Refresh Creations Ltd Newsfeed

Christmas Opening Times and Game Sales!

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 01:59:50 +0000

Refresh Creations will be closing on Christmas Eve at midday and re-opening on Thursday the 2nd of January 2014.
During this downtime emails will still be checked for any urgent / emergency requests.

Also, from today until 2014, Super Grid Run is now on sale with

40% off on ALL Mobile Stores!

If you haven't checked it out on your Android / iPhone, now is the best time to grab it, full details including App Store Links are available at: http://www.supergridrun.com/

Resisting the urge to publish games early and avoid the Christmas Rush?!

Tue, 03 Dec 2013 01:54:37 +0000

So, after rushing through some porting issues for the iPhone and iPad recently, hearing some really useful feedback from the groovy people who volunteered to beta test and asking friends and facebook groups for advice, I'm delaying They Are Everywhere until probably mid-late January next year.

There are lots of reasons behind this including adding more features, music, polish, etc but the main fact is that it will probably end up as a complete no show, with most likely a few bugs to boot if I rush to get on the App Store, OUYA, Gamestick, Google Play, etc.

I think I've probably reached the level of "Minimum Viable Product" so far which feels great, the game is certainly more complicated than Super Grid Run in terms of the programming behind it and still feels fun to play every now and them, after a lot of playtesting whilst developing.

The beta feedback has, as I mentioned, been really handy and re-enforces that I need to spend a bit more time to get a fully rounded game out there. Everyone likes the game music which is a big plug point and so far, no-one has complained about the pacing of the game. I'm still unsure as to whether It's a little slow, but that could just be me. I'm planning on adding extra game modes including boss rushes, practice mode and a 1 minute short-play mode as well as some hidden easter eggs and unlocks to help vary the gameplay from play session to the next. Secret bits are always cool to find :)

A Quick List of FREE Website Promotion Tips

Fri, 29 Nov 2013 10:05:21 +0000

Add content to your site regularly

Always important with search engines, writing quality content regularly on your website will help to improve your standings with search engines and make your site a more valuable resource for visitors. It's a win-win situation but can take time to produce the right content, be it text, videos, images, sounds or other media.
Engage on Social Networks

Get yourself on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest and whichever other Social Media platforms are appropriate to you.

If your only excuse is that you can't be bothered then that's a really poor excuse, if you think it's all just people posting about their breakfast / dinner last night or favourite pairs of socks then you should really open your eyes, there's a lot of helpful info out there and it's amazing how much insight you can get by interacting with people on them.

Follow others related to what you're interested in and you'll be surprised what you can get out from them.

That useful content you posted on your website from point 1? Get this on them also, it helps to spread the word about what you're doing and should raise your reputation on-line.
Email Signatures

You probably fire out a fair few emails everyday and it's important that people can use a variety of methods to contact you back from reading the email so make sure that your website and any social networks you are using are listed on there!
Don't forget your off-line, real world media!

Ensure that your website details are on all relevant leaflets, flyers and of course business cards. Maybe add a QR Code for the more mobile-orientated visitors for ease-of-use.
Be Consistent.

Try to keep your updates to a regular schedule where possible. It can help to build up a number of followers who will instinctively know that your site has been updated at a certain time / day.

That's it for the moment. I said the list would be fairly quick, expect more tips to appear over the following days, if this helps you out at all, that's great and if you would like more advice on your website in particular, please get in contact and we'll be happy to do a quick scan through your site and offer some helpful advice!

Looking into e-commerce

Thu, 28 Nov 2013 04:11:19 +0000

E-commerce sites come in a great variety of shapes and sizes, from your simple Paypal shop selling a couple of products to a fully-comprehensive e-commerce store capable of handling swathes of orders using multiple payments methods, with multiple languages, currencies and a vast array of products,categories and other options under the hood.

With such a scale of e-commerce solutions sites it can become quite bewildering to choose which path to take when setting up shop. As budgets become tighter you want to get the best solution for you and your business at a decent price.

It may, for example be worth almost entirely skipping the e-commerce side on your website at all and choosing to go down the eBay / Amazon / Playtrade route if you don't have an established presence on-line yet.

This gives you the advantage of both having a website which should gain more traffic over time with a popular marketplace where visitors are more likely to be actively searching for your products and services.

The only fees associated with most of these marketplaces are fairly small, usually for:

Listing products / services
A cut of the final selling price
Paypal / credit card fees

If you choose to factor these fees into the cost of the items being sold then, well, you're in business, on-line and usually without much hassle aside from creating your Paypal and associated marketplace accounts.

Of course, it's worth customising your listings where possible to fit in with your companies branding. We provide this service for a number of local companies including Switch Computer Support and Refresh Cartridges, the latter requiring both customised listing templates and a highly customised store front.

You can view the Refresh Cartridges store front here to see for yourself how an eBay store can look compared to a vanilla listing which may not be as effective.

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Refresh-Cartridges

That's not to say that having a self-hosted shop isn't going to work but at the starting point it's worth considering it as more a supporting tool to an eBay / Amazon store and converting eBay / Amazon customers to your sites store. Be that through lower prices, improved shipping or other means.

If you are looking into e-commerce options, please give us a bell on 01803 558 978 for some free advice on getting started.

Why Have A Website?

Wed, 27 Nov 2013 11:41:20 +0000

If you're interested in expanding your business then, if you don't already, you really must have a website ready to reflect your businesses services, offers and allow for points of contact to be made available. Not only does this increase your businesses digital footprint, giving more people a chance to notice your services but it allows your existing customers a simple means to both get in contact with you but also find you at your physical location.

Websites aren't expensive to set-up and usually have very low running costs involved, the only bills you would expect to receive post completion would be for any extras that weren't required in the original design brief, an annual bill (usually less than £50) for web-hosting and the renewal of your domain name (e.g. bobsgrill.co.uk) once every couple of years which isn't going to cost any more than £20.

Every one of our websites built at Refresh Creations comes complete with it's own Content Management System (CMS), meaning that you have easy access to update your web-pages as if it were a simple word document. If you don't fancy updating your site yourself, support is but an email or phone call away, simply send over the information and we can update your site for you for a low cost.

Of course, no two businesses are the same so we design our websites from scratch, not using generic templates that you may find elsewhere. This helps to ensure that your website and your CMS is geared up for ease-of-use for both you and your visitors.

If you are interested in getting a professionally designed bespoke website created then please give us a call on 01803 558 978 for an informal chat.

Charity Game Jam 2 Turbo!

Fri, 22 Nov 2013 02:54:01 +0000

It's the second annual charity game jam event and this one is going to be even bigger, better and more charitable than before!

Taking place from tomorrow (November 23rd) until next Saturday (November 30th) everyone is invited to make a game in a week and simply add an in-game button to help gamers give to charity with ease. You can choose any charity you like although a few suggestions from the charitygamejam.com website include:

Even if you're not into game development you're more than welcome to attempt to make a game, it doesn't need to be a massive, complicated game, start off with something small, you'll be surprised how much you'll get out of making your first game, playing it and sharing it with others.

More details in the keynote svideo below by Christer Kaitila:

View Video on Youtube

I'll be hoping to spare a day to make a game in probably around 8 hours, failing that I'm sure Super Grid Run could do with a turbo button on Google Play :)

http://www.charitygamejam.com/

Website Loading Times are just as important this year as any year.

Thu, 07 Nov 2013 04:07:20 +0000

It's still a growing trend that website are becoming larger and larger as time progresses, connection speeds increase and disk space continues to become cheaper the average website starts to become more loaded with multiple stylesheet files for every browser type in the known universe, javascript libraries for one-off functions, API calls to Twitter, Facebook and larger and larger images as display resolutions increase.

I would go as far as to say that you'll be lucky to see a website under 500kb in a few years time as more and more features become available to the web, which is okay, so long as you keep a hold on your websites loading time and not leave your visitors waiting.

Thankfully there are a multitude of tools you can use to analyse your own website to check for things that are slowing your site down so you can get these issues amended promptly. Below are my personal favourites for optimizing page loading times

Google Page Speed

A fantastic add-on for any website developer, not only is it simple to just pop-up and test a web-page but you can get a quantifiable score and a breakdown of where your websites speed could be improved. It's a very comprehensive tool which details the faults on the site as well as the severity of their impact.

Most tabs can be expanded on to point you in the right direction to fixing these issues which can be a massive time-saver if you are choosing to self-optimize.

Most notably this tool generates compressed versions of image files allowing you to quickly save an re-upload for an instant speed-boost.

Get it now at: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights_extensions

YSlow

A decent alternative to Google Page Speed, YSlow groups your websites loading speed into handy chunks for easier analysis so you can determine if it's just some oddly-sized images or a server issue at-a-glance.

The rule-set is similar to Google Page Speed but presented in a more friendly manner.

It has a more complete view of the website you are testing but misses out on some the automated features Google has, instead offering them through some of Yahoo's own tools which is no bad thing.

Available from: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

To summarize, you should consider the loading time of your website as an important factor whilst designing, it's a known factor in search rankings and one that can be quite quickly dealt with. It's tough to choose between both utilities so why not go ahead and use both of them?

They are both available for FREE in the links below:

Google Page Speed https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights_extensions
Yahoo Yslow http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Game Number 3 "They Are Everywhere" is Underway

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 12:39:43 +0000

The next game to be released this year, titled "They Are Everywhere" is progressing fairly smoothly so far, it's styled along the lines of an early 80's arcade shooter, mixing elements from Space Invaders, Robotron and to an extent, Geometry Wars.

I've really enjoyed creating the spritesheet and working within the constraints of a limited colour palette, using small sprites instead of 3D Objects and, again, this game is probably going to take me a lot longer to finish off than it should do, but I'm sure it will be all the more worthwhile going through the beta testing loop in particular.

This will mark my first attempt at a free-to-play game and there are lots of kinks that are still to be ironed out, I'm uncertain as to whether or not to implement in-game currency at the moment, it's one of those things that, even with an arcade setting, feels difficult to justify in my own head. I need to either, fix my game and my head so I feel it's the right thing to do or just ditch in-game currency for this one.

The premise is simple, you are limited to move inside a small grid where enemies will attack you from all directions, your ship is limited to the cardinal points for movement and each ship has it's own special ability and a limited quantity of emergency weapon (e.g. shield, smart bomb, etc, etc)

In-game Achievements and High Scores are already set-up. I'm likely going to use a combination of Global high scores and where available 1st party supported game center features.

Here comes the more tricky part of the game. I'm hoping to synchronise the release across platforms this time, something which happened with Super Grid Run and I think worked in it's favour. The only difference this time is that there's a whole lot more platforms I can publish to as opposed to in January this year. Windows Phone and the 2 micro-consoles (Gamestick and OUYA) come instantly to mind so I may not get this game out until January again but I'll just have to see how it goes and keep myself organised with this game launch.

Yes, the new site is Finally Launched!

Thu, 19 Sep 2013 02:59:37 +0100

Yes! The new look Refresh Creations site is finally up and in the wild, I hope you like the new look, the old one was looking rather old and really needed an overhaul. Also, we're introducing a few new services to the line-up including:

Ebay store design
Kayako Customisations
Custom Wordpress Plug-ins and customisations
Promotional Game Design

If you happen to have a need of any of these services, please drop us a line on 0845 0942 987 or email us on hello@refreshcreations.co.uk

Regarding the OUYA Debacle

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 01:48:53 +0100

So, the OUYA has been out for a couple of months now and I've still not released a game for it. If you follow the Indie game scene on Twitter / Facebook or read any developer news sites such as Gamasutra or even the OUYA blog and you can see that the platform has become very mixed-up, very quickly.

From a lack of QA with their initial release titles to leaked adverts with terrible depictions of their target market, followed up with seemingly botched, at the very least risky, games funds for Kickstarter campaigns their marketing department should probably be shot at this point as it's reached a critical point to where developers are actively requesting to take their games off the shelves.

None of this has really deterred me from releasing a game onto the system. It's certainly left a bad taste in my mouth as a customer and hiding the parental controls resulted in some odd purchases on day 1 but nope, the reason I've not put Super Grid Run or Holey Moley on there yet is more an issue of time over anything else. That's not to say these games won't appear on there. Just not yet.

Of course I've also got quite a bias towards the Gamestick as their developer relations have been exemplary towards me, despite being a kickstarter of the OUYA, I'm much more behind the Gamestick and I'm more in favour of them as they are the second Android console to market. It feels like they didn't succumb to the peer-pressure that was placed on OUYA from the Kickstarter backers which must be tough but hopefully will result in a more polished product on release day.