Face Word and MegaGuide!

We’ve got another new game out and our first book!

Apologies for the lack of updates on the website recently. This has been due to a number of things, including both of us moving home to a different country, our web host breaking down badly and then of course, transferring to a new web host.

Face Word

During all that we’ve been pretty busy and back at the start of February we released our second face controlled game FACE WORD on the App Store as a free game for the iPhone X/XS/XS Max, XR and iPad Pro 11″.

Face Word follows on from Face Candy’s silliness in using your head to control the game, but this time you have to eat letters to spell words stuck on your forehead!

If you have an iPhone or iPad with the True Depth camera (ie iPhone X series or iPad Pro 11″) grab it for FREE from the App Store now!

The Flick Fishing MegaGuide!

One of the most requested things for us to add to Flick Fishing was a full manual or the MegaGuide that we used to have included (via IAP) in the old version.

It took a while, but I’ve now finished the Flick Fishing MegaGuide (2nd Revision) and it’s available for free on Apple Books!

Apart from the basic How To Play stuff, the Flick Fishing MegaGuide gives you a handy guide to all the fish in the game and where to catch them as well as full details of all the fishing spots and even a full rundown of the quest!

As it’s on Apple Books you can open it on your iPhone, iPad or Mac and flip to it for reference while playing. Or just read it at your leisure when not fishing.

AiRburst!

Pop Pop Pop!

Strange Flavour’s classic Mac hit AirBurst is finally on iOS and it’s coming to your real world in AR!

App Store Link

AirBurst is one of the the first Strange Flavour games (as well as one of the first OSX games) and Airburst Extreme was one of the first games we launched Strange Flavour Ltd with in 2004. Both gained cult status amongst Mac gamers and even spawned an animated short “AirBurst: The Soda of Doom”, shown at Comicon 🙂

AiRburst is a brand new version of our classic game for iOS 12 and lets you play 1-4 players over WiFi in AR!

We’re starting with the primary 4 player characters, BCM, Flux, Maya and Moon and the normal Arcade game mode (with the Extreme powers from Airburst Extreme). Future updates, depending on sales, will add in the extra characters from AirBurst Extreme as well as the ones from the un-released XBox 360 version along with more game modes.

We’re borrowing a trick from RocketCat Games and releasing AirBurst at $0.99 and then increasing the price by $1 each major update. We’re also continuing with our policy of not messing about and doing sales on our titles, so the earlier you buy AirBurst, the cheaper it’ll be!
(and yes, there’s going to be a Mac and Apple TV version too!)

AiRburst is out now for iOS 12 (AR capable device required) for $0.99/99p/€0.99

Press Kit

 

 

FishNet!

We’ve finally got the first part of the big Fish! 1.3 update out and the biggest part is that we’ve brought back FishNet!

The idea of FishNet is that you can play against your friends no matter where they are. Whatever fish you catch when a FishNet game is active are recorded and at the end of the game time, the winners of Best Fish and Best Catch get medals.

FishNet games are a bit more flexible than network or pass and play games as you don’t need to be on the same network or in the same room. You can start a FishNet game, get some friends to join and just fish whenever you’ve got some play time, the FishNet keeps tabs of the scores and notifies you all when someone catches the best fish so far.

Currently, FishNet games can be from 1 day to 14 days long, but in the next update we’re going to add some quicker ones so you can resolve any bragging rights issues quickly 😉

Another new feature for this version of FishNet is FishNet Teams.

By creating a team, you (and anyone who joins your team) can pit yourself against all the other Fish! Teams in the world. Once in a team, all fish you catch count towards that team’s scores and at the end of each week and each month we award the top 3 teams medals!

Medals btw. are like bonus gizmos that boost your fishing skills automatically. They only last as long as the game you were playing (so a medal won for a 1 day game will last 24 hours and one for the monthly competition will last 30 days). So for bigger fish, play FishNet and win medals!

On the teams front. We’re going to organise some specific inter-team tournaments soon. So get your FishNet team together now!

 

 

Fish! on the App Store

Teenage Dirtbag

What on earth do you get a teenage software company for its birthday?
Strange Flavour Ltd. is 13 years old as of tomorrow (April 1st 2017). We’ve been releasing games as Strange Flavour since 2001 but went full time with it and set the company up with Freeverse as our publishing partners on April 1st 2004. (we picked that day as it’s also Apple’s birthday 😉 )

I’ve made a list of every Strange Flavour game that’s been released for this blog, but I thought you might find it interesting to hear about some of the great ones that *nearly* made it to release…

First up of course, is Airburst XBLA. This was the ultimate version of Airburst, written for the XBox 360 and unfortunately shelved very near to completion due to running out of budget and a need to shift to iOS game development when that became available to pay the bills. (which was lucky for us as that was when we wrote Flick Fishing and paid off all the debts Airburst XBLA had run up 😉 ). Airburst XBLA was a pretty awesome game though and it’s on our “One day…” list.

France France Revolution: You might remember our Apple Design Award winning game ToySight. It was a compendium of arcade games all controlled by the iSight camera and there was one game that didn’t quite make the final package as it wasn’t quite there yet.
In France France Revolution you waved your arms in time to music to attract the attention of the Scarlett Pimpernel so he could come and rescue the French Noble about to get his or her head chopped off by the Guillotine 🙂

A notable mention is one we did actually release, but it was a special project for a drug company to use at shows and was a special ToySight game where you play as a new drug fighting colon cancer (quoting the client “Best damn ass cancer game ever!”) . File that one along with the crowd controlled version of Totem Ball (and the play while you’re queuing for a Caterham thrill ride version of SlotZ Racer) under “cool but weird exhibition stuff”!

Strange Flavour’s Games

We have actually finished and released a huge number of games though. Here’s the full list of what we’ve done in the last 13 (or 16) years…

Bushfire (Mac)
Airburst (Mac)
ToySight (Mac) (also ToySight Gold with extra games)
Airburst Extreme (Mac)

Spyglass Board Games (XBLA)
Totem Ball (XBLA)
helped on Marathon Durandal (XBLA. Freeverse did most of the work, we just consulted)

The Plank (iOS)
Flick Fishing (iOS), (also Flick Fishing HD, Flick Fishing Free, Flick Fishing Free HD) and updates for 5+ years
SlotZ Racer (iOS)
Warpack Grunts (iOS)
SlotZ Racer 2 (iOS, Apple TV)  SlotZ Racer 2
SlotZ Racer Caterham Special (iOS)  SlotZ Racer Caterham Special
Apple Dash/Bob (publisher & added code) (iOS)   Apple Bob
Melvin Tiles (iOS)
Any Landing (iOS, Apple TV)   Any Landing 
Snapmatch Soccer (iOS)
Fast Fishing (iOS, Mac)
SlotZ Racer Zenos Special (iOS)   SlotZ Racer Zenos Special 
Tiny TrackZ (iOS, Apple TV) Tiny TrackZ
Fish! (iOS,Apple TV)   Fish!
SpinnYwingS (iOS) ( AppleTV and Mac coming soon!)  SpinnyWings

If you include the alternate versions of Flick Fishing, that’s 29 professional game releases in 16 years. Not bad for a tiny 2 man team. I think I’m taking the day off tomorrow 🙂

SlotZ Racer2 Desktop screens

A while back when we were putting together the demo movie for SlotZ Racer2 I rendered up a short revolving scene of some of the SlotZ Racer cars. We were going to put some desktop screens up based on this but got caught up in other work! here they are with a couple rendered up in square 2048 that should suit iPad retinas 🙂

http://www.strangeflavour.com/SFGames/DesktopScreens/slotzdesktop-2560×1440.jpg

http://www.strangeflavour.com/SFGames/DesktopScreens/slotzdesktop-ipadretina1.jpg

http://www.strangeflavour.com/SFGames/DesktopScreens/slotzdesktop-ipadretina2.jpg

Grab SlotZ Racer2 for iOS here!
slotzicon114

Strange Flavour are Back on the Mac!

After starting up as a Mac only games company on April 1st 2004 and having hits with Airburst, ToySight, Airburst Extreme and Bushfire (not to mention an Apple Design Award for ToySight) Strange Flavour have been somewhat absent from the Mac games market for a (cough) few years while writing games for the Xbox 360 and the odd hit or two for the iPhone.

We’ve always been a Mac team though (even our Xbox 360 titles were written on Macs) and while commercial pressure and some sensible direction by our excellent publishing partners Freeverse focused us on the iOS market, we’ve always wanted to be writing more Mac games and a recent switch in how we develop our games meant we’ve been able to jump back in!

Strange Flavour’s first new Mac game will be the Mac version of Fast Fishing and it will be released on our birthday, April 1st (also the birthday of another company to do with the Mac). While based on the same development version as the iOS version of Fast Fishing, the Mac version has no ads, higher resolution artwork and is written specifically for Mac controls. Future updates will also allow you to link both versions of the game and we’re working on an Oculus Rift update which will be a free update for the Mac version.

Following soon* after Fast Fishing will be another new title, Tiny TrackZ, which will be one for railway fans 🙂

Fast Fishing Mac screenshots:

http://www.strangeflavour.com/SFGames/FastFishingMac/FFMacScreen1.jpg

http://www.strangeflavour.com/SFGames/FastFishingMac/FFMacScreen2.jpg

http://www.strangeflavour.com/SFGames/FastFishingMac/FFMacScreen3.jpg

http://www.strangeflavour.com/SFGames/FastFishingMac/FFMacScreen4.jpg

http://www.strangeflavour.com/SFGames/FastFishingMac/FFMacScreen5.jpg

Strange Flavour are a small two- man games company based in the UK. Starting with the Mac games Bushfire and Airburst just after the launch of OS X, they turned full time with the start of Strange Flavour Ltd. in 2004 and a team up with their publishing partners Freeverse. After writing the game Flick Fishing on iOS it went on to become an international hit, reaching number one in the iPhone games chart and selling four million copies. Flick Fishing Free was also downloaded over 20 million times and players racked up over two thousand years of gameplay.

Contact:

Aaron Fothergill

CEO/Lead Coder

Strange Flavour Ltd.

aaron@strangeflavour.com

www.strangeflavour.com

* Please note, the person who wrote this press release is also a coder, so the word ‘soon’ has a somewhat more flexible meaning than what most people think of it as.

The State of Play 2014

Now we’ve got the main work done on our new game, Fast Fishing. We’ve got a little time to take a look at our older games and getting some much needed update work done.

I thought it might be a good idea to keep our players in the loop, so here’s the first Strange Flavour State of Play update!

Fast Fishing:
While we were hoping to have Fast Fishing ready for the iOS App Store for Christmas, it turned out not to be practical and it is now set for a January launch, alongside the OS X version.
Fast Fishing marks our first return to Mac games since the Apple Design Award winning ToySight and Airburst Extreme a decade ago. Something we’ve always wanted to do and plan to do more of!
The Mac version of Fast Fishing will also be our testbed for the Oculus Rift VR headset. It won’t be in the initial version as it takes a bit of finessing to get right (and the Oculus Rift itself is still in development), but we’re looking to have it as a free option in the Mac version once it’s ready.

Any Landing and SnapMatch Soccer:
We released two games this year. Any Landing and SnapMatch Soccer. Both used our Play Nice system for fair In App Purchases and I adjusted it in SnapMatch Soccer to make it even more fair to players by making all the purchases non-consumable. So no matter what extras you buy in the game, you can always reset the game and regain your purchases. Fast Fishing also uses this version of the system on both iOS and OS X versions.

With the release of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, there are some new screen sizes to take into account. Fortunately both Any Landing and SnapMatch Soccer work with the new screen sizes, but we’ll be doing updates to add specific iPhone 6/6+ screen modes to them and hopefully adding a few more features while we’re at it.

SlotZ Racer & SlotZ Racer 2:
If you’ve got our original SlotZ Racer game, published by Freeverse, hang onto it! With Freeverse’s purchase by ngmoco (and subsequent purchase of ngmoco by DeNA) the Freeverse App Store membership appears to have lapsed and all apps on it removed. This means that if you purchased SlotZ Racer, Warpack Grunts or The Plank, you won’t be able to re-download them (Flick Fishing was moved to DeNA’s store, so is still active).
As we don’t have any control over these apps, we originally created SlotZ Racer 2 to be a free app with all the features (and more) of SlotZ Racer unlocked so any SlotZ Racer players could get the new version and carry on playing. It also had some features that unlocked for free if you had the original game on your device. As the original isn’t available any more and can’t be re-downloaded if you’d purchased it, we’re going to unlock these features by default in the next update. While I was at it, I’ve added MFi controller support so you can race using any of the MFI controllers. This even works in multiplayer, so if you’ve got 3 friends with controllers, you can race using your iPhone connected to your Apple TV over AirPlay and play SlotZ Racer on the big screen 🙂

We’ve also noticed that SlotZ Racer 2 has some problems with iOS 8 screens, so I’ve re-written it to handle the new screen modes as well as iPhone 6/6+ The update should be submitted first thing in January and look out for some more exciting SlotZ Racer news then around the time of the Autosport International Show 😉

Warpack Grunts:
Grunts was another casualty of the loss of the Freeverse App Store. Fortunately as we still own the rights (and I still have the code hanging around), we’re looking at re-releasing Grunts under our own banner soon, with a much needed Universal update for iPad and MFi controllers. No idea on when it’ll be done as it’s a spare time project, but keep an eye out for it 🙂

Thank you all for playing our games and I hope you’ll keep enjoying them along with the new games we’ll hopefully be launching in 2015!

Aaron Fothergill