to Canada. :)


    I'd like to relinquish programming control, but stay in the creative seat - I want to hire other people to do the work that resides in my brain, and maybe get people like my friend Henry on the job so we can brainstorm awesome stuff together.

    I want to give you guys, my fans, all the awesome stuff you deserve, and I want to love doing it instead of trying to sacrifice sleep and sanity in order to find the time to do so.


    I'm very interested in running a Kickstarter, and I have some ideas for what I'd like to do, but I have no idea what kind of support base I've still got here. Help! Let me know where my fans are at, and let me know what kind of stuff you'd love to see from me in a kickstarter!

    The basic idea is to resurrect Blue Attack as a base goal, and then we'll have stretch goals all the way up to John-quits-his-day-job-all-over-again!

    Let me know, are you guys down for that?

    Do you want to see more games from me and my friends?? Shout it out!
     
  2. onewithchaos

    onewithchaos Well-Known Member

    Apr 16, 2009
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    Shouting!!!!

    I'd love to see re-balancing to Red Conquest!

    I also liked Blue Attack!, Retina would be nice for this :)
     
  3. jakooistra

    jakooistra Well-Known Member

    Jan 19, 2009
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    Red Conquest is something I've loved for a long time, but it is quite possibly the most "niche" product I've ever made. :p I'd be interested in open-sourcing parts of it, and allowing the community to run it in a more comprehensive way. Maybe even come up with a way for the truly dedicated fans to rebalance certain components of it? And get rid of that turtle-in-the-corner hack that some players started using? Man that was annoying. :p

    Yeah, currently Blue Attack isn't even in the app store - and to resubmit, we'd need to do some work on it. :) I'd love to bring it into the modern world, maybe with iphone 5 resolution support, as a universal app for the ipad users that want ipad-specific controls? I always thought it could benefit from a proper controller, maybe some iOS 7 controller input options?
     
  4. MidianGTX

    MidianGTX Well-Known Member

    Jun 16, 2009
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    I am broke as crap, but if there's any small way in which I can help get the word around, I will.
     
  5. The Bat Outta Hell

    The Bat Outta Hell Moderator
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    Mar 10, 2009
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    Still have all your apps installed, on my front page. I can't think of another indie dev that deserves a kickstarter more than you. Red Conquest's multiplayer was fantastic, loved the balance and ingame chat feature, something you never saw in other games during that time.

    Best of luck!
     
  6. jakooistra

    jakooistra Well-Known Member

    Jan 19, 2009
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    ALL of my apps? Wow, even Blue Defense and Blue Attack? Those titles aren't even in the App Store anymore! I guess you never even uninstalled them.

    You're hard core, man. :)

    So you still play them all from time to time? Which one is your favourite?
     
  7. Mullet_Mcgee

    Mullet_Mcgee Well-Known Member

    Jul 15, 2012
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    An updated Blue Attack would be awesome! I've still got Blue Attack and always break it out whenever I feel like building up a squadron of bullet-raining death machines. I still have all your other games too... except for the original Blue Defense, which I accidentally deleted for some strange reason!:(

    I'd love to see your games come back to life!
     
  8. The Bat Outta Hell

    The Bat Outta Hell Moderator
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    I played Blue Defense 1 most recently, it's personally my favorite of them all, and I still like it better than the sequel, for a couple reasons.
     
  9. jakooistra

    jakooistra Well-Known Member

    Jan 19, 2009
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    I always loved the ridiculousness of the fully-upgraded squadron - just raining bullets in whatever direction you want. I liked to sell off my weapon accuracy, and then it's just a huge spout of death. :p

    Interesting side note - the number of ships and the number of weapon upgrades were limited by the speed of the original iphone CPU. If I were to make an update, I might use the iphone 4 as a baseline, which would enable a significantly larger number of bullets to be in flight...
     
  10. drelbs

    drelbs Well-Known Member

    Jun 25, 2009
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    I would love to see a revamped Blue Attack! as it was my favorite of the series.

    Not that I have an iPhone 5, but widescreen support would let you move those buttons out a little bit further to increase visibility.

    I like the first Defense! game better as well. Not entirely sure why...

    Still have all your apps on, but somehow they got split up: Fastar is in an RPG folder and everything else is in a Blue/Red folder (which also has Blue Libra in it.)
     
  11. The Bat Outta Hell

    The Bat Outta Hell Moderator
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    I would buy any reboot instantly.
     
  12. laxking97

    laxking97 Well-Known Member

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    I was just looking at Fastar! this morning wondering what happened to it. I haven't played it in a looonnng time, but I loved it.
     
  13. jakooistra

    jakooistra Well-Known Member

    Jan 19, 2009
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    Basically, we failed to monetize it - when we were actively making games, we focused so much on just making the games that we didn't learn how to make money while doing it!

    We've got a major sequel to Fastar in our list of projects that we want to do (called Fastarar!), but the scope is just so large that we'd need to be well-financed if we were to start it today.

    When we released it, in app purchases were a very new thing, and we hadn't cosies red implementing it before Fastar went on freeAppADay - so when we were #3 in the free apps chart with Fastar, we should have had ads or iAPs or something driving our revenue. Instead, we just thought that the word of mouth from happy users would drive up sales after the promo - and they did, but it could have been a lot better! Generally, the concept for IAPs I think would have been for cosmetic items, to make your guy look different. (And maybe add a female character, and monetize the switch to be a man or something!)

    We've learned a lot in the 3+ years since we actively made games, and we really want the chance to come back and apply that knowledge. :)
     
  14. Mullet_Mcgee

    Mullet_Mcgee Well-Known Member

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    I never even thought about the technical side of things, but if an original iPhone can already pump out that many bullets, I look forward to seeing things become even more insane!
     
  15. xjaff

    xjaff Well-Known Member

    Sep 7, 2012
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    Just adding my shout for more Cat in a Box games!

    I still have all of these games installed on both my iPhone and iPad and still play them occasionally.

    My favorite was Blue Attack, followed closely by Blue Defense 1.

    I did also enjoy Red Conquest quite a bit but I joined that a little late to the party so missed much of the multiplayer. Lobbies were always empty when I tried to connect. Had I been around when people were playing multiplayer I am sure I would have been addicted to it.

    I thought Blue Defense 2 was an excellent sequel, but for whatever reason whenever I still play I pick Blue Defense 1 more than 2.

    Fastar wasn't as high on my list of favorites, but I think that is more due to my personal taste in games as I tend to go for shooters and rts games before platformer types. I thought Fastar was well executed just not my thing. Also the artwork in defense/attack/conquest is more appealing to me (again just personal taste).
     
  16. onewithchaos

    onewithchaos Well-Known Member

    Apr 16, 2009
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    The challenges and skirmish is still spot on for the game. I do wish the difficulty was higher but for what it is, it's great.
     
  17. Vingdoloras

    Vingdoloras Well-Known Member

    Aug 29, 2009
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    Whoa. Found this thread while digging around in old memories. Is this still a thing? I loved all of your games (especially Red Conquest, see my signature :D), would be so happy to see some new ones come out!
     
  18. jakooistra

    jakooistra Well-Known Member

    Jan 19, 2009
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    There are no new games to report, but I've got an update for everything except Red Conquest with Game Center support. :)

    It's actually more of a cost-saving move for us, so we don't need to run our own $120/month dedicated leaderboard system. Without that cost, cat in a box games can stay running pretty much indefinitely. :)


    We came up with a solution that lets is keep the metadata associated with high scores, such as the spells and suit colours from Fastar, core/kill counts from blue attack, et cetera.

    That's one of the things that prevented us from going to Game Center in the first place - knowing which spells will get you the top score in Fastar is a valuable gameplay hint!

    That, and the original leaderboard limit was 25 per game, and blue Defense second wave has no less than 73 individual leaderboards...
     
  19. JCho133

    JCho133 Well-Known Member

    Jul 27, 2012
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    This is awesome news :D Can't wait to see what you get to implement next, because with your library of games, there's really no need to make a new one ;)
     
  20. jakooistra

    jakooistra Well-Known Member

    Jan 19, 2009
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    Thanks for the support! :) next up is game controller support, definitely for blue attack but maybe also for Fastar.

    And I just approved all our updates at once, within the next couple of hours the Game Center update should be live in the App Store. :)
     

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