Hey Everyone,
Just saw Flight of the Concords in concert last night, it was pretty hilarious, even though their second season wasn't that great, they were. I'm a little tired today because of it, the night before we were up til 5 in the morning submitting the update, then I was at the world golf tour offices all day monday and Flight of the Concords that night. lol, I find myself just staring at the Post New Thread screen trying to think of stuff to write.
Anyway, I guess that jump started me a little bit to talk about last week. And speaking on Jumping (so clever), Doodle Jump added a secret Pygmy unlockable which was really cool. Igor Pusenjak, Doodle Jumps creator, contacted us a little over a week ago about the idea. They went from like #70 to #27 in a matter of days since the release and I think it helped up climb back up to #5 over the weekend. Very cool, in the future we will probably return the favor and add a Doodle Jump mechanic to Pocket God, we really want to enhance our loading logic so we can pop up something interactive really quickly while the rest of the game loads. Even before Igor approached us, we were thinking of doing something like Doodle Jump during that loading time. Don’t hold me to this though, its still just an idea not sure which update we will make this happen. We also had discussions with the developer of sway to do something similar. I still think it’s good idea, I just couldn't commit to an actual update where we would incorporate his character.
As far as the Surf's Up! update goes. It was a lot bigger than expected. It's probably fair to say that most people realize the tsunami will open a new underwater area for the Pygmies to explore. I'm not going to go into too much detail because I want people to be surprised when they see what's underwater but I can tell you there are no surfboards and it’s very dangerous. BTW, the new sacrifice is a bit of a game as well. At first it’s easy, but to take it to its limit is very difficult.
Not really much to talk about on a technical front. just that because the underwater area is so different than the other two islands, there was a lot of work making sure things were shutdown from the island properly before going underwater and then making sure that they worked fine when moving back from underwater to the island (even after switching islands while underwater). I also experimented with some soft body physics effects but I couldn’t get it to work perfectly, after a couple of days wrestling with it, I ended up scrapping it for some animations that Allan created (which looks great).
In other news, we will probably hit 1 mil sales tomorrow. I would love to get some sales figures from Crash Bandicoot and Koi Pond to see where they are. I'm sure that both games have already passed this mark. It’s been about 45 days ago since Koi Pond reported 900k sales. It would be easy for them to hit this mark in that amount of time.
Our next update will probably be a cleanup update, Hdgreen was kind enough to help us organize some of the bugs that were reported from our blog and all the forums. We were able to fix the big ones like the god stat screen not saving, but a lot of bugs were not reproducible, so we want to go back and try and get those to happen and fix them for the next update. We will probably add achievements to the next update as well. It’s something we have been thinking about for a while and this seems like the right time to do it.
Also started our new game today, it will probably be a couple months before I can really say much about it. I am looking to prototype the main game play functionality so we can have something that really feels satisfying to play. It will be an action game, a little different than what people expect from us, but I think everyone will really like it. So far, the art that Allan has doing for it looks incredible. He is really working on a new art style just for this game and I was blown away when he sent a pic of the main character today.
edit: oh wait!!! I almost forgot the most important thing. Some of you may have noticed that I just cannot come to use the word Oog when talking about the Pygmies. Well, we gave up on Oog, from this pointon, their name is officially Pygmies. No one actually complained about the word, they just thought that islanders were too close to Pacific Islanders. So, from here on out, Pygmies it is, on the island of Oog.
Just saw Flight of the Concords in concert last night, it was pretty hilarious, even though their second season wasn't that great, they were. I'm a little tired today because of it, the night before we were up til 5 in the morning submitting the update, then I was at the world golf tour offices all day monday and Flight of the Concords that night. lol, I find myself just staring at the Post New Thread screen trying to think of stuff to write.
Anyway, I guess that jump started me a little bit to talk about last week. And speaking on Jumping (so clever), Doodle Jump added a secret Pygmy unlockable which was really cool. Igor Pusenjak, Doodle Jumps creator, contacted us a little over a week ago about the idea. They went from like #70 to #27 in a matter of days since the release and I think it helped up climb back up to #5 over the weekend. Very cool, in the future we will probably return the favor and add a Doodle Jump mechanic to Pocket God, we really want to enhance our loading logic so we can pop up something interactive really quickly while the rest of the game loads. Even before Igor approached us, we were thinking of doing something like Doodle Jump during that loading time. Don’t hold me to this though, its still just an idea not sure which update we will make this happen. We also had discussions with the developer of sway to do something similar. I still think it’s good idea, I just couldn't commit to an actual update where we would incorporate his character.
As far as the Surf's Up! update goes. It was a lot bigger than expected. It's probably fair to say that most people realize the tsunami will open a new underwater area for the Pygmies to explore. I'm not going to go into too much detail because I want people to be surprised when they see what's underwater but I can tell you there are no surfboards and it’s very dangerous. BTW, the new sacrifice is a bit of a game as well. At first it’s easy, but to take it to its limit is very difficult.
Not really much to talk about on a technical front. just that because the underwater area is so different than the other two islands, there was a lot of work making sure things were shutdown from the island properly before going underwater and then making sure that they worked fine when moving back from underwater to the island (even after switching islands while underwater). I also experimented with some soft body physics effects but I couldn’t get it to work perfectly, after a couple of days wrestling with it, I ended up scrapping it for some animations that Allan created (which looks great).
In other news, we will probably hit 1 mil sales tomorrow. I would love to get some sales figures from Crash Bandicoot and Koi Pond to see where they are. I'm sure that both games have already passed this mark. It’s been about 45 days ago since Koi Pond reported 900k sales. It would be easy for them to hit this mark in that amount of time.
Our next update will probably be a cleanup update, Hdgreen was kind enough to help us organize some of the bugs that were reported from our blog and all the forums. We were able to fix the big ones like the god stat screen not saving, but a lot of bugs were not reproducible, so we want to go back and try and get those to happen and fix them for the next update. We will probably add achievements to the next update as well. It’s something we have been thinking about for a while and this seems like the right time to do it.
Also started our new game today, it will probably be a couple months before I can really say much about it. I am looking to prototype the main game play functionality so we can have something that really feels satisfying to play. It will be an action game, a little different than what people expect from us, but I think everyone will really like it. So far, the art that Allan has doing for it looks incredible. He is really working on a new art style just for this game and I was blown away when he sent a pic of the main character today.
edit: oh wait!!! I almost forgot the most important thing. Some of you may have noticed that I just cannot come to use the word Oog when talking about the Pygmies. Well, we gave up on Oog, from this pointon, their name is officially Pygmies. No one actually complained about the word, they just thought that islanders were too close to Pacific Islanders. So, from here on out, Pygmies it is, on the island of Oog.
