Hey Everyone, I submitted the new update last night right after 1.05 got approved. This one is our secret update and as an added bonus, we are including a Boulder that you can throw on top of the pigmies to squish them or throw at a bunch of them to bowl them all off the island. So, for this update we didn't really get to any new technology, I started investigating some low level sound routines (AudioUnit) that are not really documented well by Apple, our sound is about 7 megs right now, so I want to figure out how we can apply compression and also, there is an issue with playing the same sound twice in a row without cutting off the original sound. Our default sound engine uses openAl which is good for 3d sound in a 3d engine, but since our game is mainly 2d we dont really need what it offers, I just want something that lets us play sounds with no lag. Hopefully I can finish it for next weeks update. This was also the second week in a row were we were up to 3:00 AM trying to get the update out, it's weird, no matter how hard we try to get parts done early, we always end up staying up too late, Allan is usually a morning person and I have a late day at the world golf tour offices on Mondays so this schedule isn't that maintainable for us. Hopefully this week we figure out how to make it easier on ourselves. The other thing that came up in the last week was some users were complaining about non relevant topics. I personally like talking nonsense with everyone, but the main idea of us coming here is to help spread the word about the game and invite new people to try it out. We can't let it evolve into something where we have a small community that loves the game and turns everyone else away. If we did that, we wouldn't be able to sell enough to afford our work on the updates each week. Touch Arcade has been a really good place for us, we have felt really supported by everyone and the mods here seem really laid back unlike some of the other boards out there where they have power trips. The last thing I want to do is have our threads become a problem for them where they have to come in and put their foot down. So, from now on, we will have two threads, the normal update preview thread where anyone can come and get the latest news about the game and exchange relevant ideas about future updates and a Pocket God Nonsense thread where we can go off about waiting for the new updates and get crazy.
5 minutes.. interesting. This game is turning out to be like a good book. Each "chapter" just keeps getting better and better. Really helps to keep the game fresh and interesting.
Thanks Dave for the update! I just followed Pocket God on Twitter and subscribed to the Pocket Blog. So now I´ve already seen screenshots of the new update! Great to see you guys having a Twitter account and a blog. I wonder if the boulder may make the island a bit crowded, be aware that you shouldn't make the island TOO full (or make the island bigger somehow). I was thinking it would be nice to drop the statue on the pigmies, but you can't bowl with a non-round statue. So having a boulder makes sense. I do wonder what the "5 minutes" part means... Looking forward!
Let's congratulate Bolt Creative! Pocket God has made it into the Top 50 apps in the US. Things are looking great. Next goal: featured by Apple.
Update sounds awesome! I think there is a lot of progress in such a short amount of time! I had an idea for a "Stats Page" I would love if you could maybe add this, like how many bounces from a coconut on a pygmy's head, how many you killed by fire/drowning/total...etc? Thanks for such a cool app, can't wait for more!
yea, we have this in the plan, I have to finish texture optimization and then get a text engine and we will do this, we want to get it to this stage asap without delaying our normal updates.
EBPanthers9 got it for us. He asked if he could help us with our community a while ago so I fugured it might have been him. He is helping us with all our community updates now.
WOW, we got 49. I would have never believed it, Thank you guys so much for helping both Allan and I out! I thought it would take a lot longer to get under the 50 mark.
Maybe it has to do with having half a dozen Pocket God threads on the first page or two of the forums But in all seriousness, congrats you guys.
Thanks for the continual updates. Why, when you write "give us 5 minutes" do I think that there might be baby Pygmies coming or they have to go to the bathroom?
Has anyone had problems with the game crashing or running really slow? I just noticed two reviews in itunes that are claiming this and want to be able to get to the bottom of it. I did run into a problem where a kid was trying to run the game with a jailbroken phone that had a animating background app running in a background process. His game was crashing on the title screen, but I just want ot make sure that no one is running into issues with the game and no background processes.
