Tag: Ovi Store

Highway Racer is #1 on Ovi Store

I would like to share our success so far on Nokia’s Ovi Store with our Flash Lite based game Highway Racer. You can read my previous post for our initial experience of publishing.

We are really happy with our experience so far. Highway Racer reached #1 spot in Sports category, and #3 spot in overall Games category on Ovi Store in just four days after published on Ovi Store for Pakistan region.

Now it’s 29th day on Ovi Store, it’s been jumping up ‘n down in top 30 games. Highway Racer have been downloaded 175000+ times and counting, on it’s way to million downloads. It’s current rating is 4 stars with 149 reviews.

Highway Racer is also reviewed by two popular mobile technology blogs, SenseApplied and TechProlonged.

This is quite a big achievement for our team at Orison Technologies.

Highway Racer - Promo 3

As of yesterday, Highway Racer is one of the featured applications on Ovi Store, and also it’s on #1 spot for Games and Sports sections. Thanks to Nokia team for the help on this :)

We have decided to keep Highway Racer free for more time as we work on an updated version. So, if you haven’t downloaded Highway Racer yet, just visit Ovi Store now!

// chall3ng3r //

Highway Racer – Now On Nokia Ovi Store

I am excited to announce our first entry into Nokia Ovi Store with our first Adobe Flash Lite based game, Highway Racer. It’s a simple arcade style racing game, to take a fun break in your busy life.

Click the banner below to head over to Ovi Store and get it FREE now. It’s a limited time offer ;)

Here are some screenshots before I get to details and our experience so far in publishing to Ovi Store.

1-Splashscreen 2-MainMenu

5-InGame 3-About 

Game Development Experience

Highway Racer is a Flash Lite 3 based game developed using Adobe Flash CS5.5. The development experience is best you can get. We used traditional timeline for animations and scripts on frames for interactivity. Most of the resources are small components and reused to keep the runtime memory footprint small.

flash-cs55-highway-racer

Highway Racer runs on all Symbian 5th Edition (Nokia 5800XM, N97, etc.) devices as well, but the performance is not as good because these devices have slower processor.

For best experience, we recommend playing Highway Racer on any latest Symbian ^3 device like Nokia N8, E7, C7, X7 etc.

Packaging and Distribution

For Highway Racer, we used SWF2Go Pro 2.6 to compile a SIS file to post on Ovi Store for QA. SWF2Go is our most popular development toolkit used by tons of developers in more than 50 countries around the world.

Since SWF2Go allowed us to get past the SIS making process in less than 10 minutes, we were then quickly on the phase to make graphics for Ovi Store submission.

Ovi Publisher portal is now really easy to use, I must say. The submission wizard is easy follow, and it was like just 4 steps. And you are done.

The QA process took 2 days only, which was quite a surprise for us, we were not even quite ready :D

There’s one small complaint/ issue, which I like to point out. On the Distribution “€œ> Language tab, there should clear note, if content is in English, select Works With All Languages / Publish To All Languages. We selected English (US) on first QA round, and later discovered that our game was only visible in US / Latin America. Ovi Store team, please add this note.

The After Shocks

It’s a complete surprise to us that Highway Racer is on #1 position in Sports category and #3 position in overall Games category for Pakistan region, just in 4 days!

We are very proud, and excited, as we have just stepped into Ovi Store, and finding such success in few days. It’s a big milestone for us.

We have already plans for follow up versions of Highway Racer as well as couple of cool new game ideas we are working on to publish on Ovi Store in coming months.

Download Highway Racer now from Ovi Store, and let us know your feedback and suggestions. And keep visiting Ovi Store for more of our exclusive games and apps to come ;)

BTW, Highway Racer is also our entry for Nokia and [email protected] MakeMyApp 2011 Challenge. Wish us luck!

// chall3ng3r //

Fixed: Ovi Store not working after Hard Reset

I have seen many users complaining Ovi Store app not working at all after they Hard Rest their Symbian^3 device, such as Nokia N8, E7, C7 etc.

Ovi Store app is developed using Qt and it requires the Qt runtime on device to work properly. When a user Hard Rests his device, the runtime is gone. And unfortunately, Nokia is unable to tackle this issue so far when installing Ovi Store again on device.

I have to reset my Nokia N8 once, and I got hit by the same issue. I knew what was missing, so I just installed the Qt runtime (4.6.3) SIS from the Qt SDK 1.0 folder to my N8 and it started working just fine.

Normal users don’t have Qt SDK, which is ~1.3GB download. So, I thought it would be a good idea to put the Qt runtime SIS files on my server and let the users having issues with Ovi Store, download and install the Qt runtime without downloading the Qt SDK.

ovi_store_fixed

I created a special mobile friendly page on our SWF2Go website, where any user can just go directly using his mobile and download and install the Qt runtime.

Direct Download Qt Runtime: https://chall3ng3r.com/downloads/qt/

I uploaded Qt 4.6.3 as well as Qt 4.7.3 runtimes. You just need only one of them. I’d recommend the later as the most of the new apps such as LinkedIn for Symbian is based on it.

Update: Based on feedback I have also added Qt Mobility 1.1.3 SIS along Qt runtime. Some users have reported Ovi Store app uses Qt Mobility as well. I guess this will fix Ovi Store always loading issue after installing Qt.

Update 2: I have now added Qt Notifications APIs SIS on the download link above. The new version of Ovi Store uses these new APIs as well.

Update 3 “€œ Recommended for Symbian ^3: Nokia team has finally made available a standalone download of the Ovi Store client app. Just visit the following link to download the latest version. Read more about this at official blog.

Direct Download Ovi Store App: http://lr.ovi.mobi/store/client-symbian-3/

Update 4 (26 Oct 2011): Download new Qt QML based beta Nokia Store app. 18mb download contains Qt runtime and the client. No need to install Qt. Get it from here.

My suggestion to Nokia / Qt Team: There should be similar Qt runtime download page optimized for mobile devices, for end users. Who disparately search on internet when Ovi Store stops working.

Update 5 (Sep-2015):
Nokia Store for Symbian is no longer available. Most of the apps are moved to Opera at http://apps.opera.com. Visit this website for Opera Store installation on your Symbian OS phone.

Have fun downloading great apps from Ovi Store!

// chall3ng3r //

New project: Make SVG icons for Symbian from any image – Free!

I am glad to announce our latest online project SVG2Go, for mobile developers targeting Symbian platform. As the name suggests, SVG2Go is for making cool looking SVG icons from any image file. And best of all, it’s online and free ;)

Start using SVG2Go online here: http://www.orison.biz/apps/svg-icon-maker/

Icons made with SVG2Go can be used for all Symbian applications made using Symbian C++, Qt and Flash Lite. Even you can use it with our other product SWF2Go, to rapidly develop cool games and applications using Flash Lite and publish them on Ovi Store.

Until now, making a nice looking SVG icon was a really hard task. The icon made using Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape doesn’t look the way designer created them, when it appeared on mobile device. Let me give you an example:

tron-icon-example

You might have checked out the Disney sponsored Tron : Tanks Arcade game on Ovi Store, made from the Tron : Legacy movie theme. Take a look it’s icon, no offense to anyone here, but I’m guessing that the developer might have not been able to produce a better icon in time, so he used this one, which doesn’t look good enough. But, the game is quite impressive, smooth graphics and play experience.

Using SVG2Go, anyone can make a really nice SVG icon instantly using the same Photoshop raster artwork. No need to experiment with SVG-T or fiddling with viewbox property. The output SVG icon looks exactly as you have made them. No tweaking needed.

As always, bellow is the screenshot of SVG2Go in action.

svg2go-screenshot

Give it a try, and do let us know of your experience with it, or any suggestions you might have. And don’t forget to share it with your fellow Symbian developers.

// chall3ng3r //

SWF2Go Professional 2.6 – Now Available as Free Trial

We are proud to announce another update of our flagship product SWF2Go Professional. This new version now natively supports latest Symbian based devices, such as Nokia N8, C7 etc.

What are you waiting for? Go ahead, and download the trial and see how easy it is to publish Adobe Flash Lite based games and applications to Ovi Store.

Also, you might like to see what kind of games are already made with SWF2Go and are available on Ovi Store. Check out some great games by Breakdesign at http://store.ovi.com/search?q=breakdesign

The biggest advantage of SWF2Go is that it’s completely standalone product. You just install it, and click the Build Project button. It’s that simple!

Download now and let us know what you think, or you might like to showcase your new game or application on our website :)

// chall3ng3r //