First let me start off with a BIG THANK YOU to everyone who has made Meghan’s Memory Game First Grade such a success. Sales have been steadily growing with our first release in the Meghan’s Memory Game series of educational games. RatCat is excited to announce that we have now completed the kindergarten edition. Aimed at the four to five year old Meghan’s Memory Game Kindergarten contains over 250 two, three and four letter words. This version is pending the Apple App Store approval and will hopefully be available starting on April 12th, 2009. Next up will be version upgrade to our first grade edition as we have developed a better method of compressing the audio files and will be able to reduce the size of our application. After that we will focus attention on completing a 2nd grade edition.
Archive for category Game Development
Houston we have lift off! Meghan’s Memory Game 1st Grade received final approval from Apple this morning indicating that our app was “Ready for Sale”. So, it took only 7 days from the time we submitted our application until approval. That’s not so bad, considering how many apps they are reported to be reviewing each day. It will be interesting to see what kind of downloads and feedback we recieve. Hopefully it will be all good!
We say “Maybe”, because there is still one major hurdle to overcome. Acceptance of our application by Apple. RatCat was able to place the finishing touches on Meghan’s Memory Game 1st Grade over the past few evenings and decided it was time to release it to the public. We know our testing team has enjoyed kicking it around and now it could be your turn. Around 8 pm this evening, we uploaded our first application for the iPhone and iPod Touch to the iTunes App Store. If all goes well, we could be in the store in the next couple of days…. Or if things don’t go so well, we could get the dreaded “Needs More Work” email from our Apple application reviewer. Keep your fingers crossed and say some extra prayers! I know we at RatCat will be.
Let the animation begin…
Mar 23
Over the past couple of development sessions RatCat has been able to “animate” the intro splash screen of Meghan’s Memory Game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The animation is on the very simple side, however it’s a start. The overall process is kind of simple, you create the animation frames in Photoshop then sequence them in a loop with a timer in the application. Besides the addition of animation, we have revamped the games appearance, added the ability to turn off the sound, added a second level and a new splash screen when completing the level 1 and 2 and added over 350 first grade level spelling words (After all it is an Educational Game!).
We have decided that we will be targeting first grade students with this version and we have plans to release a second and third grade versions shortly after a successful release of this version. To finish up Meghan’s Memory Game 1st Grade, we need to complete the voice recordings of each word then prepare the marketing material and meta data for the RatCat Software web site and for the iTunes App Store. It looks like we are actually ahead of schedule, though I’m sure that we will need all the time we can get to actually make a May 1st release!
One of the components of a great game is sound and we hope that the sounds in Meghan’s Memory Game are no exception. Today we made our initial recordings. Meghan was recorded saying phrases like “Great Job” and “Way to Go” to be played when the game player chooses the correct match and phrases like “You Can Do It” and “Sorry” for missed attempts. This has been a way cool way to incorporate a six year old into the game development process and I know when the team starts the next round of testing they will be thrilled with the new phrases. The development of Meghan’s Memory Game for the iPhone and iPod Touch is moving along and our deadline of May 1st for an initial release to the App Store at iTunes seems reasonable. The next phase of development is to revamp the graphics and add three levels with increasingly difficult words.
