Tuesday, March 29, 2011

WP7 NOT BOOTING? FIRST CHECK YOUR DATA CABLE

[ If you deem this article as helpful, please consider buying my game "Just Survive!" on the Appstore for only 99 cents:

=> http://itunes.apple.com/app/just-survive/id424392950 ]

A couple of weeks ago I had pressed and held the start button of my WP7 device to find that it had fallen in a sort of neverending booting loop.

As soon as the device started and the first screen appeared showing the initial info/stats, it automatically rebooted for ever.

Since I wasn’t able to hard reset it, my first thought was “Oh gosh, it’s bricked!”.

I then noticed that the batery level was closed to zero, so I grabbed the USB data cable and plugged it into my desktop PC. No luck! After a couple of minutes the battery was still at zero level …

… as a desperate move I connected it to the AC power, directly. Still no luck! My thought then was “Drained Battery?”.

So I searched on the Internet for similar cases and I found that many reported faulty USB cables. “Could it be so?” …

Well, it turned out to be the case, at least for my device. After buying a new USB data cable, the device started to recharge the battery. And when it reached a charge level of 7% percent, it successfully booted!

So, if you happen to suffer from a similar situation, don’t panic! Go and buy a new USB data cable and try again.

Hope this help,
~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

“LONG TIME NO SEE”

For the last few months I have been immersed in a code rush to get my first commercial game published on iTunes’ App Store. And finally, I’m proud to say that it made it into the market!

http://itunes.apple.com/app/just-survive/id424392950

The name says a lot about the game: Just Survive!

I had originally started working on it on 1998 and published it on the web during 1999. At that time there was just one enemy and scores were saved locally. The game didn’t get noticed but many people because everything was much different from the globalization we are experiencing now, but I remember having received an email message from someone who wrote something like:

Nice game. I have been playing it for 45 minutes and I want to know how much longer I have to play it to get to the first boss; btw, highscores aren’t been saved on your server …

That message helped me to decide –a few years after- whether to jump into the indie Industry. And today, here I am …

The game has gone through lots of modifications since then, 90% of them happening during 2010/2011, so I can now say the you’ll get to fight many types of enemies, more than one boss and there’s global leaderboards!

Here’s the trailer on Youtube:

Just Survive! First Trailer

This is one of the four games I have in production for different platforms, so in the following months expect some news about them.

Hope you like it … and buy it!
~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.