They are cute creatures, whose only natural predators are gravity and uncontrolable urge to keep running all the time.

Snobli Run is a small game where you try to prevent the extinction of these cute creatures.
It was made in mere 48 hours for the Global Game Jam 2011 by me and Ilkka Leino.
We are currently planning to expand this project into a full game for the iOS and Android devices.

You can play it here.

Valve, the company behind games such as Team Fortress 2 and Portal and the very successful computer games distribution platform Steam, claim to be more profitable per employee than Google or Apple. This is pretty good, since Google has about 24 400 employees and made a profit of 6,5 billion dollars in the year 2009. With simple math, you can calculate how much that is per employee, which is around 270 thousand dollars of profit per employee. Although Valve Corporation has only 250 employees, this means that the make at least 66 million dollar profit in a year. At least, I would assume that the real number is a lot higher.

Personally I am not a huge fan of Valve’s games, but I do know they have a strong fan base. They operate the Steam, which is a must have software for any PC gamer. Steam is probably the source of most of their revenue. Valve tends to value their customers more than other companies around by providing a constant amount of updates even to their old titles. They also host the communities around the games and try to collect as much as possible data from their customers.

What is so special about Valve?

Can Steam keep up with the competition with all these new distribution channels popping up?

Mining

Quite boring. Time is mostly spent on looking at asteroids.

Trading

Quite boring. Time is mostly spent on looking at jump gates through the market screen.

More coming later

I’ve been on a bit of a break from my main project, 7-bit Pirates. Just taking a bit of distance to it and avoiding nervous breakdown.

Here is something little I’ve been working on mostly on weekends. I mainly just wanted to test the new features of Untiy 3 so I made the hangar in about 2 weekends. I made the ship building script today and it took about 6 hours to get it right.

Here is a (bit outdated) video of the game:

Here is some pictures from the latest build:

Well, sort of a “pay what you want”. Since I AppStore doesn’t have a such feature, I needed to fiddle around with the prices a bit.

For June 2010, the price of Forklift Hazard at Apple’s AppStore will change daily:

After that, the price drops back to free and the whole thing starts again.

If you want to get the game for free, get it on a Monday. If you want to support the maker of the game, buy it on a later weekday.

Here’s the link to Appstore:

Thanks in advance!

PS. If the price on the app store is not what’s listed in the table above, just wait a bit. Sometimes the AppStore doesn’t know the day has changed yet or it just hasn’t had time to update.

PSS. Feel feel to post this to your twitter, facebook or otherwise share it with your friends and family

Enough said