We did it! MicroVentures is now available on all iOS devices:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microventures/id589994705
Like our Android release, it’s completely free/ad-free! Let us know how it plays, we’d like to know what you think.
In other news:
As some of you may know, MicroVentures is available on the Android App Store, or ‘Google Play’. It’s completely free, ad-free, and available for download here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.studiomu.microventures
So far, we’ve been getting 5-star reviews, which is a great accomplishment since we didn’t pay for any of those reviews. Our only problem right now is that the game does not work on Samsung Galaxy S3, which we have just pushed out a fix for. It should be up on the app store by tonight, and hopefully those display issues are fully resolved.
We’re trying to get our game up on the Apple App Store as well, though that process is a little bit more tedious. Nonetheless, we hope to get MicroVentures on iOS, also free of charge and ad-free!
So if you have an Android, and that Android does not have MicroVentures, then what are you waiting for? It’s FRREEEEE!!
– Studio Mu
It’s finally here, Beta v0.4 is now available for you to download FOR FREE!
Features/Bugs:
– Massive story generator fixes
– New UI Art
– Loading Screen Hint Text
– Updated music
– Small bug fixes & minor tweaks
Here’s a link:
Download Here!
QR Code for the game:
Love,
James F
Hey All,
We haven’t put out an update in a while, mainly due to the scramble of employment post-graduation. Though as CEO of Studio Mu, I am proud to say that we have submitted our game to the Independent Game Festival, both the general and student competition. Our team worked extremely hard on this game, and we that it shows during the judgement of our game. Along with us, Pretentious Games’ Hello World has also been submitted to both competition, and we wish them luck as well.
In other notes, we’ve tweaked and polished a few things in the game, including:
– Few art updates
– Fixed several bugs with teleportation
– Fixed several bugs in storygen
– Many other small fixes I can’t think of right now
The Story Generator still has some kinks in it that show up while playing on the phone, and not while debugging on the computer. We have some leads, but unfortunately we’ve been so tied up with our jobs, as well as hunting for jobs, that it hasn’t been fully cleared out. Kyle has made great progress on it, and since we can update our IGF submission, I hope to get it fully sorted out soon and have it ready for judging.
Some future thoughts our team has been throwing around include the possibility of porting our game to another SDK. Though Marmalade has been good overall, there are many flaws within their SDK that seem to especially affect our game. This of course, will only happen if our game picks up an incredible amount of hype and it becomes apparent that we’ll need to expand outside of Marmalade.
One other future thought (now getting into fairy-tale dreamland), is that, if our game becomes so popular and grows a huge fanbase, we will develop tools for users to create their own content for our game, including new levels, heroes, enemies, stories, etc, and hopefully create a community where this user-generated content is freely shared. This game started from a humble childhood-inspired idea, free of any monetization plans, and I plan on keeping it that way whether this project tanks or prospers.
Well, aside from all those pie-in-the-sky ideas, that’s all I have for today. We should be pushing an updated .apk very soon, so keep your eyes peeled!
Over and out,
James F
After a long hiatus, Studio Mu is back in business! Well, more or less. With the team scattered to the four corners of the Earth and many of us facing different responsibilities, our reunion hasn’t been quite as monumental or complete as we would like, but there is not time to feel down! We’re taking MicroVentures to IGF!!!
The student category is open for submission until the end of October, and we’re gonna get in, one way or another. Fletcher has already addressed a number of engine issues, and I am currently wrestling with a story generation bug on the phones. While the game won’t be releasable by October, we are going to have it at least feature complete by then. After that, content, balance, and polish. The foundation of any game’s healthy, nutritious breakfast.
Keep your eyes and ears open, folks. We should have a beta v0.4 sometime soon.
– Kyle “The loneliest number” Huey
There’s several bugs in our current beta, the biggest one being that everyone is getting the same three stories. We’re going to fix this in the next week or two and release a Beta v0.4, once we’ve all settled down after graduation.
Also, we’re going to be posting up the soundtrack very soon, probably with our next beta release.
Check it out!
Make sure you’ve allowed installation of Non-Market Applications
If you’re looking at this on your phone, Download MicroVentures Now!
Note that this is a Beta Release.
Give us some feedback after you’ve played!
Problems installing? Let us know!
It’s been a long time since my last post. No amount of words can quite describe everything we’ve accomplished thus far. So as a cop out, I’ll show you some pictures instead!
It’s been a journey thus far, an odyssey of epic proportions! Hope you guys try out the beta release and help us make it even better!
– Clement “I’m too good for writing” Tran
Hey folks, I know it’s been a long time since I posted, but I’m here with another short exploration of MicroVenture’s story system.
This time, I will talk a bit about the extent of the story generator. From the get-go, James wanted to have meaningful stories to tie our adventures together; give something more meaningful to the player than the throw-away text you might get from another mobile game.
At first, our ultimate goal was the incorporation of MINSTREL into our game. Being that we have close ties to the creators (them being our professors and TA), we thought it would be a neat practical application of the technology for a game about stories. Quick rundown, MINSTREL is an author-level AI being developed with the goal of automatically generating engaging stories with complex plots and relationships.
If you’re interested, the paper they wrote on it can be found here:
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1822309.1822321
Go ahead and read it; it’s good stuff. Don’t worry, I’ll wait…
…aight, welcome back. Anyway, that was the original plan. Note the quantifier “original”. Two realizations dawned on us as we developed the more “Mad Libs” style generator that was our initial system.
1) Writing tons of stories is not easy. Procedural story generation is HARD.
There’s a reason people have devoted their entire careers to this subject: you could spend that long on it and never really reach a conclusion. We don’t have that luxury of time. Moreover, technical limitations made the logistics of incorporating MINSTREL onto a phone alongside a game a daunting task. Our best solution would be to put it on a server, and have the game query it for new stories every time the player starts a new game.
2) What do we get out of it?
This one came to us much more slowly than its brother. How many players are actually going to read the stories? How many of them are going to get something out of the stories? How would complex plots add to a game that should take less than 10 minutes a day to play?
In short, the answers are “Most of them”, “Enough of them”, and “Not much”. We are first and foremost a video game – to ignore that fact in favor of trying to duplicate a system that took years to create that makes stories people might not even be reading would be an almost suicidal decision. We wouldn’t be a game anymore.
If you ask a person which they cared about more, who wrote a story or what happened in that story, most of the time people will care about the story itself, and not where it came from. They’re there for an experience, not a tech demo.
So, we abandoned high-level author decisions in favor of a simpler and more manageable template-based system. I hope this sheds a little light on the decisions we have made so far. Talk to you more soon.
-Kyle “I am so sick of reading right now” Huey
MicroVentures 