Brainiversity 2 Wrapping Up

I'm busy wrapping up development of the new Brainiversity game which is cleverly titled "Brainiversity 2".

The first Brainiversity game was released almost 2 years ago and is still selling well. I developed the game in my spare time for over a year while working at a console game development company. My day job was always top priority and sometimes I never touched a line of Brainiversity code for weeks on end. But whenever I got a spare moment I would do some coding, be it half an hour at night or a whole weekend afternoon.

A lot has changed since then... I'm now working full time in the casual/social games space and loving it! Making the sequel has been fun, and I've enjoyed working with a team of really smart people.

One of the potentially challenging aspects of making the sequel was the decision to develop the Facebook app at the same time as the retail version. To do this we made the call to switch to a complete Flash development environment. The previous version was developed using the PopCap Framework. One upside of using Flash was that I could finally unshackle myself from Windows and work on a Mac.

Doing FB simultaneously also meant learning lots of skills that have potential beyond just making a brain training game. As a team we've had to grasp PHP, SQL, JavaScript, the whole complicated Facebook environment and of course Flash and ActionScript 3.0.

We've also gained a deep understanding of the dynamics of social game development as well as how to use microtransactions. And we're still learning new stuff everyday!

And now, as the retail version gets closer to launch, we'll begin honing our skills on marketing our new game.

Now, if you enjoy reading my blog, check out this list of other great game development blogs: Top 50 Best Game Design Blogs. I was chuffed to find mine at number 4 :-)

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