Title 1.1
21/01/09 22:34
A big thanks to everyone’s who’s bought
our latest iPhone game SlotZ Racer and been so
positive about it. Now our publishers Freeverse
don’t think we’re quite so mad
(major kudos for them backing us all the way
even though they thought we were mad!).
The upshot is of course that I get to allocate a bit of my time to tuning, tweaking and generally adding stuff to SlotZ that it wasn’t feasible to do for the 1.0 release. There’s been a lot of feature requests, most of which were within what I’d call sane, although I’m someone who thinks that writing a single button game for a phone that has multitouch and accelerometer input is sane, so who’s to say ;)
Combine everyone’s wishlist with the bits we wanted to add once the resources were available and you end up with a pretty big list, so I can see it being split over a couple of updates (that way it doesn’t stall in approval for 2 weeks while some poor tester at Apple has to wade through a giant test list and I can get the more important ones in and on your iPhones and iPods without too long a wait).
The first of the big features was one we wanted to do but as a large chunk of the work was done over the Christmas break while Freeverse’s server team were away, had to wait until now to do. That’s the ability to email a track you’ve designed to your friends. Build it, email it and they get a simple code to download it and race on it. If you’re on the same Wi-Fi network you can also quickly zap a track from one iPhone to another.
I’ve also been working on improvements to the track editor. There’s nothing like letting 50,000 people play with something to get feedback for possible tuning. I’ve already got the ability to do more than one bridge height in and I’m looking at some navigation controls to make it easier to see your track and hop around editing it.
In the game itself, I’ve made the single player left hand compatible (the whole screen is now the button) and I’m doing some tuning to the race stats info. Things like flashing up a fuel warning when you’re about to run out of fuel for instance :) There’s also a few more options going in for messing with the CPU players. You get to tweak an “oops” factor for them. By default they know how to go round corners, but the more oops they get, the more likely they are to overcook it on a bend and spin off. If you want a bit more of a challenge, there’s a strict championship option that switches off the ability to restart races in a championship so you have to complete it without cheating (that includes changing the speed, grip and acceleration settings). Upside is you get an extra reward for winning :)
Funny thing is, nobody’s found all the features of the current build yet. We’ve got an annoying habit of adding hidden musical instruments in our iPhone games, the Plankophone in Plank and Quackophone in Flick Fishing for instance. Admittedly this one’s hidden a bit better. Then again, when you’re hunting for hidden stuff, practice always makes perfect and at least we didn’t call the game iiiiiiiiiFlower :)
More info as I wantonly chuck stuff in :)
The upshot is of course that I get to allocate a bit of my time to tuning, tweaking and generally adding stuff to SlotZ that it wasn’t feasible to do for the 1.0 release. There’s been a lot of feature requests, most of which were within what I’d call sane, although I’m someone who thinks that writing a single button game for a phone that has multitouch and accelerometer input is sane, so who’s to say ;)
Combine everyone’s wishlist with the bits we wanted to add once the resources were available and you end up with a pretty big list, so I can see it being split over a couple of updates (that way it doesn’t stall in approval for 2 weeks while some poor tester at Apple has to wade through a giant test list and I can get the more important ones in and on your iPhones and iPods without too long a wait).
The first of the big features was one we wanted to do but as a large chunk of the work was done over the Christmas break while Freeverse’s server team were away, had to wait until now to do. That’s the ability to email a track you’ve designed to your friends. Build it, email it and they get a simple code to download it and race on it. If you’re on the same Wi-Fi network you can also quickly zap a track from one iPhone to another.
I’ve also been working on improvements to the track editor. There’s nothing like letting 50,000 people play with something to get feedback for possible tuning. I’ve already got the ability to do more than one bridge height in and I’m looking at some navigation controls to make it easier to see your track and hop around editing it.
In the game itself, I’ve made the single player left hand compatible (the whole screen is now the button) and I’m doing some tuning to the race stats info. Things like flashing up a fuel warning when you’re about to run out of fuel for instance :) There’s also a few more options going in for messing with the CPU players. You get to tweak an “oops” factor for them. By default they know how to go round corners, but the more oops they get, the more likely they are to overcook it on a bend and spin off. If you want a bit more of a challenge, there’s a strict championship option that switches off the ability to restart races in a championship so you have to complete it without cheating (that includes changing the speed, grip and acceleration settings). Upside is you get an extra reward for winning :)
Funny thing is, nobody’s found all the features of the current build yet. We’ve got an annoying habit of adding hidden musical instruments in our iPhone games, the Plankophone in Plank and Quackophone in Flick Fishing for instance. Admittedly this one’s hidden a bit better. Then again, when you’re hunting for hidden stuff, practice always makes perfect and at least we didn’t call the game iiiiiiiiiFlower :)
More info as I wantonly chuck stuff in :)