Hey all, I am working on an iOS pirates and privateers style game called Letters of Marque, and I am starting a devlog to keep the community updated with the development progress. You can se videos and pictures of the game here:
I would love to hear any feedback and any tips on doing a good devlog that captures peoples interest 
I’ll be putting up a few tutorials too in time. Cannot wait to hear what you think
Hey everyone! I have updated the facebook page for letters of marque with a set of new screenshots, video links and so on in an effort to try to increase public awareness of the game.
I am going to work on getting a beta up and running soon with TestFlight, if anyone is interested in beta testing on their iDevice. Would anyone be interested in checking out a web build if I put one up?
Here’s the gameplay demo. Figured I would post it right in the forum here:
So I decided to make a more polished trailer for LoM today, and I really needed to find a new tool for screen capturing and video editing. I was using FRAPS on Windows to capture, moving the clips over to Mac, running Handbrake on them to convert them into an iMovie compatible format, and adding in annotations by making text graphics in the GIMP. Whew, that was awful! I played around with a few trial products and I finally settled on ScreenFlow
I am quite happy with this software! I was able to create this trailer in about 2 hours, including the time spent learning how to use ScreenFlow! This a task that would have surely taken twice as long using my old method. Anyway, here’s the trailer!
A few updates! We are now up on IndieDB and SlideDB. These sites have been awesome so far at growing publicity and interest. We are currently ranked #107 in popularity on IndieDB and #7 on SlideDB! Thats the top 1% for both! Updating often and posting articles has really helped us get high rankings there. When we are quiet, we drop into the 500’s on IndieDB. Great sites though, highly recommend everyone making a game get them up there!
We also have a twitter account setup now that you can follow if you want to: @funonium
And finally, the goods. Here are some sketches of the new characters that will help you purchase supplies, tell you about your journey, and threaten your crew!
Artwork by Ashley Kozicki
Male Pirate
Female Pirate
Male Privateer
Female Merchant
Male Merchant
This looks really interesting! I’m curious what the controls feel like on an IOS device. A video with examples of live device play might help communicate that. Another cool idea for a dev post might be a video capture of creating, importing, and playing with a new ship in the game. Are you guys using blender for modeling?
Thanks for the compliment! I can do a video of the control style for you. Will post that soon. I don’t have any immediate plans to add any more ships as we are working hard to get the levels wrapped up and get this game out the door. But I will keep that in mind. Maybe the next version will have more ships or something I can video
We use Blender and 3ds Max. I mostly use Blender because I am a Mac person, but Tim (the other developer) likes 3ds Max on Windows. The ships were entirely done in blender, and the weapons in 3ds Max.
Here is a video that demonstrates how the player controls work in LoM.
There are two ways to control the player ship. You can choose to “push” the ship with your finger, or you can use a virtual joystick which (I find to be much more natural on larger devices.) When using the “push” method, the ship just sails away from your finger leaving the view in front of the ship and to the sides clear of fingers. When the joystick is enabled, anywhere you tap will create a joystick control under your finger.
The player can also pinch to zoom the camera in and out. Larger ships allow the player to zoom out further so they can see more (just one of the many perks to upgrading your ship.)
I have been working on tuning the weapons and ships a bit as we get closer to a public alpha. I am also doing a lot of tuning and polishing on the “Swab the Deck” level which will make the first 4 levels ready to play, about 3 hours of gameplay. Once I am finished with that level, I think we will open up the alpha to a limited number of people. Apple only allows for 200 devices to be on my developer account, and I am saving some of those for review sites and journalists, so if you are really interested in getting into the alpha, let me know as soon as possible!
Anyway, here is the current configuration for the weapons and ships:
Well if you have been waiting to get your hands on LoM, then this is your lucky day! I am running a TestFlight for the app. If you have an iPhone 4, iPad 2, iPod Touch 5th generation or newer, just follow the link below from your device and connect your device to your new (or existing) TestFlight account:
I will be manually approving recruits every day, so please be patient. Within 24 hours of connecting your device to your account, you should get an email with an install link that will install the game right onto your device. Since this is a development build, it is a rather large install and it may take a while to download (213 MB).
Hope you like it, and I would love to hear your feedback!
After playing through LoM Alpha 1, it became obvious that the weapon tuning was a bit off. A level 5 weapon was many times more powerful than a level 1 weapon. This meant that upgrading from the CatBoat (a single weapon ship) to the Sloop (a dual weapon ship) was a difficult transition as two level 1 weapons were far less powerful than one level 5 weapon.
I have retuned the weapons so that a level 4 weapon will be about double the strength of a level 1 weapon. I look forward to hearing your feedback for this change in the Alpha 2 release (which will be available on TestFlight September 20). The game is iOS 7 ready and I cannot wait to give it a try on the iPhone 5S.
LoM Alpha 2 is now available on TestFlight! If you want to try out the alpha on your iOS device, just follow this link and connect your device:
http://tflig.ht/149x7kC
For all of the current alpha testers, some changes were made in this build that will not work with previous saved game data, so this update will be starting fresh. This will likely be common during alpha releases.
Changelog:
I just finished tuning the final dock and decided to give everyone a little preview of what you will be up against! Beta should be available this week on TestFlight!
Here’s a high-res version of the image:
http://www.funonium.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/letters_of_marque_final_stand.png
Hey everyone, I wanted to give you all an update. Unfortunately, due to some technical difficulties, there will not be a public beta available. However, we have uploaded to Apple and are awaiting their review. If all goes well, the app will go live in the App Store on December 8.
We have chosen to deploy only on iOS 7+ devices as the operating system has pretty good adoption rates now, and that number will only grow. LoM uses upwards of 200MB of memory at times, and all iOS 7 capable devices have at least 512MB, so iOS 7 also ensures that the game isn’t launched on insufficient hardware. The iPhone 4 seems to suffer low frame rates though so we may remove support for this device as the graphics chip is just a bit underpowered for the Retina display. It will currently run on an iPhone 4, but as we add more, the iPhone 4S and iPad 2/Mini 1 will be the baselines for testing.
The apps status is currently “Waiting For Review” on iTunes Connect, I will keep you posted.
So in preparation for a month long marketing push, does anyone have suggestions for distributing promo codes to review sites? We have a list of about 150 review sites, however Apple only gives us 50 promo codes. Are there any sites setup that will give us a link to put in the email so reviewers can just click the link, and it will give them a code. This way only interested parties will receive a code (until the 50 codes are used up).
Or does anyone have other experiences that they could share on the subject?
Thanks!
Today, Apple completed their review for Letters of Marque, and the application is officially “Ready for Sale!” The review did take longer than expected so the release date will be moved to Sunday, December 15th. This is to give game reviewers a full 4 weeks to complete their reviews, and hopefully the result will be an audience waiting to play the game on the release date.
According to every resource I can find on the subject, Sunday seems to be the best day to go live. Christmas is also a wonderful time to be in the App store (or so I have heard), so I am hoping that everything combined will propel this game to a successful launch. Over the next few days, I will be contacting most the review sites on my list and providing them with a promo code. I have 180 contacts total, though some only offer paid reviews and I will be skipping over those.
Thanks to the folks on Reddit, I have also learned of the site redeemco.com which will distribute promo codes to people who click a link. Depending on how many review sites in my list are paid sites, this may come in useful.
Here’s to a busy weekend!
Hey everyone, here’s a little update. We have contacted around 80 review sites, all of which appeared to be free or did not have pricing information readily available. Around 10 of them replied with pricing for a review, 5 have contacted us for more information about the game, and 7 promo codes have been used to download the game. I have not yet seen any reviews showing up for the game, but they have only had the promo codes for about a week now, and I am sure some reviews will take many weeks to appear.
I have also added the game to the PreApps database. If you have a moment, hop over there and give the app a thumbs up! No account needed, and we don’t need many votes to get on the front page:
http://www.preapps.com/new-iphone-ipad-apps/letters-of-marque/697
If you know of any other game databases we should be on, like IndieDB or PreApps, please let me know!
Letters of Marque is a contender for the SlideDB “App of the Year” award, and the IndieDB "Indie of the Year” award. If you have a moment, help us out and give us a vote! Here are the links:
Vote for Letters of Marque for the App of the Year award
Vote for Letters of Marque for the Indie of the Year award
Also, I wanted to say thank you all for helping us reach the FRONT PAGE on PreApps.com! Your votes made a difference!
Don’t forget, this FREE game goes live in the Apple App Store in 10 days!
We made it into the top 50 over at SlideDB which puts us somewhere in the top 1.8% of all applications on the site! This also means we have made it to the final round of voting. Thank you all for your support so far; lets keep this going! Only 7 days left to vote. Click the link below to vote for us in the top 50:
http://www.slidedb.com/events/2013-app-of-the-year-awards/top50#vote25348
Hey Everyone! I just wanted to post and let you all know that you can now download Letters of Marque from the App Store on your iOS device for FREE! Here is the direct link to the app:
https://itunes.apple.com/hk/app/letters-of-marque/id645191923
Also, there are only 5 days of voting left to help us win ‘App of the Year’ over at SlideDB. If you get a moment, click on over and give us a vote:
http://www.slidedb.com/events/2013-app-of-the-year-awards/top50#vote25348
Well after 2 weeks in the app store, I decided to give you all an update on how things are going.
The short version: 4000+ downloads and enough revenue for a new laptop.
The long version: http://www.funonium.com/2014/01/04/letters-of-marque-our-first-2-weeks-in-the-app-store/
