I thought I would share the following write-up about Fish vs. Crabs on Warp Zoned, a UK online gaming publication.

“Those who read the title and were expecting another Plants vs. Zombies rip-off will be pleasantly surprised to see how wonderful this 3D underwater tower defence game looks. You control a ragtag school of fish, protecting their eggs from a marching army of crustacean fiends. As well as adding different fish to fight the crabs with different powers (my favorite is the puffer fish), players can also find hidden items by completing side challenges.” – Andrew Rainnie – UK Correspondent, Warp Zoned

You can read the full article here: http://www.warpzoned.com/2013/04/kickstart-this-the-poo-pub-edition/#more-33183

T-Shirt designs are also here. You can get a t-shirt for Fish vs. Crabs through the Kickstarter campaign, or come see us at Pax Prime.

Web Demo

A public demo is available to play for Fish vs. Crabs which is meant to show off the camera controls for the game. We are looking for feedback on the control system. You can see the web demo pages here:

http://www.swiftcreekgames.com/?page_id=497

But we think you are here, visiting our site because you either like our games or want more information. By all means take a look around, grab some wallpaper for your desktop and play a few games. You are certainly welcome.

To support our efforts on Greenlight, click the big banner below. Please throw us a vote and tell your friends.

We are also running our kickstarter campaign to help us take the game even further. Please visit the kickstarter site and support us. Better still, tell your friends about us there as well and we can make Fish vs. Crabs an amazing game.

This week we’re at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, learning about what is new in the industry and starting to make noise about our new game Fish vs. Crabs.

Fish vs. Crabs

While still a couple months from being finished, Fish vs. Crabs is already proving to be our biggest game yet.

You might be wondering; What is Fish vs. Crabs? That’s a good question, and in short it is a Tower Defense game that has the fish defending their eggs against greedy little crabs, shrimp and lobster who are trying to steal them.

Before, during, and after the battle you also have the opportunity to explore the reef. Each level has many items to discover and recover. Fish vs. Crabs is an immersive 3D world where you can move and look almost anywhere in the entire scene, searching for items to complete small quests.

Before I go on, check out our trailer video here on our YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvQli98SItQ

The video itself is a hidden object game. Find the following objects:

Once those naughty little crabs have been defeated, you may remove your eggs to a safe reef location. The reef may be decorated with rocks, corals, and other fish. After a while, your eggs hatch and you may begin collecting your fish.

Fish vs. Crabs is well on it’s way to completion. We do have big plans for the game we won’t mention at the moment, but I’m afraid we might not be able to pull it off. This is where we need your help. In the next week or two we will be launching our Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds needed to finish the game the way we want to finish it and faster. More on that later.

Developer Blog

The main page postings have been made when significant information needs to be provided concerning the company or product announcements. We will soon be providing a more regularly updated developer blog which should be at least once a week and we will mirror at Gamasutra (www.gamasutra.com). Stay tuned for some more details on that where I’ll provide a link.

Have you gone out to eat lately? If so, you may have noticed technology creeping into your favorite restaurant. The goal – to ease your wait while your server is busy dealing with the customer who cannot make up their mind or unreasonable person next to you that insists they shouldn’t pay because their food wasn’t prepared to their exact specification.

Ziosks have been showing up at restaurants around the country, and what’s the #1 game being played on all of them… Yes, it’s Jar of Marbles.

#1 is not just us trash talking the other games on the device. The numbers don’t lie. Jar of Marbles is played between 2x and 8x more than other games on the same device. Now, when you have 5 or 10 minutes to kill while you wait for your piping hot meal to come, your hungry child cannot sit still and looks like your eating your fingers for their next meal, just remember that Jar of Marbles is a great little distraction.

Android

Jar of Marbles recently received an update on Google Play that fixes a few bugs and restores audio. We are are also trying to bring Jar of Marbles Premium to the Samsung app store which we hear released earlier this week, as well as Jar of Marbles III: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

After a couple weeks of focus on our newest title, described a little bit below, we are back at work at bringing Journey to the West to Android and iOS.

Need a little exercise?

It’s a little known fact that we wrote Remix Workouts for the iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch. Next time you need a little exercise on a rainy day, go check it out. Your workouts change every single day and videos

The next big thing, more frequent updates

Being heads down on projects is great for getting work done but horrible for producing updates and getting news to our customers. We will be starting a campaign very soon to keep you more up to date.

If you have not already done so, visit our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/SwiftCreekGames. You can also follow us on twitter @swiftcreekgames where you should get weekly updates about the latest Swift Creek News.

What is different, however, is that Big Fish Games is now distributing the title instead of Swift Creek distributing the game directly.

Jar of Marbles has also picked up all of the latest performance enhancements, visual and audio effects and bug fixes from the 1.5 version of the title. Additionally, Jar of Marbles no longer has advertising!

We hope you enjoy it.

Previously available only for iPad, we’re very pleased to now offer this game on your phone.

The latest version of Jar of Marbles includes support for more devices and versions of the Android platform including Jellybean. It also  brings the code base up to date with the latest in-app purchasing model from Google.

Upgrading to the Premium version of Jar of Marbles now has 2 options.

The first is to pay what you want, almost. With price ranges from $0.99 to $4.99, this allows us to tell us what you think the game is worth. We generally think of this as the candy bar test. If the game is worth a $0.99 candy bar, a $3.99 espresso or a $4.99 sandwich  Of course, all these food options will be done and gone in 5 minutes and Jar of Marbles can be played for years.

The second option is to watch advertising, install another application or some of the other options offered by Tapjoy inc (www.tapjoy.com). Using a simple coin counter, 200 coins will unlock the game automatically. In many cases you won’t have to pay a dime and the Tapjoy advertising option is turned off. At least, it’s turned off in this version of the game as there is no additional in-app purchasing to be done.

We hope you enjoy this version of Jar of Marbles and share it with your friends.

October 17, 2012: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Jar of Marbles III sets the scene for Washington Irving’s classic American ghost story set in Tarry Town, New York in the 1820s. Follow the story of Ichabod’ Crane’s rivalry with Brom Bones for the love of Katrina VanTassel in this physics based match 3 marble popper. More than 70 objectives and over 50 achievements keep you engaged while you drop, blast, zap and torch your way through dozens of hand drawn environments.

http://www.bigfishgames.com/download-games/18986/jar-of-marbles-2/index.html

More distributors are lined up to receive this game so it will be available in more places over the next couple weeks (such as GameHouse and related portal partners).

The iOS, Android and Kindle Fire versions are nearly complete and will be available as soon as we can push them out the door.

Jar of Marbles III will be a special Halloween edition, so look for that soon.

Swift Creek Games is supporting the Oculus Rift VR Device. I won’t say much about what we have planned right now, but we do have a plan in the works for this nifty toy.

If you wish to support this adventure or get a unit early, you still have a few days to pledge your support at Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game?play=1&ref=search

Spry Fox has grown a lot in the last year and they are now poised to take over development of Triple Town for Mobile. We hope this frees up a lot more development time to create new and exciting games of our own and we wish them the best of luck in the future.