Mini Chess Released for iPhone / iPod Touch
by Chris Jorgensen · 06/05/2009 (9:02 am) · 3 comments
Mini chess is now up in the app store. This version of Mini chess is slightly different than the PC original. Two modes, Makruk (Thai chess) and Shatranj (Persian chess) will be released as separate games this time around.
iTGB 1.2 support for MP3 has proven extremely valuable. It allows chess (and Mini Shogi v1.1) to have a lengthy, quality song loop while keeping the game file size under 10MB.... this is critical, since any games over 10MB must be downloaded over Wifi instead of 3G. All iPhone users I know have stated that games over 10MB are "annoying" and likely not to be downloaded!
It will be an interesting experiment to see how chess performs in sales. It is far less niche than Shogi, far more popular, and definitely sits in a possibly saturated market. Fortunately, the ease of porting from TGB to iTGB allowed this to be done in under a week... in fact, it has been a trend that waiting for Apple to approve the game is slower than the actual work of porting! GarageGames has definitely lowered the time risk for me as a developer.
Here's hoping it's a hit!
Game site: cascadiagames.com/game_minichess.html
iTGB 1.2 support for MP3 has proven extremely valuable. It allows chess (and Mini Shogi v1.1) to have a lengthy, quality song loop while keeping the game file size under 10MB.... this is critical, since any games over 10MB must be downloaded over Wifi instead of 3G. All iPhone users I know have stated that games over 10MB are "annoying" and likely not to be downloaded!
It will be an interesting experiment to see how chess performs in sales. It is far less niche than Shogi, far more popular, and definitely sits in a possibly saturated market. Fortunately, the ease of porting from TGB to iTGB allowed this to be done in under a week... in fact, it has been a trend that waiting for Apple to approve the game is slower than the actual work of porting! GarageGames has definitely lowered the time risk for me as a developer.
Here's hoping it's a hit!
Game site: cascadiagames.com/game_minichess.html
About the author
Owner of Cascadia Games LLC
#2
I think some of those tiles and pieces can survive a conversion to PVRTC pretty well, so if you haven't done that, see what you can twist iTGB into doing.
06/05/2009 (6:03 pm)
Congratulations! You are well on the way to cornering that market now :)I think some of those tiles and pieces can survive a conversion to PVRTC pretty well, so if you haven't done that, see what you can twist iTGB into doing.
#3
06/07/2009 (11:00 am)
Thanks. Unfortunately, a competitor played some dirty pool yesterday and put a 5-star rating on his game and a 1-star on mine. Really damaged sales. Here's hoping some kind folks go in and rate mine to cancel it out! 
Associate OmegaDog