- This topic has 4 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 11 years, 2 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
-
Hello all,
that’s bomberman back, 10 years after my registration :) And I always follow closely what happens on this board, and it’s nice to see the indie scene has really bloomed in Ireland since I left!
Aphra, strictly speaking, what I will post is about what I’ve been doing with the new French company I’ve setup since I came back to France, this is not about the good ol’ BitRabbit (which is still alive, and I continue to work on our middleware). So if you think this is not the right place, just tell me… However, I think it can help some indies so just trying :)
Just wanted to brag about our new product made by Clan of the Cloud… We have developed a complete solution which lets you easily add in your games social and multiplayer components. We provide GameCenter and cloud saving features, integration with most social networks (Facebook, Google+, Game Center), complete push notifications support, multiplayer modules… All of that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, BB10, Tizen, … and it is really cross platform. This means you can save a game on one platform, and continue later on any other platform. Or you can make a multiplayer game where everybody plays on a different platform. That’s not a problem, we handle everything.
Also, all the backend is handled by us, you do not need server and DB administrators, all the infrastructure is run by us automatically with scripts. It also scale up – or down – automatically, depending on the number of users logged on our service.
All of that is provided through concise and simple C++ APIs (some customers implemented the login part from scratch in less than half a day), and the same C++ code is recompiled as is on all the supported platforms. We also have Unity and Marmalade wrappers for those who prefer to use these tools.Two games have been released so far, including "Combo Crew" from http://www.thegamebakers.com , and the game was heavily featured by Apple and Google in their respective stores. We’ve added some new customers recently, including some 1st class publishers. We are now looking at new partners who would be interested in using our tools.
If someone is interested, just contact me and we can continue the discussion later.
Michael
-
Sounds very interesting! Any free/very cheap solutions for indie devs? Or are you targeting financially backed studios more than anything? Also are you working on a website to show off this stuff?
-
Hey, thanks for the feedback! I’ll try to answer your questions the best I can…
Our product is not free, but we choose a business model which is fair for everybody, since developers using it pay an amount based on the MAU (we can discuss the numbers with interested people).
Hence, there are no big upfront costs associated with using it. You pay nothing during the test/evaluation or development phases, and are only invoiced when the game is released and you have active users.A big difference with other free products (apart the fact that it aggregates more than just social features like leaderboards and achievements) is that you have access to your users. If they have filled their email when registering, we will provide you with a backoffice website where you can browse your users and details (language, email, your games they are playing, …) and you also have a frontend to send them some push notifications (update announcement, or even some more advanced game maintenance signals, …). We never hide your users to you as is often the case. Hey, if it’s free it means you are the product :) This way you can manage your mailing list of customers.
Last thing, it works in 2 flavours. There is a "mutualised" databases used by indies (and we do work currently with several indies, from the 1 man office to the middle sized studio), so all users share the same database, which lowers the costs (because Clan of the Cloud pays for the shared database), and on top of that it allows to do crossover stuff between games from different studios (there are some features in the SDK to allow to do this easily). For the bigger studios or publishers, there is a "white label" version which works on a completely different database, so their users are not mixed with other ones, but then it means they have to cover the costs for the necessary servers and databases.
We do have http://www.clanofthecloud.com right now but you won’t find a lot since all our efforts are on adding many more features every day…
Hope that helps :)
-
-
Very interesting Michael – we’ve been looking into Facebook integration ( we have been using player.io so far ), but it’s always cool to see other technologies that we could utilise.
-
- The forum ‘General Discussion’ is closed to new topics and replies.