Ordinary Day

How to gift Big Fish Games

Wed, 19 Nov 2014 18:16:35 GMT

Some of you know already that I work for Big Fish Games for my day job, and because of this, I thought I’d take a moment to provide some helpful data on how to give our games as gifts if you want to give casual games of the sort we sell to your loved ones!

What we sell

First of all, if you don’t know already, what we sell are things in the general category of “casual games”, ranging from Hidden Object-type adventures (some of which can be quite complicated and dark) to Match 3 type games (think Bejeweled, Gummy Drop, or one of my personal Big Fish favorites, Unwell Mel) to card-type games (think Fairway Solitaire and Fairway Solitaire Blast), and many more.

What platforms our games can be played on

We sell games for PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.

Gifting PC and Mac games

We have a page for buying gift credits for standard editions of our download games right over here. (Standard Edition as opposed to Collector’s Edition–the Collector’s Editions of games have extra content available, and they cost more.)

Note that a lot of our recent releases are Free to Play style games, meaning anybody can download and play them, but they have in-app purchases. Gift credits should basically be used on non-Free-to-Play type games.

Gifting iOS games

We sell our iOS games through iTunes, of course. So there are a few different ways you can go about giving out our iOS games as gifts.

One: we have a bunch of app bundles available for our iOS games and you can see them on our site here. And we’ve got a Help page up about app bundles here.

From what I’ve seen googling around, you can buy an app bundle via your computer in iTunes and then you can download the individual apps onto your iOS device, even if you’re not running iOS 8 yet. So if you want to give an app bundle to somebody, and they don’t have iOS 8 on their phone or iPad yet, have them redeem the gift code on their computer. See this post for a longer explanation.

Two: If you want to give an individual game as a gift, you can do that too via the iTunes app store’s usual functionality. As with our desktop games, a lot of our iOS games are Free to Play. So if you see specific Big Fish Games with a visible price on them, those are ones you can give as gifts. (For example, Mystery Case Files: Return to Ravenhearst, a long-time favorite of mine.)

I don’t know yet whether iTunes app store credit can be applied to in-app purchases on our iOS Free-to-Play games. I’ll update this post when I find out.

Gifting Android games

The vast majority of our Android games are available via either the Amazon app store or the Google Play store.

On Amazon, I don’t see an immediate way to give specific games as gifts–but I do see that you can give Amazon coins as gifts to people, and they can then spend them on apps. Alternately, you can always also buy Amazon gift cards for folks and they can spend those on apps as well.

On Google Play, it’s a similar situation–I don’t see a specific way to give an individual game as a gift. And checking the Help on Google Play’s store, I see that you can only buy physical gift cards for people if you want to give them credit to the store. You can’t buy store credit online for someone else’s account, just your own.

I don’t know yet whether Amazon and Google Play store credit can be applied to in-app purchases on our Android Free-to-Play games. I’ll update this post when I find out.

What games should you buy?

So enough with the details–what games do I recommend?

First, here is an earlier post I did on the topic of my favorite games, including several from Big Fish.

(Note: since I wrote that post I have in fact started playing “Escape from Ravenhearst”, but be advised that that game is particularly dark compared to a lot of our usual fare. It’s one of the few games we’ve published with an actual content warning. It’s not kidding. So if that’s a concern, you might skip that one and go to the next one in the series.)

Some more recent releases that aren’t mentioned in that post: I’m VERY fond of Fairway Solitaire Blast, which is a Free to Play game, but which strikes a decent balance between playability (you don’t really need to buy extra perks to solve levels) and reasonably priced extra perks (you can drop 99 cents on a new pack of lives if you don’t want to wait for your lives to recharge).

And in terms of full-download, premium-type games, I like the “Awakening” series as well, which starts with “Awakening: The Dreamless Castle”. “Empress of the Deep” is pretty cool, too, and it’s got sequels as well.

Any questions?

Any questions? Recommendations to others about your favorite casual games? Tips on how to give games as gifts? Drop a comment and let me know!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

comments

Big Fish has game bundles now for iOS 8!

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 20:04:02 GMT

We just deployed this to sync up with iOS 8 coming out, and since I did the testing on the pages for it, I shall take this opportunity to point at this and go HEY LOOK A SHINY THING!

Namely, if you’re an iOS 8 user, you can now install some of our games in app bundles. Buying them in a bundle means you get all of them more cheaply than if you bought the individual games. But if you buy the bundle, the individual games will then deploy to your Apple account, and show up as individual games on your iOS device.

We advertise the bundles on our site even though you do have to click over to the iOS app store to actually get them. We have a total of nine bundles available–two each for English, French, and German, and one for Japanese. So if you want to see some examples, here you go:

To the best of my knowledge you DO have to have an iOS 8 device in order to be able to install bundles–I’ve tested this via an iPad running iOS 6, and the app store claimed that the bundles weren’t available to me. So if this is something you’re interested in, be sure you’ve updated your device to iOS 8.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

comments

And for all my Canadian friends, a belated Canada Day present!

Wed, 03 Jul 2013 16:16:18 GMT

I was up until stupid-o’clock in the morning between Monday night and Tuesday morning, along with several other teammates, launching a shiny new thing: we opened up our streaming games service, Big Fish Instant Games, for Canadian users!

So now, if you’re a PC user or an owner of an Android device in either the States or Canada, for a small monthly fee you can have access to any game in our streaming catalogue. You can save your progress and pick it up again across devices and computers, even! (It IS PC and Android only right now, folks, my apologies on that–as a Mac user and owner of iOS devices, I want to see us streaming games onto those platforms too! But we’re working on that part.)

Anyway, Canadians, go clickie and have a look! You don’t have to fork over any money just to try out the system. You can even play games for a short time without making an account, and if you like what you see, then you can make a trial account and have full access to all the games for a week. And look at it this way–if you subscribe, you can consider it a small loan to me, given the high likelihood I’ll be channeling that money right back into fine Canadian traditional music, Montreal-style bagels, and Growers cider. ;D Everybody wins!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

comments

Internets, I give you my new author pic

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 23:17:50 GMT

At the day job this afternoon, my team’s having a little party for our lead dev’s birthday! The theme is mustaches, so there are cookies and cupcakes with mustaches decorating them. And they brought in fake mustaches (the box for which was helpfully labelled EMERGENCY MUSTACHES, y’know, for all your whisker-impairment needs) for all of us to wear.

However, nobody said how we were supposed to wear them. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a QA engineer demonstrating ‘boundary testing’!

Mustache Hat

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

comments

Good news everyone!

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 05:02:55 GMT

This is definitely one of those times where I need me an icon of Professor Farnsworth from Futurama, because he’s totally in my head right as I type this!

But the news, oh, it is good. It is SHINY. Internets, I’m getting promoted! QA Engineer II, baby! This comes from an excellent year of slurping up Python and finally bending my brain around class-based coding–this is what I get for having learned how to code long enough ago that object-oriented programming wasn’t really a thing yet, so it took me a while to get the idea down. But it’s in there now and WOO! PROMOTED!

*does a little dance*

There is compensation involved, a raise as well as a bonus, and oh, there will be a Shiny Thing. A very, very Shiny Thing. It’s about time to upgrade my Macbook, and this news is going to let me do it!

Winnowill, mind you, has served me well (and only those of you who are fellow Elfquest fans will understand the number of giggles I get out of typing that phrase, ha!) and does hold the record to date for longest-operating laptop I’ve ever owned. I got this MacBook back in December of 2007, which means that as of this December, Winnowill will be hitting her five year mark.

However, that’s an eternity in laptop terms and Winnie IS getting a bit long in the tooth. Specifically, she is just a touch too old to be able to run Mountain Lion. So I want a laptop that’ll let me continue to be upgradable along with the OS, at least for the next five years or so! The only question is going to be, whether I commit to a higher-end Macbook Air (because SO SHINY), or whether I go with a Macbook Pro.

There must be much comparison of specs. And thinking hard about what I need out of the next Laptop of Awesomeness to join the Murknet.

Though I gotta admit, if I wind up with an Air, that box is totally getting called Aroree. <3

As to what I’ll do with Winnowill–actually, I’m not convinced yet I’ll be decommissioning her. Winnie DOES dual boot between Lion and Win 7, and having Win 7 around is handy sometimes, not only for testing purposes but also just for playing our games! And as Mac OS continues to develop, it’ll be handy as well to have a somewhat older version around. So we’ll see. If I wind up with an Air, Winnie could also continue to be my iTunes box since I DO have a certain number of bands for whom buying physical CDs is still absolutely essential! (Great Big Sea and Le Vent du Nord, of course!) So many choices before me!

And SHINY THINGS! And promotions! And another awesome year to look forward to at Big Fish! Which, I might add, is now the longest job I’ve had EVER, as I’ve passed my previous record of 3 years, 7 months–which was how long I was at Attachmate. This coming January will be my four-year mark!

EEEEEE! \0/

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

comments

Help Felix Find a Cure update

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 16:42:22 GMT

I’m informed by the woman who’s directing our Help Felix Find a Cure campaign that if people would like to donate to it without buying the multimedia package we’re selling, then checks made out to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation may be mailed to Big Fish Games, ATTN: Kate Brinks. On the memo field of the check, you should include “In association with Big Fish Games”.

Any checks thusly received will be sent in with our final donation to the BCRF.

Our corporate address is listed over here. Kate’s here in the Seattle office so if you wish to send in a check for the campaign, you should send it here.

Thanks, folks, for anything you can do.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

comments

Okay fine, more on Breast Cancer Awareness

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 21:28:43 GMT

I thought I was going to have little to say on this, but apparently I was mistaken. This is what I get for this whole month being one long hammering of breast cancer breast cancer breast cancer breast cancer for me so far, and it’s not even half over yet.

All you folks asking your online friends to post status updates and/or wear pink or whatever, your hearts are in the right place, but I implore you: if you really want to do something to help fight not only breast cancer but cancer in general, then what would really be best if you donated to the cause. Find whatever means of donation works for you. I’ve already posted about the Help Felix Find a Cure campaign my workplace is running. And my local Safeway is taking donations all month; your own local grocery store may be doing the same. There are a plethora of donation options available if you expend a bit of effort to look. And consider donating to other forms of cancer research–because breast cancer isn’t the only version by a long shot, and men and women both suffer from its various forms. It was cancer of the brain that gave my mother epilepsy and ultimately killed her, so, um, yeah, been very well aware of cancer all my life.

I have been privileged to know several women both locally and online who have fought the same fight I have, or who are even currently fighting it. And I feel that for the sake of these women, the best thing I can do is to make what donations I can to the cause, as well as ask you all to consider doing the same. Updating your status on Facebook or wearing a pink shirt ultimately accomplishes very little. Throwing actual cash at actual research, however, can save lives.

Besides, Internetz, c’mon. I don’t even use a purse for the most part. I use a backpack, which ain’t nearly as sexy and girlie. And the only pink article of clothing I currently own raises a lot more awareness of Great Big Sea than it would of breast cancer, given that that’s what’s actually emblazoned on said article of clothing. Given that it is also now October, I ain’t wearing that out without wearing several layers over it, which kinda defeats the whole purpose, y’know?

Anyway. I’ve sent email to the coworker running the Felix campaign to see if I can drum up a way for non-Windows users to donate without buying the actual multimedia package. I’ve also been donating to Safeway’s efforts the last couple of times I’ve bought groceries there. Again, please consider doing the same. It’ll mean a lot more than status updates. Thanks.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

comments

Help Felix find a cure

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 04:05:05 GMT

It’ll probably surprise few of you that I’m actually going to have little to say what with it being Breast Cancer Awareness Month; anyone who’s read me for a while will know I’ve had plenty to say on the subject already.

However, I will spread the word about this. My workplace, Big Fish Games, is having a fundraiser to raise money for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. We’re selling little $5 packs of multimedia downloadable goodies, including wallpapers, screensavers, and avatars. So if you like the games we sell, consider checking this fundraiser out.

You can get all the details and buy the download package right over here. Fair warning though: the download being sold is a Windows executable file, so not immediately interesting to non-Windows users. (I’ll be asking the folks at work if there are any plans to sell equivalent download packages or other goodies for the Mac users.)

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

comments