Grind, Hustle, & Payoff. That is our mantra right now. And never forget the battle cry... "FFAP!" "For Fun And Profit!" what else! (This really is still a hobby job atm.) If something is truly fun, the profit part follows. I am always seeking balance, but don't get me started about mainstream marketing, that is a bridge too far right now without some serious help from a larger firm/platform. Can we even afford that? Can we even support growth. Questions we need to ask, be ready to scale. We know how to increase server capacity, that plan is in place.

Porting Doodle Army to Windows 8 and Android continues. Rapidly.

ALERT! We have a fix for Doodle Army 2 right on the heals of the 1.7 release. We introduced a bug in the Bluetooth code late in the game (and the fix is sitting waiting for review at Apple now.) [sorry about that!]

On the topic of Doodle Army 2 hacking. We do really care to solve this. We are trying to stop it. We are going to start a thread on reddit at some point to ask the dev community for thoughts on how to stop it as well as community ideas. So rest assured we are watching. We have names, game center accounts, we know who many of you are. And when we can can confidently say without a doubt, we are nailing these punks on a few vectors. You will see them drop off the scoreboards one of these days if they keep it up. We have spent too much time and money on these guys having their fun at the expense of the honest gaming community. It bugs us. It really does. There is not a planning meeting it does not come up. If it was easy it would be done. Period. Give us time, hang in there. We are going to roll out ways for the community to deal with it as well. We are catching many in game hacks as is possible, and when we do those folks are rendered inop as possible. BUT we have to be super careful, if an accidental detect occurs and we take action, to us that is just as bad if not worse as hacker deterrence, and if that is happening we need to know. We have to be super careful.

Damn hackers. Go away, bug another game. The real lame part is the code is optimized for minimal network involvement and that makes a lot of hacking vectors easy, but reduces lag. Any fix we put in puts load ont eh server (++$) and network load (++lag). The cost is in the wallet and network performance (WHICH really makes you stand up and say, oh hey we found a fix for this particular hack [there are many btw] but it doubles/triples our server costs. SUCKY huh, I am trying to figure out where on the doll I made the hackers touch to get them to do their thing... I know it is mostly script kiddies  but the hack devs gave them the hack capability, those guys can go frag themselves.) So we will have to try out new server side code and see what the game play is like (hopefully not bad!) So I see LOTS of testing in our future...  That is why this is TAKING forever to solve.


Well I a lot has happened since last update. Lets see if I can summarize.

Doodle Army 2 (DA2) has gotten a lot of attention this round. It was due. We have always had a serious hacker problem. It stems from an architecture choice made from its inception that makes hacking easy. At the inception it was easy to handle bluetooth near proximity networks, and community policed. You just walk over to the offender and knocked the device out of their hand and had words ;).  I could care less about the piracy of in app purchases. I give a lame kudo for keeping a buck or two out of my pocket per script kiddy using your hack. Its a game after all, and those purchases function within the normal expected bounds of the game experience, but what I can not abide by is people hacking to gain "1 shot" kills, infinite life, etc. That affects the positive multiplayer experience in a negative way, which effects the number of people who want to play, etc. So DA2 is getting some serious client and server tweaks as we take steps to make it annoying to hack, etc. The sad part is it ups the amount of work the servers have to do, so it actually costs us more. A downer, but that work has went well. We added some new weapons. Fixed some odd bugs (rocket launcher and map related. We had some issues integrating an ad framework into DA2, that slid us to the right several weeks.

In other great news we are still working on an Android for Doodle Army (the original) and now we are just starting a port to Windows 8. It is a matter of time before we are simply building games in an agnostic as possible fashion then porting to every platform. The days of use being a one platform pony show are coming to an end.

Zombie Road Rage is doing well enough. Not super amazing, but interesting to see how many people are still playing (about 1/15 the amount as DA2)

Flip the Bird... (Flop the Bird) Well the kids love him. We see him going free someday when we have a slow moment. Otherwise it is just underwhelming. We think we know part of the problem. It needs a tutorial, and a 

I am sure I am leaving out something interesting... In any case I better get back before someone realizes I have slipped out of my enclosure.

What I really want to do is fire up Dwarf Fortress and Tekkit (Minecraft)... But that will have to wait... There is much work to be done yet.


CodeWorx Studios

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