Team Blog

A recent blog post got me thinking about whether our assumptions about mobile gamers and where they play are still right!

Mike Mace's post about mobile gaming in Japan makes interesting reading - research into Nintendo DS users shows that they spend most of their playing time at home, where you might imagine they have other entertainment available from TV, consoles, etc.

At Astraware, we've always imagined that our games are perfect time fillers for when you're waiting for a meeting, queuing, commuting, or any of the other 10-20 minute gaps during the day, but the truth is, apart from the occasional comment when someone makes a purchase, we really don't know where people play our games!

Let us know - where do you play our games? I've set up a thread on our forums for answers. Do you play games on your PDA or Smartphone while you're at home? Do you play in company? Let us know!

When I'm not testing our games under development for bugs or checking on our Beta team, I can be found providing the office with up to the minute reports of the local weather. I go by the pseudonym of Wincey while performing these weather reports, which is probably only marginally worse than my usual office name of Jeff (a long story, involving at least two other Pauls).

It has been known to get pretty bad in this area of the country during past winters, so this year we're prepared for the worst, and I am our first line of defence.

The moment the fog rolls in or the second the first flake of snow lands, you can be sure Astraware will know about it, after all "Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night will keep me from my appointed rounds of Bejeweled".

Sometimes the little unexpected surprises are the ones that mean the most! A new visitor to our forums left a lovely message entitled 10 Things Bejeweled Teaches Us About Life.

I have to agree with all of them! What a cool post!

Thankyou "Moodring" for your early Christmas surprise to us all:-)

Hello. My name is Mike. I'm an Astraware artist...I draw...I draw LOTS!!! When the room erupts into chaos, as it regularly does, I disappear into my iPod for a couple of hours and emerge with a nice afternoon's work. My tastes range from classical to folk to rock with a few detours in the middle. I like to keep my playlist random and never settle on being "into" any one thing. If I don't like it I skip it...which is usually followed by deleting it.

I'm very picky about what I'm listening to. It has to complement what I'm doing, which generally means it has to be not too intrusive. Here's the first ten random tracks from my iPod:

1. Oxygen - Willy Mason (from the album Where The Humans Eat)
   Acoustic motion to war on the western world which forgot its principals. No really, I've never heard a song say so much about us so quietly.
2. Time - Marion (from the singleTime)
   An acoustic version of their BRILLIANT song from the mid 90's. These also did a few songs on adverts of the time.
3. Modern Way- Kaiser Chiefs (from the album Employment)
   The song that made cowbell cool again.
4. Give The Girl A Gun - The Wildhearts (from the album The Best Of The Wildhearts)
   BRILLIANT B-side from one of their late 90's singles... These were quite frankly THE best rock band at the time. Described as "the Beatles meet Metallica", it doesn't get much better. This one grew on me years after the fact.... and surprizingly, one of the few rock tunes on here!!
5. Far From Home - The Levellers (from the album Levelling the Land)
   Classic Levellers. From their first album, Levelling the Land. I had a fair few good camping trips to the sound of this band! TUNE!!
6. The Decision - Young Knives (from the album Voices of Animals and Men)
   I actually heard this on Radio 1 late at night, thought it rocked, and found it on google by typing the words in!! Genius!!
7. Symphony No.3 "Eroica" Op 55. No.1 Allegro Con Brio - Beethoven (from the album Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 / Leonore Overtures Nos. 1 & 2)
   I only discovered this genre of my own accord recently. There are some bits of classical music which really do it for me. They all seem to be Beethoven at the mo.
8. Maps - The Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs (from the album Fever to Tell)
   Quite new to my music collection. I hadn't heard these until about a week ago. Very emo! Lovely.
9. Descent into Mystery - Danny Elfman (from the album Batman)
   From the Batman The Movie soundtrack, until recently, the best attempt to bring the bat to the screen. This bit of music is a prime example as to why the film was so atmospheric.
10. One of These Things First - Nick Drake (from the album Bryter Layter)
    A gorgeous rolling arpeggio of piano, guitar and percussion, with a Dylan-esque lyric.

Shaun McGill of PDA247 emailed us, curious to know if our appearance at the UIQ Developer Fast Track conference signified something of a change of strategy. It's a good question, and now that we're back home I thought it would be good say a bit about what we're thinking.

For a long time we've kept saying to people who ask that we're looking into Symbian and may do something "in the next 6 to 12 months", but to the outside world nothing really happened . We have kept things under review for a long time, but until this year we've felt that we needed to keep focussed on our existing customers who own Palm OS and Windows Mobile-based phones and PDAs. We can only do so many things at once! There have also been technical and market reasons why we've not looked at Symbian: porting to the older versions of the Symbian OS was expensive for us to do, plus there didn't seem to be a large enough market for Symbian games (rather than Java games - we don't do those).

Happily these issues seem to be looking much less of a problem in S60 3rd Edition and UIQ 3 (both based on Symbian OS v9), which is why we're taking another look. For instance, more and more of Nokia's phones are powered by S60, and Sony Ericsson's new M600 and Walkman W950 phones look exciting too .

So what does that all mean? Initially I think it's likely that we will be releasing a small number of games on the Symbian platforms next year, and we'll be using them to get a better feel of which titles from of our complete games catalogue we should port across.