Welcome to Little Hero Games

Harvest Lands soft launches on Android!

Hey All!

We just ninja posted Harvest Lands to the Google Play Store! So for all you Android device users who have been telling us to “GET YOUR GAME ON ANDROID!!!”, we’ve got it there for you to download! So get on the Google Play Store and download it to your device. Please let us know if you come across any major technical issues as we’re still ironing things out.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.littleherogames.harvestlands

Harvest Lands Officially Launches World Wide!

Wow… After 8 months of hard work and perseverance, we finally launched our first game around the world! Please download and give our game a play through. If you enjoy it, please share it with your family and friends and hook us up with a rating and review in the app store too! This newest version of the game that we just released has lots of nice changes and improvements so if you downloaded it before, give it another go.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/harvest-lands/id530316420?mt=8

Our focus now turns to getting the game the attention we think it deserves so as many people as possible get a chance to try it out and enjoy it!

Back in the queue!

We’ve learned quite a bit from our soft launch and we’re really glad we took the time to do it. We learned about a key User Acquisition issue that resulted in us taking decisive action (reduced our file size to <50MB!). Just as important, we identified some challenges with User Retention that put us on red alert to address by improving our tutorial experience and adding in a couple of key features that made our game more casual friendly.

We definitely recommend all developers strongly consider doing a soft launch of their titles before they hit the big stage of a global launch. Choose a country like Canada, UK or Australia or combinations of the three. The key thing is to choose a market that is reflective of your major market, the US and identify any problems whether they be technical or design well in advance.

So the end result for us is that we scrambled like hell over the past couple of weeks and fixed and tuned a bunch of things based on the analytics we reviewed from our soft launch. Oh yeah, definitely have analytics set-up for your game so that you can actually make data driven decisions on key performance indicators in user acquisition and retention. Doesn’t matter if your game is a simple arcade or puzzle game or a complex simulation game. You need to know what your users are doing and when they’re quitting and why they’re possibly quitting.

And now we’ve resubmitted a much more polished and stronger game build to Apple for review. We’re just waiting it out and preparing for a global launch in early September.

Official Trailer Video Good to Go!

Harvest Lands is currently available in the Canadian, UK and Australian App Stores! The global launch is coming soon.

If haven’t or can’t download Harvest Lands yet, check out our official trailer video below. Big thanks to Craig McEwen from Ocular Empire for working on this video for us!

Harvest Lands is in the CDN & UK App Stores!

Hey All

Shortly after our last post on being “In Review”, things moved at light speed because we got approval and launched Harvest Lands in the same day! You can download Harvest Lands in the Canadian and UK iOS App Stores right now!

Canadian App Store Link

UK App Store Link

Please download and check it out. If you enjoy the game, please share it with your family and friends. This is our soft-launch which we’ll be following up real soon with our “official” launch in US and Worldwide markets.

Big thanks in advance from our team!

In Review!

So after 10 days (8 business days) in “Waiting For Review”, Apple’s moved us to “In Review” status. The review process should take anywhere between 2-5 days to review, usually faster than that if they fail and reject an app. We’re hoping to goes smoothly and quickly for us. It’d be awesome to kick-off the long weekend here with being able to launch our game on the Canadian and UK app stores on Friday, but we’d still be pretty satisfied to kick it off early next week too. The key thing is passing!

Waiting for Review…

Well, we took THE big step a couple of days ago. Harvest Lands was submitted to Apple for review. We’re currently in the queue waiting for Apple to review the game. From our research on the net, it appears that the wait time could be anywhere from 10-12 days based off of collective data from other developers in July. Although a couple of developers have stated that they only waited for 4 days, we’re not going to hold our breath for that! We’re hoping that we get reviewed soon and all goes well so that we receive an approval from Apple and can execute on “soft launching” Harvests Lands into the Canadian and UK App stores. We’ll follow that up shortly with a US/Worldwide Launch later in August. Stay tuned on Linkedin or our Twitter to keep-up with the status of the game.

We not just sitting around refreshing the Apple web page hoping to see the status change (semi-truth). We’re all still hard at work fixing bugs, polishing & tuning and getting another build ready for the US/Worldwide launch. We’re also diligently working on our PR content including a game trailer, press release and all that other good stuff. We hope to share our marketing and PR content with you all soon.

Getting close to the “1st” Finish Line

So what’s been shaking at Little Hero Games in July?

Well we’ve been getting nuked in our office this past week with the mini “heat-wave”. A 100+ year old brick building without air-con is a deathtrap. Perhaps it’s madness spawned from the heat, but there’s been murmurs of “going pantless”…

Ahem… more importantly, we have been working like possessed men to get Harvest Lands ready for submission to Apple. We’re targeting to get a build in to Apple for review in the upcoming week or so and are planning for a soft-launch of our game into Canada and the UK App store as soon as we get the green light from Apple. So hang tight as we’re hoping our game will be available in limited release very soon with a US and Worldwide launch to follow shortly.

So why do so many developers do these “soft launches” in countries like Canada and the UK anyways? Well both of those countries are very similar to the US in terms of gaming habits and trends so they are excellent small markets for developers to test their games out and fine tune technical or gameplay issues before they release on the big stage with the US App Store. We’re planning to share some new video and media over the next couple of weeks as we get closer and closer to showing up in App Stores.

Oh and what the heck does “1st” finish line mean anyway? Getting our first build into Apple for review is a big deal and is an important milestone for us, but we know that there’s still lots of work even after your game is in the App Store. Bug fixes, gameplay tuning, new features and new art assets for future content updates, the list goes on and on because once you launch there’s almost as much work to support your game.

Check out our wonderful game music!

Check out the one of the wonderful music tracks composed for Harvest Lands! Big props go out to our music composer Jesse Barden and our other audio team members, Anton Thomas and Jon Fish. These guys have been working feverishly to put together an amazing array of SFX and music that really bring our world of Nummies to life!

Harvest Lands, home of the Nummies!

Hey All,

We’ve been a bit quiet in the past few weeks, but that’s only because it’s we’ve been super busy with working on our game. But, we’re here now to provide some cool updates to our first game.

#1 – Our game’s title is “Harvest Lands“. No more Project Manticore, we have a proper game name now! As you might be trying to guess, our title reflects that one of our game’s key gameplay mechanics will be harvesting. More details to come soon about our game design!

#2 – The creatures in our world are affectionately named the “Nummies” or “Nummi” for the singular form. The origins of this name involve a K-Pop video and our Art Director Jeff selectively hearing something that really stuck to us like glue since the early days of the project.

So yeah, we’re planning to share a lot more information and “footage” from Harvest Lands in the upcoming weeks as we get closer and closer to launching. If you have an iPhone 4/4s or an iPad 1/2/3 and want to test out Harvest Lands and give us feedback, contact a member of the team and we’ll get you hooked up! We’re definitely starting to ramp up with getting some fresh-eyes and feedback on our game.