Memory of a Goldfish

This game was my first foray into Windows Phone 7 development. It is a Silverlight app based on the card game of Memory (as I knew it, though it is also known by many other names according to Wikipedia). The idea is that you turn over the ‘cards’ in pairs; if they match then you get to keep them. If they don’t match then they are flipped back over and you get another try. You can see the play screen in the image below.

In a, pun very much intended, twist, all the pictures are of goldfish. I think that this makes for some quite interesting games as the shared characteristics of all the pictures (fish, tails, fins, etc) can make it difficult to remember precisely where it was when you last saw it. However, as testament to the pattern seeking and classifying human brain, a bit of practice soon has you noticing quite subtle differences in order to fix them in your mind.

To increase the fun and challenge (and also to try and extract 79p from an upgrade from the trial version) there are achievements to try and win (though not XBox Live ones). These range from the standard ‘3 in a Row’, through the skillful ‘Perfect Recall’, to the masterful combination of luck and skill ‘Flawless’.

Whilst briefly on the subject of money, I am clearly not going to be getting rich from the tiny piles of 79 pences that are likely to be generated from the sales. So why bother setting a price at all? Some people would say that it required work to develop and as such I should seek to be recompensed for it. Whilst I am certainly not against the notion of people giving me money (under any circumstances) the reason that I set a price (even a small one) is as a way of keeping score. Of course I could just measure the number of downloads but I would maintain that most people would give anything free a chance, with relatively little thought, but even a small fee requires there to be something a bit special to have caught the eye of the user.

So far it has achieved a pretty modest 14 downloads (5 paid), something that will hopefully be remedied by this shameless self-promotion.

If you do fancy having a go yourself the deep-link to try or buy the game for your Windows Phone is here. I would be grateful for any feedback, particularly in the somewhat lonely Marketplace rating section.