How To Die Released!

The day that you’ve been waiting for so long is finally here! We’re proud to announce the official premiere of our wonderful game, How To Die.  It’s available on Google Play, and we plan on releasing it on AppStore circa December 2015 (thank you Apple for making life so hard for developers). 

We’ve managed to fix (almost) all the bugs reported by our beta-testers, we’ve polished the levels (considerably changing some of them) and thoroughly tested every aspect of the game that we could possibly imagine. As I mentioned in one of previous posts on this blog, How To Die has grown beyond our boldest expectations, so you should be prepared for long hours of quality gameplay.

Over the course of last week or two, we’ve spent a lot of time gathering contact email addresses of gaming websites and we plan to launch a full blown (zero-budget) marketing campaign on Monday or so. Reviewers, tremble in fear of our spamming squad constantly littering your mailbox with promotional materials! Let’s players, prepare yourselves for tons of comments under your videos! And you, dear reader! We have a task for you. If you like our game, you can join our spamming efforts and share How To Die with your friends on social media or just recommend it to them, write to your game-reviewing  colleagues (if you have any) or simply give the game a high rating on its Google Play page. We really appreciate any help from our users, as our internet ranger powers are strictly limited.

We can’t wait to here some opinions of the first players and we’re very impatient to hear from you. You can contact us from inside the game, by clicking the right icon in the main menu, or simply share your thoughts with us at contact@bluedjinnsgames.com. The production process of HTD has been a great pleasure for us and we hope that you’ll get at least as much pleasure from playing it. After all, we’re here to entertain you.

While hoping for a great success of How To Die, we have to move on and start thinking about the next Blue Djinns Games production. Will it be a bloody pit fighting multiplayer, finger-breaking arcade tap-the-screen-as-fast-as-you-can challenge or a brain-wrecking puzzler? The time will show (time and our financial results, to be honest). We’ll also start a technological Kickstarter-funded project  that will result in the most useful holiday gadget that you can imagine (you’ll here some more about it when we’ll have a working prototype).

OK, that’s a lot more text than I wanted to produce initially. So I’ll end here and once again direct you to the Google Play page.

Have fun!

Inside-out tests help develop How To Die

Hi guys!

We're polishing How To Die to release it in the best shape possible - and that moment is closer than you can expect!
As some of you knows, we've managed to establish close co-operation with PreLaunch.me. As a result, nearly 750 people pre-register for open beta test of How To Die:

Some of them shared their opinions on game with us. Most of the people feel that the game is too hard - but it's targeted at hardcore players indeed! We'd like to deliever something for that group of gamers, which - in our opinon - don't have enough representation on mobile platforms.
But we also would like to present How To Die to as many people as possible, so we've taken this voices into account and introduced some new features to the game. Two most important are:
1) additional instructional videos for the tutorials as the image (movie in this case) is worth more than a thousand words; for ex watch our tutorial on magic boxes:

2) items save/load in manipulation mode, so you don't have to place them over and over again - it really lessen the frustration!
So, it looks like we're adding features that haven't even been planned... But if you want your game to be playable and fun for users, you should always take their opinions seriously. And that's what we do in Blue Djinns Games :)

Beta out!

Hi everyone!  I have some big news for you all. We’ve just released a beta version of our first game – How To Die – on Google Play. When we started this project, we didn’t even suspect it’s going to turn out so big. Featuring  45 levels (not counting tutorials) plus 15 bonus stages it was a real challenge to such a small game developer as Blue Djinns Games. But it’s not only about quantity. We’ve managed to create, I believe, a really innovative game incorporating both demanding puzzles and fun arcade sequences with lots of physics-based rampage that’s gonna  make you waste long hours staring at your tablet and trying to figure out what the hell we want you to do.

Optimalization - first iteration

Last two days have been a real hard-working ones, with working hours from 7am to 2am next day!

Our friend, Piotr (thanks once again, hope the beer was good!), has joined us during the tests on the devices and brought his Dell Venue 8 (Intel Atom inside) and some of the latest Lenovo models featuring 1080p IPS display. We wish we worked on this kind of cutting-edge tablets, but to be sure that How To Die runs smoothly on older devices, we've tested it at the same time on our "beloved" 10-inch Kiano tablet (quad core supported by 2 GB of RAM, but apparently it isn't enough for clean Android install... chinese manufacturers, you know) and two other outdated Samsung Tabs (GT-P3110 and SM-T111; I'm grateful nobody forces me to use these on daily basis...). To raise the difficulty level we've decided to install How To Die on nearly broken Xperia J. We have taken memorial photos:

At first we took care of APK size, which initially was 113 MB. As some of you may know, Google Play only accepts a single APK package of size less or equal 50 MB. Our goal was to avoid splitting package into several separate ones; also, it's always convenient for a player to download less. So we've performed some magic within Unity and managed to cut the APK size to lucky 49,999 MB :)

How To Die was successfully uploaded to Google Play to conduct closed alpha tests. Single testing day supported with our friend's help and opinions resulted in adding nearly two pages to our bug report and new ideas; APK was upgraded from 1.0 to 1.3. What's good news for you? We'll reduce the difficulty level of How To Die :) On the other hand, we'll have something special for those that would like to swear like 10 f-words a minute ;) Stay tuned for more info. Good day!

Alpha tests start

Another milestone: alpha build of How To Die arrives on Google Play, so that people from outside of our company can contribute to the tests. Stay tuned for the open beta/RC tests! :)

Gamers reaction to How To Die's trailer

Hi there! We haven't yet started any serious marketing actions (we will in the not too distant future!); we're preparing materials and so on. But we've decided to share info about our game on some forums with gamers in mind. We're glad to share with you some positive opinions on our product:

I am really impressed by the work that you guys are doing at Blue Djinns! How To Die might come with some simplistic graphics, but the physics and clever gameplay that it comes with is really amazing, to be frank! I will gladly download this game on all my devices to support your guys. All the best! HariK, gamemob.com

I absolutely love what I have seen in the trailer that you posted on your official website! The concept behind How To Die is really original and I am pretty sure that this game has the potential of doing really well out there. Keep working on the marketing and remember to get the trailer out there! All the best. coolgamerdude06, droidgamers.com

Thank you guys :) We'll do our best to bring How To Die to as many people as possible! :)

In the meantime, take a look at our trailer one more time:

Gameplay with commentary

We've published our first gameplay with commentary on YouTube :) Hope you like it!