What's in a name...

It wasn't easy for me to find a good name for my first game. And it should be nothing less than outstanding of course. I decided to use the "queer foreign word method". For that, you have to write down some five-ish keywords that you associate with your game and feed them to google translate. Go through all the languages and take the one word where it makes click to you.

For me, it was the Xhosa word "gexa" which means "stagger". It's a beauty :)

I decided against "pööre" (Estonian for "rotate"), "ਚੱਕਰ" (Punjabi for "dizzy") and "vrrt" (Hindi for "circle").

Don't forget the second step after deciding for a name: google it! Luckily, there is only an american energy company named Gexa Energy, a transport company and an automobile club. Nothing "dangerous". Speaking about it, a while back I started a block named "alsnuff.de". I forgot to google and oversaw that there is a film genre "al snuff". I spare you the details. If you're brave enough google for it, but be warned: it's absolutely not for the faint of heart...

Why Mickey Mouse prevents me from using Ravel's Bolero in my games

Gexa is an action / skill game that increases in difficulty with time. Because of that, I thought that the music piece Bolero of the french composer Maurice Ravel would fit perfectly. Especially, as it is in public domain since April 2016.

Here comes Mickey. Disney is afraid to loose the copyright of Mickey Mouse and all the other Disney characters to the public domain. Because of that, the company, along with other companies, lobbies to keep extending the copyright duration of material published after 1922.

At first I thought that it's a pity, but Ravel was French, so that does not have to concern me. But, as so often, I was wrong. International copyright treaties are not that easy. Again, the US government monkeywrenched my plans: there is a rule of the shorter term that says that material from foreign origin which has a shorter copyright period than the own contry is legal to use. But, of course, the US, among others, does not respect that rule.

So no Ravel for me. Instead, I have chosen Dance Macabre from Sait-Saens - he is longer dead :)

New and bigger logo

I like it. I needed a new logo because the old one I had only had a resolution of 192x192 pixel and was saved as a png file. For publishing to the Google Play Store, you should have a much bigger logo (512x512 pixel). Scaling my small logo up was not an option as the quality would suffer.

The old logo was made with several screenshots of my game and combining them with Gimp. That was a pita to make. Luckily in the meantime, I familiarized myself with Inkscape. And that was my luck. I created that logo in less than 10 minutes because basically it consists of some circles and 3 lines ;)

With that, I could export even the small logos to get a better quality for every size. That is because a vector graphic is a lossless format that can scale to every size.