Personal Update

As I mentioned in the latest Mobile Mavens article on PocketGamer.biz one of the risks of being a small indie dev is that a random family crisis or localised disaster can blow your project deadlines and business plans out of the water.

I added this to my piece as it was going to press because at the same time I was packing an emergency go bag to head out to Tunisia in North Africa to attempt to rescue my father who’d fallen ill while on holiday out there (with no travel insurance, as it’s kind of a no-go area at the moment) and bring him back to the UK for treatment.

It took a week to get him back, 2 days in Tunisia trying to get him as well as possible while trying to find return flights and 5 days in France (earliest flight back was via Paris but he collapsed on the plane). Eventually I was able to take him back to the UK on the Eurostar and he’s currently comfortable in a UK hospital.

Major thanks to the British Foreign Office and consulates, Nouvelair’s excellent flight crew and the Doctors and Nurses in France and the UK as well as Dad’s friends Hamza and Yvonne who helped him out and contacted us to let us know he was ill. Having my partner Lynne back in the UK able to look up and co-ordinate things was critical to getting out again and my old MacBook Air and iPhone 6 Plus with a local data sim were priceless in terms of keeping that link and booking things, mapping etc. On the 2 hour crazy taxi drive back to the airport, the local driver got lost when his Android phone lost signal and maps, so my iPhone (which still had signal and retains the map even when offline) was able to direct him to the airport.

Of course, this has had a big impact on the update to Fish! we’ve been working on as well as burning a huge hole in our savings that we’ve been running the company on. Rather than push the release date of the update back, we’re going to split the update into two and release it in stages.

I’ve already got some major fixes and changes in place. Mostly from going through the player reviews and emails we’ve had for requests (exit goes back to the map, yay!) so the first update will have those along with some other bits at the start of March. Then the 2nd update a little later should have some of the bigger components once they’re tested, including the full new reboot of the FishNet game mode we had in Flick Fishing that gave you the ability to play multiplayer games with your friends around the world!

So, apologies for this extra delay and if you haven’t bought any of our games yet, now is the time to pick one up as we really need the sales at the moment.

 

 

Fish! on iOS/tvOS/watchOS (Universal Purchase)

Fish! on macOS

Planes Trains and Automobiles (and Fish!)  iOS/tvOS (Universal Purchase, bundle of our games!)