Hello!
This post has two audiences – the lovely followers we’ve gained in recent years as we’ve started on more of our own projects and the new readers from iDevBlogADay , which is an indie developers weekly blog initiative we’re lucky to be part of.
Essentially this means I’ll be trying to keep up with writing a new (and hopefully interesting) blog post every Saturday. I did debate for a bit whether to have a separate site for these posts as some people may be glad to see only a rare monthly post from me!!
We’ll be taking the opportunity to make some improvements to the site and we’re trying our FeedBurner for our RSS feeds now – please subscribe! Also if you aren’t already be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
WHO ARE WE?
Some of you may not have a clue who Four Door Lemon Ltd are (apart from being a really weirdly named British company!).
We’re a five year old games developer based in Bradford, West Yorkshire in the North of England. We started out as 2 guys, grew quite a bit with remote contractors at one stage in 2008 (while having a core team of 5 in the office) and we currently have 7 people in the office.
It’s been a very interesting journey so far and we’ve been involved in a huge variety of projects across pretty much every gaming platform. Internally we are fairly code orientated but the last year or so has seen us performing a lot more design and working more closely with our art guys (who are mostly external contractors we have had close relationships with for many years).
When we started out we aimed to earn enough money from work-for-hire and licensing out our engine to produce our own titles for 6-12months. This money never materialised due to various reasons (not helped by the financial crisis) but we survived and then ended up falling into self-publishing on iPhone (starting with QuizQuizQuiz and more recently You Are The Ref) which has led to us starting on similar fun projects.
We see our future being a healthier split of our own work across a large amount of digital distribution platforms and client projects.
WHAT’S COMING UP?
I’ve got a list of topics for the blog but looking at other iDevBlogADay posts I’m not really sure where exactly to pitch it or whether people have specific queries that could coincide with stuff we’re working on.
Feel free to post a comment on this post or to contact me on twitter with any suggestions for posts!
We’ll be enjoying the lovely sights of Paris next week while attending the Paris Game AI Conference which we’re also proud to be sponsoring.
Please get in touch if you’d like to meet up with Simon while there or at Game Horizon or Develop Brighton in the coming weeks!
Game AI Conference 2010 Press Release
A busy few weeks at Four Door Lemon towers which sees the release of both You Are The Ref and QuizQuizQuiz World Football (links will take you to the iTunes page).
For more information on You Are The Ref please see the official site!
Nice to be getting some great coverage and reviews of the latest game project we’ve been involved with ‘Aurifi’
Read more over at Screen Yorkshire and some of the comments below!
Also be sure to download the game from Apple via iTunes
Reviews
‘’Aurifi deserves major kudos for taking an interesting risk and creating such a unique product. For those looking for something different or those who are mere curiosity seekers I would definitely recommend checking it out. I can promise you you’ve never really played anything like it before. As someone that relishes new gameplay experiences this one definitely scratches that itch.” - Gamezebo
“Aurifi marks the beginning of a completely new genre of gaming” – BornTechie
“4 out of 5 : Download this app if you’re ready to try a state-of-the-art audio game” – Snapcase07, Appolicious
“Aurifi is unlike any game available for the iPhone, and is likely the first of its kind for any gaming device.“ – Appolicious
“Aurifi uses a finely-woven tapestry of sound effects and music to create a gaming experience unlike anything you’ve experienced before.” -TouchMyApps
“Welcome to the advent of audio games on the iPhone and iPod Touch” - N4G
“This concept is totally revolutionary… This is one of the must have games. I LOVE IT!” – Davide
“…an enjoyable and oddly hypnotic experience.” - PocketGamer
We’re pleased to announce one of the projects we’ve been busy working on – please see the press release below for further information with much more information coming soon!
The website will be coming soon at http://www.youarethereferee.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Four Door Lemon announce football trivia game “You Are The Ref”
Four Door Lemon are pleased to announce the upcoming launch of You Are The Ref on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
The ‘You Are The Ref’ cult football art strip, which has been hugely popular with fans and players since 1957, features a series of awkward football refereeing decisions to challenge your knowledge of the football rules. This exciting new trivia game will bring the series to interactive platforms for the first time.
Keith Hackett said “We’re very pleased to be announcing the game version of You Are The Ref which will bring the great artwork and puzzling questions to a whole new audience as well as our long established fan base.”
The game will provide a great challenge to football fans young and old just weeks before the World Cup kicks off.
Simon Barratt of Four Door Lemon added “Working closely with Paul Trevillion and Keith Hackett during development has been great fun. I have been a football supporter from a very young age and having learned quite a bit while playing the game, I was staggered at just how little I did know about the rules of the beautiful game!”
The games launch date and further details will be released shortly.
For the latest information please go to http://www.youaretheref.co.uk and be sure to follow us on Twitter (@youaretheref) and Facebook.
For further information, please contact:
Simon Barratt, Four Door Lemon, simon@fourdoorlemon.com
www.fourdoorlemon.com
Four Door Lemon Limited develops, provides and supports cutting edge game and interactive media technology services. Since formation in early 2005 this multi-platform development studio has worked on over 30 titles across all major platforms as well as providing high-quality middleware to many other projects.
Paul Trevillion is a legendary illustrator with a career as a comic/sports artist spanning 50 years. He has met and drawn some of football’s biggest names including Pelé, Bobby Moore, George Best and Franz Beckenbauer.
Keith Hackett is a former Premier League and International referee. As well as playing his part on the pitch Keith has been involved in publications around the rules of the Beautiful Game since 1986 and has worked with Paul since the 1970s.
You Are The Ref Announcement
Three of the Four Door Lemon team are attending GDC in San Francisco from March 9th – March 13th.
We’re keen to meet up with lots of people while we’re in the US so if you’d like to talk to us please get in touch via the details on the contact page.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to our fund raising for the DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal, we’ve donated £250 + Gift Aid which is 100% of the revenue on the 20th January (As part of IndieRelief.com) plus 100% US/Canada revenue from that week.
We’re really pleased to see that IndieRelief.com raised over $140,000 so far and hope to see further support for good causes in the future from games developers small and large.
Along with the rest of the world we were very saddened by the amount of devastation in Haiti and hoped we could in some small way contribute to the funds used to help with the recovery effort.
From Sunday 17th January till Sunday 24th January ALL revenues we receive for QuizQuizQuiz in the US / Canada will be donated to the DEC Haiti Appeal.
We’re also taking part in Indie Relief on the 20th January which will see us and over 100 other indie developers donate their entire revenue for the day to charities (again we’ll donate this to the Haiti Appeal).
Please click the image below to go direct to the QuizQuizQuiz iTunes page
Please help spread the news (click the posts link and see the various sharing options such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook at the bottom of the post)
We encourage all our friends to help out in anyway they can, thanks for your help.
We’re pleased to announce we’ve been voted into the final nominations for Best Trivia Game and Best Family Game.
Please vote for us here in the Best Trivia Game category and here in the Best Family Game category.
Also please note we now have a Facebook fan site, please ‘Become a Fan’ and share with friends.
The 2009 Best App Ever Awards finish at the end of the month. Both QuizQuizQuiz and QuizQuizQuiz Xmas (FREE) are currently in the top nominees for Best Trivia App!
We’re up against some great competition so we’re asking for further help from our many thousands of fans across UK + Europe. With great professionally written localised quiz content for the English (US/Canada), English(UK), English(Australian), English(New Zealand), English(International), French, Italian, German and Spanish markets making up over 33,000 questions we want our game to reach even more people.
Please vote for QuizQuizQuiz here (and spread the word to others to do the same!)
We’d also like to say hello to Dan Grigsby over at Mobile Orchard who is offering further support in the competition to readers / listeners of their awesome blog and podcast!
'QuizQuizQuiz Xmas' cake!
We’re proud to be taking part in this years ‘The Great App Bake Off’
As well as a couple of promo codes for QuizQuizQuiz we baked a cake of the QuizQuizQuiz Xmas app icon to hopefully get competitors into the spirit!
There are some great prizes available so get baking today!
We’re proud to announce a free version of QuizQuizQuiz – ‘QQQ Xmas’.
Christmas Fun for everyone!
QuizQuizQuiz, the worldwide #1 Trivia app, is pleased to announce the release of QuizQuizQuiz Xmas a festive fun-filled FREE version.
This early present is packed with a mix of Christmas and general questions plus includes a sneak peak of the upcoming QuizQuizQuiz update which will feature
* Answering time increased to allow more sociable and less stressful play. The scoring system has been adjusted to ensure the integrity of the current global leaderboards.
* Correct answer shown if you get it wrong so you can learn for next time (can be switched off if you don’t like to be told!)
* Improved category selection to help players avoid subjects they don’t like. We’ve found that some players like to play subjects they are not strong at to try and improve. Others prefer to avoid them. We’ve updated the game engine to keep everyone happy!
* Even more content carefully targeted at each market. QuizQuizQuiz is committed to being best value quiz game with the most questions. Every one of the question sets (UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) will have new content.
* Several new achievement awards. QuizQuizQuiz is unique amongst premium trivia apps in giving players awards for a wide range of achievements in the game, and the update will contain several secret awards to unlock.
Be sure to purchase the full version now packed with over 28,000 questions in total! (varies depending on question set selected).
QuizQuizQuiz Xmas is available at http://bit.ly/qqq_xmas (iTunes link) and the full game is available at http://bit.ly/qqq_iphone (iTunes link).
The game site with trailer can be seen at http://www.quizquizquiz.com/iphone
QuizQuizQuiz_Xmas press release doc
Seen as though it’s almost 2010 it’s probably about time we increased our Facebook presence!
Please become a fan of us at http://bit.ly/fdl_facebook
This Is Football Management for PSPgo was announced today over at the playstation.com blog
We’ve been working hard on this project with Sports Director for the last few months and are pleased to be launching on the minis store.
QuizQuizQuiz, the worldwide #1 Trivia app, is pleased to announce several new features for its first update. In conjunction with this great announcement the apps sale price will be ending today (21/10/09) and going up to an incredibly great value price of $1.99 / £1.19.
- Even more content carefully targeted at each market. QuizQuizQuiz is committed to being best value quiz game with the most questions. Every one of the question sets (UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) will have new content.
- Answering time increased to allow more sociable and less stressful play. The scoring system will be adjusted to ensure the integrity of the current global leaderboards.
- Improved category selection to help players avoid subjects they don’t like. We’ve found that some players like to play subjects they are not strong at to try and improve. Others prefer to avoid them. We’re updating the game engine to keep everyone happy.
- Several new achievement awards. QuizQuizQuiz is unique amongst premium trivia apps in giving players awards for a wide range of achievements in the game, and the update will contain several secret awards to unlock.
- Multiple player profiles per device!
- Minor bug fixes and tweaks to improve performance.
In addition, we’re also working on some new multiplayer modes for future updates – watch this space!
QuizQuizQuiz is available via http://bit.ly/qqq_iphone (iTunes link) and the game site with trailer can be seen at http://www.quizquizquiz.com/iphone
QuizQuizQuiz_UpdateAnnounce
