iOS Games Archives - Strange Flavour Ltd

Face Word and MegaGuide!

May 24, 2019May 18, 2019 by Zwilnik

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.

Face Candy!

May 24, 2019January 7, 2019 by Zwilnik

Your Face is your controller, we’ve just released our first Face Control game!

While updating our ARKit 2 game AiRburst I wanted to try out the ARKit’s “other side” feature of face mapping. A while (ok over a decade) ago, we wrote the Apple Design Award winning ToySight games pack using Apple’s iSight camera, so camera controlled games are something we like to mess with. That and the opportunity to write a game that involves players sticking their tongues out seemed to good a thing to miss out on.

Face Candy is our new (free) game for iOS that uses the unique Face Mapping features of ARKit to control the game with your face!

Hook the candies with your nose and stick your tongue out to slurp them in!

Avoid the bombs, electric shocks and other nasties and grab as much candy as you can before you run out of time!

Collect 3 in a row of the same candy and score bonuses!

Unlock new face features and customise your look!

If you’ve got an iPhone X, XR, XS, XS Max or an iPad Pro 11″ then grab Face Candy and have some silly fun!

Face Candy (iOS.. Free)

and if you’re playing Face Candy, take a look at this vid showing you how to score lots of points, which helps to unlock all the extra goodies 🙂

It’s Back!

May 24, 2019September 10, 2018 by Zwilnik

Guess what’s coming very soon…

Flick Fishing Redux

May 24, 2019July 17, 2018 by Zwilnik

Time to stop messing around 🙂

When we wrote the original Flick Fishing for the iPhone back in 2008, we never realised just how influential or long lasting a game it would be.

Due to change of ownership and management of our publishing partners we gradually lost the ability to update the original version and decided to focus on different games for a while. However the fans wanted Flick Fishing and we rebooted and relaunched the game as Fast Fishing and then Fish!, deciding that launching with the same name but as a different product might be confusing (the original app SKU not being under our controlFlick ).  What we’ve realised since then is most of the players buying Fish! have been searching for Flick Fishing and are more confused by the name change and lack of Flick Fishing on the App Store than it being a new product. It also doesn’t help that Fish! is a terrible search term. So, let’s de-confuse it a bit…

From the 1.4 Update on 19th July, Fish! will now be Flick Fishing (or Flick Fishing Redux as its full name 😉 ). It’s still, as always, the Flick Fishing you’ve grown to love, but we’ve stopped messing around calling it a different name.

The 1.4 update will be simultaneous on iOS, macOS and tvOS and features more fish, a new fishing spot and a new system that lets you collect powerups to build your own custom fishing rod!

Fish! (soon to be Flick Fishing) App Store Link  

and on the Mac App Store..

FishNet!

May 24, 2019March 18, 2018 by Zwilnik

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

Fish! for macOS

December 2, 2017 by Zwilnik

The macOS version of Fish! is now up on the Mac App Store. That means Fish! is now on every single Apple platform, macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS!

Here’s the Mac App Store link Fish! For macOS https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/fish/id1313955304?mt=12

and here’s the iOS version link (which also counts as the watchOS and tvOS version) Fish! For iOS/AppleTV https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fish/id966194870?ls=1&mt=8

The App Stores are pretty broken for smaller devs like ourselves at the moment. Not only does the search ignore a new app until it gets a few zillion downloads, it also doesn’t show an app even if you type its name in exactly (on the Mac App Store for instance, it’s impossible to find Fish! or Strange Flavour by search). So we’re reliant on the direct web links.

Unfortunately that’s now broken since iOS 11 as the new desktop version of iTunes removed the iOS App Store it means you can only use an iOS App Store link on an iOS device. (Likewise you can’t buy an AppleTV or MacOS app unless you’re using the device specific App Stores).

What we’d love to see is a cross platform web based App Store that lets you buy apps for all your Apple devices in once place (or at least from any device). Your account already knows what devices you have anyway, so the store should be able to warn you against buying them for the wrong device and it would make the App Store a lot more accessible to everyone (not to mention letting it tempt people away from other platforms 😉 ).

Don’t wait!

December 1, 2017November 7, 2017 by Zwilnik

Now the wait is over, the Fish! 1.2.2 update is out and the AppleTV version is waiting for approval I can keep everyone up to date on what else we’re doing 🙂

Firstly, time to reiterate our policy on pricing and sales. Having realised that paid apps are probably our only chance of actually paying the bills, we decided some time ago that we’d focus on them and stick with a “No sales” policy.
The philosophy behind this policy is that we don’t want to mess our players around with variable prices for games and set a reasonable price for them.
So there’s no point waiting until one of our games goes on sale. If you want to play it, buy it now. It won’t get any cheaper and if they’re not selling early on, we can’t afford to update them and may even have to drop them entirely.

What’s next for Fish! ?

The next big update will be in the new year. We’re going to be adding quite a bit more cool stuff in this update. Now I’ve got the UI rewrite out of the way, we can focus more on content. There’s going to be more classic Flick Fishing features returning too!

Also, I’m dabbling with the Mac version of Fish! If you’ve got the macOS version of Fast Fishing from the Mac App Store, drop us a line as we’d love to set you up with a free copy once it’s up and running as a thank you for your support.

Download Fish! Now from the App Store! (Fish! is Universal Purchase, so buying the iOS version also gets you the Apple TV version)

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fish/id966194870?ls=1&mt=8

If you do want to try a fun little free game of ours by the way, we do have SpinnYwings on the App Store for you to play. Give it a go!

SpinnYwingS on the App Store

Fish! 1.2 Update (it’s Flick Fishing really ;) )

September 26, 2017September 24, 2017 by Zwilnik

I got the approval message from the App Store yesterday for our huge Fish! update, so it’s set to go live this week (to be precise, 00:00 28/9/17 Australian time). Flick Fishing is back baby!

This update is kind of a big deal for Adam and myself as it’s the first time in a while where we’ve been able to set a decent block of time aside from doing contract work etc. that pays the bills to focussing on one of our longest running games and do a solid update for it. It helped that we’ve had a ton of great feedback from players who’ve been playing since Flick Fishing days and a huge part of this version is getting more of my game design features from Flick Fishing into Fish! The biggest of those familiar new elements is the collection of ‘junk’ items from treasure chests, which are now the method for unlocking gizmos, reels and rods, but also unlock a brand new, just like it never went away, Xtreme mode 🙂 (for those not brought up on Flick Fishing, Xtreme mode unlocks all the same fishing spots, but with bigger and tougher fish, so it’s a gameplay mode for the more experienced players, but with bigger fish as a reward).

We’re seriously hoping that Fish! can get more of our old Flick Fishing fanbase back with us. We weren’t able to continue updating Flick Fishing for various reasons after our publishing partners Freeverse were bought and their App Store account was eventually closed. Because the original game was on their account, it meant we couldn’t update it and so we ended up with Fish! as a new SKU (which means there’s no way to let original Flick Fishing players know about it directly). So it’s annoying but did give us the opportunity to do a fresh start on the project (even if I did re-use the actual fishing mechanic code 😉 ) which makes it a lot easier to keep updated in future.

If you’re a Flick Fishing fan, now’s the ideal time to get back into the game and pick up Fish! from the App Store. Don’t wait for it to go on sale as we’ve got a standing policy of “No Sales” (they don’t work any more for smaller devs like ourselves) so the price isn’t going to get any lower 🙂

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fish/id966194870?ls=1&mt=8

Pre WWDC Update Update :)

May 30, 2017 by Zwilnik

Well, it’s WWDC next week and one of the things we’re all expecting is the end of 32 bit iOS apps.

Luckily for us, all but one of our current games are already 64 bit and the last remaining one (SlotZ Racer Caterham Special) should have its 64 bit update submitted before WWDC.

This does give me a prod to update you all on what we’re doing behind the scenes to keep our games fresh and what updates to expect either soon or eventually 😉

Fish!

Fish! is in the process of a very big rewrite. It’s taken a lot longer than planned for its update as we realised there was a lot of stuff we really could do with changing so it can easily be updated across iOS, tvOS and macOS without huge waits in between each version. As the aim is to have the iOS and tvOS versions (at least) able to play multiplayer between each other, that ability to update simultaneously is pretty important. The good news though is that while it’s taking longer, it does mean we’re going to be including more of your favourite elements from our original Flick Fishing in the game and the re-engineering will make it faster for us to do updates in the future.

If you’ve got any particular favourite bits of Flick Fishing you’d like to see in the updates, now’s a good time to let us know. Either through our contact page, or on Strange Flavour’s Facebook page!

SpinnYwingS

SpinnYwingS has soft launched rather nicely and has picked up a decent number of players in the HeyPlay system who are busy challenging each other in multiplayer games. We’re going to be doing some more point updates to SpinnYwingS and gradually introducing more content to unlock.

Tiny TrackZ

Once Fish! has had its big update, I also plan to re-engineer Tiny TrackZ to allow us to update it faster and add more content easily.

SlotZ Racer

The SlotZ Racer games are now relatively old tech, but once SlotZ Racer Caterham Special is updated, they’ll all still happily work on new devices and should be good for a few years. Any non critical update focus is going to be solely on SlotZ Racer 2 though and ideally I’d like to be writing SlotZ Racer 3, but that will be a little way off probably 🙂