Monthly Review – Vanadium Games

Looking Back At 2018 (And Future Plans)

01/01/201924/02/2019
by Joshua Heng

You can view the online version of the newsletter by clicking here.

Hi,

First of all, Happy New Year and Happy Christmas – we hope that you had a good holiday!
Our newsletter for December will look back at what we have accomplished this year in 2018, and our aims and goals for the future.

Looking Back

2018 was the first year of Vanadium Games, which was incorporated in the second half of the period.

We managed to complete many background tasks, also releasing The Stacks both online and on mobile.

Notable Events of 2018

13 July
The Stacks was created and released online

14 August
Vanadium Games Ltd was incorporated with Companies House

30 September
Beta testing for The Stacks opened

17 November
The Stacks was released on the Google Play Store

20 November
The Stacks was released on the App Store

5 December
Downloads of The Stacks on the App Store surpassed 100

Looking Forward

We have many hopes and plans for 2019, including the release of at least 1 or 2 more games.

These should be easier and quicker to make, as we now know the workflows and methods of creating mobile apps and have done lots of background work.

Newsletter Updates

This year, we are planning to reduce the newsletter to be released bimonthly.

As a result, unless we have lots of news, you will only be emailed every other month – the next newsletter will probably follow at the end of February.

We will, however, be sending blog and game updates – if you would like to join the newsletter, you can do so here.

If you would like to keep updated, make sure to follow us on social media – we are active on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Use the links at the side or search for @vanadiumgames

That’s everything for this newsletter.
Thanks for reading, and have a good 2019!

Joshua Heng
Lead Game Developer

Bimonthly Newsletter

Monthly Review – November

06/12/201824/02/2019
by Joshua Heng

The email newsletter version of this is available here.

Hi all,

The main focus this month was the release of The Stacks on both the App Store and Google Play, and we are proud to say that our target was met.
Because of everyone working on this, not much else was done. Nevertheless, we are pleased with what we accomplished.

The Stacks was officially released on the 19th of November 2018 on Google Play and on the 20th of November on the App Store.

Since then, as the time of writing this, we have had over 10 installs on Google Play and over 110 downloads on the App Store, with very positive reviews. We would be grateful if you could spread the word about The Stacks and encourage people you know to leave reviews.

We are nearly at the end of the journey of The Stacks. We have a few bugs to address (such as the jump butting being temperamental and some adverts not working on iOS), however these are nearly all fixed. Hopefully, by the start of January, we are hoping that we will be able to finally declare The Stacks as a finished project.

This will allow us to develop many more games for mobile, and if you have any concepts which you would like to see made, you can email us at [email protected].

In conclusion, the month of November was focuse on finally releasing all our hard work, and, in the close future, we will begin working on our new games. If you would like to stay up to date with our activity, please follow us on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.

Thanks for reading,
Joshua Heng
Lead Game Developer

Bimonthly Newsletter

Monthly Review – September 2018

01/10/2018
by Joshua Heng

Welcome to the first monthly review! At Vanadium Games, we are aiming to publish a review every month, covering a summary of what we have been up to.

All reviews will also be available in our monthly newsletter, of which you can subscribe to here.

Anyway, what we have been up to in September?

We have been focusing on developing our platformer The Stacks to the point where it can be released to the App and Google Store, as well as making multiple improvements to the game:

We added the functionality of having multiple languages available, with Spanish already translated
We added touchscreen controls for mobile devices, as well as a slider to allow the user to change the GUI size
We added the opportunity to gain an extra life on mobile devices by watching an advertisement
We totally updated our leaderboard system to use our server and to have separate leaderboards for mobile and PC
We fixed multiple bugs

The Stacks is available as a public beta on both Apple and Android, so if you want to help test our game, you can join our testing programme.

In other news, we have made plans to start our next game, Tapping Tournament. Nothing is set in stone though, so we are not revealing any details until later.

We also have been sorting our admin and background jobs, which will enable us to develop games faster and more efficiently in the future.

Our social media manager Morgan has been busy posting and updating our Instagram, Twitter and Facebook pages (which you can follow by clicking on our social media links or searching us – @vanadiumgames). If you want to receive quick updates and interesting facts, follow us there!

Anyway, that’s all for this month.

Joshua