21 Feb

DragonScales 3: Eternal Prophecy of Darkness

After several months of hard work, the new installment in the DragonScales series is finally completed. DragonScales 3: Eternal Prophecy of Darkness is the DragonScales game with the most gameplay variety ever! DragonScales 3 showcases a totally new story arc, with more than 150 new levels and a novel Gravity game mode, besides the classic DragonScales mode with some fun and challenging twists.

Lady Siniestra, Specktr, Archmage Cedric and Xeroz. A new adventure begins!

Lady Siniestra, Specktr, Archmage Cedric and Xeroz. A new adventure begins!

With DragonScales 3: Eternal Prophecy of Darkness DragonScales allows players to win badges and collect stars, for enhanced replay value. Some stars are secret, and you’ll have to find them out! There are other alluring challenges for advanced DragonScales players, albeit the game also offers an enjoyable experience for players looking for relaxed play sessions. Furthermore, DragonScales 3 introduces a new array of magical powers. For example, Improved Prescience allows you to select a tailored set of scales to play! And with the new Confusion power you can completely change the position of all the scales on the board!

New falling mode with skulls!

New falling mode with skulls!

The game is being prepared for distribution through several channels, so stay tunned! 🙂

30 Dec

After playing the NagiQ demo…

Hello again! If you’ve followed the tutorial to learn how to play NagiQ, and then played the demo (freely available here,) most likely you already finished all the free levels included with such demo version. Now, by purchasing the full version of NagiQ you’ll get access to all the islands of the game:

screenshot_4

All of NagiQ’s islands can be unlocked in the full version of the game.

In the full version of the game each island will be immediately unlocked after you complete the previous one. Then you’ll be able to click on an island image to select a level to play. Notice that some levels introduce gameplay variants to keep the game fresh, fun and challenging!

Enjoy! And Happy New Year!

16 Dec

How to play NagiQ

This is a little tutorial explaining how to play our first game, the challenging word game NagiQ. Things will be easier if we start with a screenshot of the first level:

NagiQ-start

First level of NagiQ

Notice there’s a board, with some letters on it. Letter S and letter C. We refer to those starting letters as Mystic Letters.

How to play?

The rules are simple. Form a word (by typing it with your keyboard, or by clicking on the letters of the game’s permanent on-screen keyboard) and place it on the board with your mouse. For instance, type the word ‘star’ or ‘soap’… whatever. When you’re typing the word, the game will show a green verification mark to let you know that it will accept the word you’ve just typed.

NagiQ-soap

I’ve just typed the word ‘soap’. The green verification mark shows the word is accepted by the game.

OK, that’s it for forming words. Now you have to place such word on the board. And the word might be placed horizontally or vertically. Press the SPACE BAR on your keyboard to switch between horizontal and vertical style (alternatively, the on-screen keyboard has a special key for this task, if you prefer to use the mouse.)

NagiQ-horizontal

Horizontal style.

NagiQ-vertical-explanation

Vertical style.

Now that the word orientation is chosen, it’s time to place the word on the board. To do so, simply click on a board’s cell. However, there’s a very important rule:

Every new word you want to place on the board must include at least one of the letters ALREADY PLACED on the board.

That’s why our first word can be ‘star’ or ‘soap’, because such words include ‘s’, and our board already has a letter S. We could also start by forming the word ‘car’, because the board also has a letter C. We could also form the word ‘base’, because ‘base’ has an ‘s’. Or the word ‘case’, which has both ‘c’ and ‘s’. Whatever word you form, the important thing to remember is that such word must contain a letter already on the board.

Use your mouse to move your word around the board, and click to place it. You cannot place your word anywhere, though. You have to connect it to a letter already on the board. Simply move your word and ensure that a letter of your word overlaps a matching letter already on the board, e.g, if your word is ‘star’, ensure that the ‘s’ of ‘star’ overlaps the letter ‘S’ already on the board. When the word is well placed, the game will change the cells’ color to green. Then click to finally place your word on the board (Pro tip: you can press ENTER on your keyboard instead of a mouse click.)

And that’s all. Do you remember those Mystic Letters, S and C? Well, in order to win the level you’ll have to place your words properly, to ‘connect’ with ALL the Mystic Letters on the board.

Upcoming boards contain cookies to get hints, and each island of the game offers gameplay variants. But essentially, these are the core rules of NagiQ. Two little details:

  1. You cannot connect your new words directly to the Mystic Letters, except for the first word you place on a board. In other words, your first word might connect with any of the Mystic Letters S or C. But after you’ve placed your word, you next words must include letters of the words you’ve placed.
  2. Once you use a word, you cannot re-use it on the same board.

Let’s see a commented game to better understand the rules.

NagiQ-1

First level of NagiQ. Two Mystic Letters: ‘S’ and ‘C’.

NagiQ-2

We type a new word: ‘cases’. The green verification mark shows it’s a word accepted by the game.

NagiQ-3

By using the mouse we place our word ‘cases’ so that one ‘s’ of ‘cases’ overlaps the ‘S’ already on the board. If the placement of a word is OK, the tiles’ color changes from red to green.

NagiQ-4

Click or press ENTER to finally place the word ‘cases’ on the board. The color of the tiles changes to yellow after the word is placed on the board.

NagiQ-5

We form a new word: ‘rock’.

NagiQ-6

We want to place it vertically, so we press the SPACE BAR on the keyboard. We can achieve the same effect by clicking the special yellow button on the on-screen keyboard of the game.

NagiQ-7

We move our word and place it to match and overlap the letter ‘c’ of the word ‘cases’ we’ve just placed on the board.

NagiQ-8

A new word: ‘peer’. We place it to match and overlap the ‘r’ of ‘rock’.

NagiQ-9

Now we typed ‘really’. We switch it to horizontal style, and place it to match and overlap the first ‘e’ of ‘peer’.

NagiQ-10

Finally, we type ‘cool’. We place it to match and overlap the second ‘l’ of ‘really’. A smart move, indeed: this word ‘cool’ allows us to also match and overlap the remaining, unconnected Mystic Letter C. Therefore, after playing ‘cool’ (pun intended) we will connect with Mystic Letter C, and there won’t be any unconnected Mystic Letter on the board. That way the board will be completed.

NagiQ-11

Well done. After placing ‘cool’, this level is completed.

Combinations are endless. Have fun 🙂

04 Mar

DragonScales 2 clinches the top spot!

dragonscales2_1st_place_March_2016
Today we received a very good news! Our game DragonScales 2: Beneath a Bloodstained Moon has clinched the top spot on Big Fish Games! When we released the first DragonScales in 2014 we couldn’t reach this #1 place, and one of our goals with the sequel was to aim for the top. We’re very happy because of this accomplished goal! Thank you very much to all of you who made this possible!

24 Feb

Comments about warning “Deprecated Carbon Component Manager” on OS X El Capitan

Last November, after updating to OS X “El Capitan”, we started seeing a strange warning message when running DragonScales 2:

“WARNING: 140: This application, or a library it uses, is using the deprecated Carbon Component Manager for hosting Audio Units. Support for this will be removed in a future release. Also, this makes the host incompatible with version 3 audio units. Please transition to the API’s in AudioComponent.h.”

DragonScales 2 was built with LibGDX, and before updating to “El Capitan” it did run with no problems, warnings, etc. After some research, we were informed that this was caused by an OpenAL-Soft issue (which has already been fixed.) Specifically, Apple is deprecating some libraries, e.g., the Carbon Component Manager, and the OpenAL-Soft library was referencing such deprecated Carbon Component. When a game referencing these deprecated libraries is executed, newer OS X (e.g., El Capitan) shows the above warning. However, as told, this OpenAL-Soft issue was already solved on last November: the library is updated and ready for prime time.

A build of OpenAL-Soft is part of the LWJGL natives bundled with LibGDX. If you don’t use an updated build of OpenAL-Soft you’ll keep receiving the deprecation warning. As we commented on this thread, a quick fix is downloading the latest LWJGL3 build, grab the native libopenal.dylib and drop it over the OpenAL native bundled with LibGDX.

A caveat, though, about using the OpenAL-Soft included in LWJGL3 (at time of writing.) Some testers of DragonScales 2 for OS X reported a nasty crash. Here’s part of the crash report:

Dyld Error Message:
Symbol not found: ___sincosf_stret
Referenced from: /var/folders/*/openal.dylib
Expected in: /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib

Clearly, our OpenAL library was referencing a function not provided by OS X. It turns out that our testers were using an older OS X version (10.7, I think) whereas the libopenal.dylib bundled with LWJGL3 was targeting OS X 10.9. In fact, output of otool -l libopenal.1.17.0.dylib includes these lines:

cmd LC_VERSION_MIN_MACOSX
cmdsize 16
version 10.9
sdk 10.9

As our publishers require support for OS X >= 10.7, we had to compile our own libopenal.dylib. We set OS X 10.6 as deployment target and 10.11 (El Capitan) as the root SDK, by using these CMake variables:

-DCMAKE_OSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6 -DCMAKE_OSX_SYSROOT=macosx10.11.

By the way, here you can find OS X SDKs if you need them.

Checking our build with otool, yields:

Load command 8
cmd LC_VERSION_MIN_MACOSX
cmdsize 16
version 10.6
sdk 10.11

This version of the library passed all our tests successfully.

20 Feb

DragonScales 2 for Android about 90% completed!

After its Windows, Mac and Linux release, DragonScales 2: Beneath a Bloodstained Moon is getting ready for Android. We’ve been testing the Android port of our new game and so far, so good. Here are some screenshots of the game running on a Kindle Fire device:

DS2MobilVersion

DS2Mobil

There are still some minor fixes to apply, such as adjusting strings (“Click” to “Tap”, etc.) but everything looks fine so far!

20 Jan

A fresh web look for IKIGames.com

GreenyGreedy-NewWebSite
At last! It took several weeks but our new website is almost 100% done. We devoted part of our “vacations” to roll out a new and cleaner look for ikigames.com, paying attention to a special feature we wanted for our website: responsiveness. We wanted a responsive design, allowing for browsing via desktop and mobile (especially tablets.) Yet more, we modified the structure of the home page, for a (hopefully) better presentation of all our games. The changes comprise a revamped top menu, with a dropdown for Games, providing direct access to the pages of our works.

The largest reconstruction, though, has been implemented on the pages for each game. Now each page for a game on ikigames.com displays a representative image of the game, a brief description of the game, key features and media (screenshots, gameplay video, etc.), a better placement for the Buy and Demo buttons, subpages for showcasing these Buy and Demo versions, and finally, we close each page by recommending other games developed by IKIGames. You can take a look at the page for DragonScales 2: Beneath a Bloodstained Moon to verify by yourself the elements we’ve just described.

Other important feature we’ve finally added is.. (drumroll)… TADAH! The IKIGames Newsletter! We invite you to subscribe to the IKIGames Newsletter to receive special promotions and other surprises, as well as tips for our games and information about our ongoing and future projects. We hate spam too, so don’t worry, your email is safe with us.

web-newsletter-icon

Join IKIGames Newsletter!

Sign up today for free to get notified on our new games and promotions!

Don't worry, we hate spam too. We won't share your details with anyone.

We are well aware that a few things have yet to be improved: better support for browsing on devices with small screens, a few extra images, and so on. But it’s a great way to start the year in IKIGames! Stay tuned, as DragonScales 2: Beneath a Bloodstained Moon for Windows and Linux will be released really soon!

14 Jul

DragonScales Deluxe available in 6 languages!

DragonScales Deluxe Multilanguage Localized
Great news! Our game DragonScales: Chambers of The Dragon Whisperer has been localized into 6 languages (German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese) thanks to the great work of GameHouse’s localization team. They’ve carried out a fantastic translation, which included localization of textual and non-textual elements of the game. All of this started a few months ago, with the adapting of a special DragonScales build suitable for localization. After weeks of hard work, we’re very excited to bring our original gameplay to a broader audience. As of today, the game is available on zylom.com:

A huge thank you to all of you who sent emails and were on the lookout for fresh news of DragonScales and our new projects. Thank you!

P.S. Stay tuned for news and updates on our next project: DragonScales 2! A new challenge lies ahead! More levels, new game modes, more fun!

20 Nov

DragonScales: Drawing the Sacred Axe item

Our newest game, DragonScales: Chambers of The Dragon Whisperer, is the first title of ours which does not use cartoon graphics. The art of DragonScales meant a lot of work, as we had to create more realistic characters and backgrounds, within a fantasy setting. For instance, here are the steps followed to create the Axe used in-game for the Sacred Axe item which destroys a column of scales on the board.

AxeStepsEnglish

This Sacred Axe, of course, was designed by XKlibur, our lead artist and IKIGames’ mastermind. Hope you liked it!