Mahjong FRVR
While I have been incredibly bad at updating the blog over the past 5 months things are still moving forward with FRVR. I earned a bunch of money, did a big restructuring of the company, made new agressive growth plan and much much more. However I will leave that for future blog posts. Today we are talking about Mahjong FRVR
Mahjong FRVR is a move towards the more classical game direction FRVR was originally designed for. While Hex FRVR has been a huge success, I still think it’s to risky for FRVR to build that type of unique puzzle games. That’s something better left for later, when FRVR has 10+ games in the market.
As is the goal with all FRVR games, Mahjong FRVR has beautiful high DPI graphics, great sounds and music and can be played on pretty much any device.
For now, the game only has one visual look, but I expect to update the game with a system where they can unlock other visual looks fairly soon.
Self publishing & initial analytics
While it’s incredibly unlikely that Mahjong FRVR will be as big of a social hit as Hex FRVR. I do believe I have a much better understanding of how to release and grow the games than when I started FRVR -- I will be back in a few weeks to talk more about that and comparing it to the initial release of Solitaire FRVR.
Here is a sneak preview of how the game is performing it’s first week after release.
Note here that I updated how I report page-views in the analytics integration. Therefore page-views now represent people navigating the game between the calendar view and playing levels.
This update was made mostly to allow me to use Google Analytics flow diagrams to analyse how users interact with the game. Here is how new users playing Mahjong flow through the game.
Technology
The game also marks multiple major milestones towards the reusability and maturity of the FRVR tool chain. A casual list of places where a lot of time was saved would be:
- Standard UI components
- Calendar view allowing you to play one new game per day.
- Dialogue system
- Menu sidebar
- Integrations
- Facebook Integration
- Twitter integration
- Backend storage integration
- Social buttons in bottom of page integration (Now with localised social networks for China).
- Kik messenger integration
- Hidden technology
- FRVR Render engine, now named XS
- Sound and music subsystem
- Wrapper for Android publishing
- Wrapper for iOS publishing
- Wrapper for Facebook App publishing
- Wrapper for Google Chrome App publishing
- Shared analytics integration
A cool result of this technology platform is that Mahjong FRVR was released almost simultaneously on all our major platforms.
- Play Mahjong FRVR online
- Play Mahjong FRVR on iOS
- Play Mahjong FRVR on Android
- Play Mahjong FRVR on Facebook
- Play Mahjong FRVR as Google Chrome App
Likewise platform wide optimisations now means that future releases of FRVR games will be even smaller. Mahjong is playable after only 380kb of gzipped download in the browser.
Mahjong FRVR is also translated into 17 languages both on web and app stores. However rather than going for a solution where users have to select their language, this feature is so far hidden and language is automatically selected for the user based on operative system or browser language.
Try changing your browser language and navigating to http://mahjong.frvr.com/alc/ (ALC for automatic language choice)