Short Circuit
Short Circuit was an XBox 360 puzzle games based on the popular handheld game produced by Tiger Electronics. In Short Circuit, you would be faced with a grid of lights ranging from 3×3 to 10×10. The objective was to turn all the lights off by clicking on a light one at a time. Each time you clicked on a light, it would toggle the lights above, below, left, and right of it. Short Circuit introduced a new type of light called the three-stage light that operated similar to a stop light.
Get Short Circuit on XBox360 here.
Get Short Circuit for Android here.
If you have any issues with the Android version, please post it in this Issue Tracker.
Friday, May 12, 2017
Early last year Microsoft sent an email to registered developers letting them know that XBox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) was going to be shutting down. That meant that anyone who had purchased the XBox 360 version, would no longer be able to play the game they purchased. At that time I decided to change the Android version to being completely free with no advertisements. That was kind of my . . .
Short Circuit is Coming to Android
Monday, March 27, 2017
Following hot on the heels of my release of Droplets, I expect to be finally releasing Short Circuit for the Android soon. I don’t plan on using advertisements to support Short Circuit, instead I plan on selling the full game for no more than $1.00 USD. Since I know that people aren’t as likely to spend their hard earned money on a game that they haven’t gotten to try, I am also planning on . . .
Short Circuit Coming to Android
Monday, March 27, 2017
For a long time I have been hinting at the possibility that Short Circuit may be coming to the Android platform. Today, I am proud to officially announce that the game is now in the final stages of play testing. The game will be released as two separate apps, the full game, and a demo. You will be able to download the ad free demo and explore 20 classic levels, and 20 advanced . . .
Short Circuit has been Released on Android
Monday, March 27, 2017
I’m kind of writing this post a little more than a week after the fact. Short Circuit for Android has been released and is available in the Google Play Store. To save you some time searching for it, here are the links:
Sunday, March 30, 2014
The Xbox 360 version of Short Circuit never sold enough to actually generate any type of income. Microsoft’s policies state that they won’t pay out until the game grosses over $200. Unfortunately Short Circuit only ever grossed about $60. Since that is the only game that I have or will ever publish on the Xbox 360, that means that I have not gotten paid for my effort in producing the game. . . .
Friday, April 26, 2013
The update that I had sent to peer review has been pulled back for having too many unresolved issues. I sought to solve some of the previous controller issues and ended up create bigger problems that could lock up a system. For various . . .
Monday, April 8, 2013
Not to long ago I sent a new Xbox update to peer review. This update fixes a few minor issues that were pointed out to me, as well as redesigned the demo to show that there are in fact more than 12 levels in the whole game. Mostly though, this update only affects the demo and not so much the full game. This brings me to part two of this post, “Future Plans.” For a while now I’ve been . . .
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
After several hours of work over the last weekend, I have created solution videos for every level in Short Circuit. The videos are extremely short, so there shouldn’t be any problems viewing them on any type of internet connection. Anyways, without further ado, here’s the links . . .
Monday, March 18, 2013
Yes, folks, an update has been sent for peer review. If you’ve already purchased the game then you won’t notice many changes at all. The vast majority of the changes in this release are dealing with the demo version. I felt the demo version wasn’t a very good representative of the whole game because it gave demo players no idea how many levels there really was. Now, the demo will show all 70 . . .
Sunday, March 17, 2013
I realize that some people who have purchased Short Circuit may be having difficulty with some of the levels. I knew I had to find some way of showing players how to beat some of the levels, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to do it. During development I wrote down the solutions to each level, but most people probably wouldn’t understand if I just released my notes. After pondering over this . . .
Saturday, March 16, 2013
As of March 11th, Short Circuit has sold a whopping 26 copies and had 474 copies of the demo downloaded. That means that the game currently is holding a trial to purchase ratio of 5.49%. From what I hear that’s a decent figure, but taking a second look at the game I think it could do better. The first problem that I see is that currently the demo only shows six levels for each classic and . . .
Friday, March 1, 2013
It’s very humbling to see someone else playing a video game that I built, and it’s an awesome feeling watching someone that I have never met play it in a You-Tube video That’s a feeling that I simply can’t describe effectively. I entered into this adventure of creating Short Circuit so that I could finally get the game out of my head. It wasn’t directly an attempt at making money, though I . . .
Thursday, February 28, 2013
As promised, RealLAGgamers has provided a review of the Full version of Short Circuit. I’d highly recommend that you watch his video, and please be sure to give him a like to let him know he’s doing a good job. Anyways, here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GEXYXgYXPc Previously I’ve mentioned that there was a complaint about the total size of the game, and I explained that it was . . .
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Ever since its release, I’ve been patiently waiting for the reporting on the Xbox Indie Developer site to unlock so that I can see the statistics on how well it’s doing. As of a few days ago I started sending codes to various video game news sites in an attempt to get them to review my game. Today, as I’m stumbling across the internet, I find that a You-Tube review has already been made, and . . .
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Short Circuit has passed through the peer review process and is now available for purchase on the Xbox Indie Marketplace. If you’ve been following this development blog then you would know there are some minor bugs in the game that only affect users when they first purchase the game. Rest assured that these bugs will be repaired. The process of repairing bugs is the same as getting the game . . .
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Short Circuit is now 75 percent of the way through peer review. That means that as long as no major bugs are discovered, we only need one or two more reviews for it to be ready to go to the Marketplace. This most recent review was extremely short and to the point. In fact, the . . .
Monday, February 18, 2013
As of this moment, Short Circuit is about 58% of the way through peer review. The last few reviews have literally had nothing negative to say about the game. In fact, one of the most recent reviews stated that they had gone all the way through the “Evil List” and found nothing. For you non-indie developers, the “Evil List” is a list of tests that developers reviewing a game should perform upon . . .
Monday, February 11, 2013
Short Circuit has been back in peer review now for about three days, and it has gotten one review in that time. This latest review points out what I consider to be a very minor bug. The reviewer suggests that I pull the game back and fix it, but unless some major bugs are revealed I think I’m going to let it ride. What was the bug, you ask? According to the reviewer, if you start the game in . . .
Monday, February 4, 2013
So, during testing it was discovered that when I removed the extra references, a few not quite so extra references were removed as well. This had the wonderful effect of not displaying the game at all. Essentially, instead of displaying all those pretty screens that I’ve worked so hard on, it displayed only a single display of flashing colors. It’s kind of like what you might have seen on the . . .
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
I have sent Short Circuit for its third round of peer review. I feel confident that it will make it through peer review this time, and I look forward to finally seeing it on the Xbox Indie Marketplace where it belongs. During its second round of peer review it only got one review, and it noted that when the game started up, it expected input from the first controller for selecting which hard . . .
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Short Circuit went through the second round of developer testing and got absolutely no reponses. Operating on the idea that for every one person who posts at least 5 others played the game, and upon the concept that most people will only post if they find something wrong, I then sent the game for peer review. It sat in peer review for a week until it finally got a response. A single minor bug . . .
Friday, January 4, 2013
Ok, well Short Circuit has been submitted for developer play testing again. In the previous round of play testing they found a few things that needed some attention. Of course, in keeping with my promise to keep you guys up to date, this post will tell you what they were. This time there was only one major bug reported. If you selected the “Purchase” menu option it required you to use the . . .
Thursday, December 27, 2012
What can I say? I’m dedicated, or something like that. I know I previously posted that I was going into Holiday Silence and would not be working on this, or any of my projects. Well, I just couldn’t help myself. As I mentioned when I started, this project has been whispering to me for years, and has been getting louder the whole time. I finally started this project when the whispering became a . . .
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
I recieved my first set of reviews for Short Circuit recently, and have since pulled the game back out of the review process in order to fix the issues. Here’s a small list of what was found:
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Friday, December 7, 2012
As of this moment, Short Circuit is awaiting peer review in the XBox Developers portal. If it is approved through peer review then it will then be available for purchase from the XBox Game Marketplace. It’s my understanding that once it’s approved I will be given several codes that I can give out so that some of you can . . .
Thursday, December 6, 2012
I’m very excited to say that Short Circuit will be submitted for developer review soon. That means with any luck, you should be able to purchase it for your Xbox console very soon. In the mean time, I’m working very hard to make it the best game it can be, and to make sure it passes the developer review. Last night I finished creating and testing the rest of the advanced levels. I also added . . .
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
First change to take note of is updated graphics. I noticed that the buttons looked kind of chunky when they were scaled up for the smaller puzzles, and I felt that just made the game look like raw crap. So I’ve redesigned all the buttons to use just two very large custom button images. I decided to draw the image much larger than they’ll ever need to be so that they will look nice and . . .
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
While discussing this project with my wife last night, I posed the question to her about how many levels should be contained in the game. During our short and informative conversation about this topic, it was brought to my attention that unless a player could somehow resume their previous game, they’d soon tire of having to redo levels just so they can beat them all. This made me ask myself . . .
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
So much done in such little time. Actually, the updates for today have actually been in the works for a few days but just weren’t finished when I posted last. The project is looking a lot more like a real game every day, but without further ado, let’s get on with the changes. One of the largest changes completed today doesn’t really involve a lot of graphical changes, but dealt directly with . . .
Monday, November 19, 2012
Short Circuit really seems to be taking shape. I’ve now added in functionality for playing background music and sound effects. I’m not all that great with composing music, so I managed to find a bunch of royalty free songs from Matt McFarland that I thought sounded nice. I’ve also recorded a simple sound effect for clicking on the buttons, thus the game provides some audio response. There’s no . . .
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Today I made at least a little bit of progress as I’ve added in a means by which to track the players high scores for each level. Of course, I don’t yet have it saving this information, that will have to be added later. Along with the scoring, I’ve also added a Level clear screen where it will tell you what score you got from the last level…assuming you finished it of course. Curently . . .
Friday, November 2, 2012
Moved a large portion of the code into a separate code library and created a basic game editor. This may not sound like a lot, but it really as a lot of work as I had to ensure that only universal methods were included in the library. This also means that I had to essentially recreate all existing functionality for the editor and make it use reverse logic from the actual game. In the game, . . .
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
I had a few minutes to spare this morning before work so I did a little bit of work on Short Circuit. The end result is that the grid size is now variable and can go from 3 to 10. Currently, it's only one single number that specifies both height and width of the grid. I may change that later. I also added the tri-state lights, and as you can . . .
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Day 1 of development is over with quite a bit done. Today I’ve managed to get the core of the game engine up and running so the game resembles the original Lights Out by Tiger Electronics. So far I have it displaying a 5×5 grid of two state lights, and those lights react correctly when clicked upon. I’ve also implemented a . . .
Monday, October 22, 2012
Today I’ve started coding on a new game project. Actually, it’s not a “new” game project as it’s one that I’ve had laying around for years. I started it once a long time ago using GameMaker, then I started to rewrite it in Visual Basic. For various reasons such as virus attacks, system crashes, and various operating system reinstallations all files associated with those projects have been lost . . .