Pocket God 1.10 - A Mighty Wind!
So, this week was kind of a milestone for us, we released 10 updates in 10 weeks and our 11th update is in review right now. Its kind of funny that our new update is about hurricanes because that's exactly what it has felt like since we started in January.
This was a fun one to work on for me, the last few have been fairly heavy on the art side, but this one was mainly a programming effects based update. We have wanted to do Hurricanes for a while but I've been a little concerned that I wouldnt have the time to do it justice, but once I got into it and created the initial algorithm for doing the whirlwind, everything just started falling in place and Sunday night it all just came together at the last minute like usual. I think you will like it, its pretty interactive and the pygmies look awesome when they are being whipped around in three dimensions.
In other news, today I submitted our order for our figures. Here's a pic for those who havent seen it yet.
We ordered 10 of them, 1 for each of us, and 8 to give away to big review sites at the Game Developers Conference next week. If people are interested, they cost $90 apiece and if I get enough orders I can have them do another run. I'll post pics of the final product when I get them.
This also marks the beginning of the 3rd week at the top paid app position, we know that it can be a pretty steep decline once you start moving down so we are looking for ways to extend our time at #1. Mainly it involves finding big sites that can write reviews for us (our MacWorld and fox news reviews when live this week) but we are also looking for new ways of generating interest. I think Allans viral video should be done before we start working on the next update (it is awesome), and we should have our WallPaper Apple contest on our blog tomorrow. Hmmm, I wonder if we have a good prize for the contest. Something thats much better than a T shirt and a limited edition with only 10 in existence?
Technology wise, everything was put into the hurricane effect but I did manage to create a cool tool that can take key framed animation from flash and dump it into our engine, we are now using it to animate the tree, where each palm branch and the trunk is its own bitmap and we just move, rotate, and scale the pieces instead of having a giant png for each frame. This will be a life saver for us, because keyframed animation is small, we can finally start animating bigger objects without it impacting us so much.
A Might Wind! was posted on Monday night so it should be available Friday.
The next update.... what can I say about it... I guess its a subject that appears in the New Testament quite a bit. It will also be a nice update and probably the closest to a mini game that we have built so far.
