I don’t have a title yet and the game’s story is still a little fuzzy, but I do have some screenshots from my new Android game. Don’t mind the Unity image in center of the image. It’s just a place holder until I can replace it with my own button image.

One of the best parts of Unity is the built in physics engine. In this level, parts of the bridge collapses and you have to jump and leap over the rubble.

The floating character follows you around and tells you the back story as you wonder through the game environment.

Now that Union of Armstrong is a few months old, I wanted talk about the game and my decision to focus on Android development.

Union of Armstrong

What Worked:

When I first started Union of Armstrong it was going to be an adventure game. As it began to develop, it seemed to make more sense as a strategy game. I wanted to create a strategy/tower defense game with a stronger story and a better atmosphere than most tower defense games. I think I did a great job at that.

What Didn’t Work:

I didn’t put enough extra features and options into the game. I wanted to make the controls easy to use, but it came at the expense of the game play. I also assumed that a tower defense game would be more popular than it was. As of this blog post Union of Armstrong has sold only 50 copies, compared to Tourist Trap that has now sold 2310 copies. Also releasing the game about the same time as the new dashboard update didn’t help either.

What’s Next:

I’ve been learning the Unity game engine. It’s great. While I still like the XBLIG platform a lot, the tools for that platform fail to compete with the powerful Unity engine. Unfortunately I can’t make XBLIG games with Unity. Unity3D is not compatible with the XNA framework that’s behind all XBLIG games.

I’ve always been upbeat about XBLIG, even with all the negative things people sometimes say. I still think it has great potential. I may even make more XBLIG games at some point. My main concern is the platform does not reward the experienced developers. Too many developers have hit the wall and are leaving.

My assumption has always been that the games on XBLIG would get better and better as the developers learned more and gained experience. I’ve certainly learned a lot since I’ve started. I thought the service was going to hit a tipping point where there was going to be enough high quality games that service would be the best part of the Xbox console. It looks like that’s not going to happen.

Part of what attracted me to XBLIG as a whole was the ability to make games for a high end console rather than the early low power smart phones. Times have changed. There is more processing power in my new Asus Transformer Prime tablet than the current Xbox 360.

While XBLIG market is shrinking, Android and iOS games are expanding. Those platforms will continue to be around for a long time. I don’t know what will happen to XBLIG. The Unity engine only works with Android iOS. Unity is not compatible with Windows Phone 7 or Windows 8 Metro at this time. Microsoft really needs to make sure that third party development software works with their mobile platforms. I would have considered developing for Windows Phone 7/Windows 8 if they had.

When it comes to the war between Android vs iOS, I’ve chosen Android. The website redesign should have given you a hint. I may expand out to iOS at some point, but I’ve decided to focus mainly on Android development.

My bet is that Android will out pace iOS in all or at least most things. Android offers something for every taste and budget. This in the end is better than the one size fits all that Apple devices tend to offer.

iOS is a great operating system. I own an iPod touch. But the OS is starting to feel dated. It may be simplistic, but the iPad is a giant iPod. With Ice Cream Sandwich especially, Android feels more like a real computer operating system.

This won’t be like the iPod. Companies weren’t going to go out of business if they couldn’t compete with the iPod. But Phones and tablets are becoming critical to the future of computers. Companies have no choice but to fight and compete. If people start buying iPads instead of laptop/desktops, non Apple manufactures will be in trouble. Dell, Samsung, Asus and HP will be at risk of losing most if not all their business. If Android and Windows 8 fail Google and Microsoft, those companies will be severely wounded and be far less competitive. These tech companies won’t just lie down and let it happen. The mobile platform war is about to go nuclear.

I’ll be posting screenshots for my next game soon.

Let me know what you think.

Union of Armstrong is now available on Xbox Live Indie Games. It may be a break from my usual adventure type game, but this tower defense game has worked out pretty well I think. You can download a free trial through xbox.com.

You can find the game by using the new Xbox Live Bing search. Just type in Union of Armstrong in the search box or use Kinect’s voice recognition by saying “Xbox Bing” and then “Union of Armstrong”. I hope you enjoy the game.

You are the president of a Moon colony defending the historic Apollo 11 site from a corporate mining company. Command your forces during the final battle with Luna Corporation. Play over forty levels in this tower defense game.

Here is the final screenshots for Union of Armstrong. The game is now in peer review and I’m hoping to get it passed soon. I’ve been trying to peer review other games as much as I can. There is been a real lack of people doing reviews on the App Hub site lately. Which means it takes longer to get a game passed then it should. But I’m not complaining.

Microsoft has recently announced that they have raised the file size limit for 80 point Xbox Indie Games to 150 MB. As I’ve complained in previous blog posts, the limit was 50 MB.

So this is good news for the Xbox Indie service overall. This also means I can now offer the Mind’s Eye of Jupiter game episodes at 80 Microsoft Points each instead of the 240 Microsoft Points each. I hope you enjoy the new price point.