I'm happy to announce that we're close to releasing a new match-3 game for Android called "Match and Hatch".
If you're not familiar with the match-3 genre of casual games, like Bejeweled, basically the goal is to move elements on the screen to make matches of 3 or more of the same element in a row, either horizontally or vertically.
Ahead of Easter, I thought an egg theme would be kind of cool, though it's not explicitly an Easter game. There are a couple of twists on typical match-3 play. For one, every time you make a match, the eggs hatch open, revealing either points, pets, or food.
If you find a pet (some are much rarer than others), you can then view them on the pet screen:
Once you hatch a pet, you'll need to take care of it at least a couple of times a day, by feeding it and showing it a little attention (you can pet the critters by rubbing their head or their belly). This increases their happiness and levels them up. If you neglect your pets long enough, they'll level down and eventually run away.
I thought this blend of match-3 and virtual pets would be a cool hybrid. We'll see. I'm going to release the paid version first, probably for $1.99, followed closely by a free ad-based version. Then I'm going to look into using Google's new in-app purchase system to allow users to directly purchase food and pets. Some players may want to spend hours and hours hatching eggs, but others may enjoy the pet aspect more.
And I'm also likely going to commission an iPhone version in the near future.
Stay tuned...I'll let you know when it hits the market!
This summer I commissioned an app based on an idea I had: What if you could create a virtual mail carrier, put a message and/or photo in its mailbag, and pass it (physically) to a friend, then they could add a message and/or photo and pass it to someone else, and so on? You could also track your pet's journeys around the world and see all the places and people it has interacted with. That was the idea behind PetPass...kind of a chain mail Twitter with cute animals, leveraging the Bump API.
It's been a rocky road getting this thing produced, but we finally got it submitted to Apple yesterday. It's still a little rough around the edges (especially when it comes to handling poor network connectivity). Here's how it works:
The app is free. You get 100 credits with the free download. It costs 10 credits to create a new pet. You choose a pet type (monkey, panda, robot, etc.) and give it a unique name. Then you add a message and (optionally) a photo to its mailbag. You click Pass Pet. A friend of yours who also has the app on their device clicks Receive Pet. You shake your phones near each other and the pet passes from your phone to theirs. You earn 1 credit for each pet you pass, though you can't earn more credits by passing the same pet multiple times. You can also purchase 10 credits for $0.99.
Will people like and use this app? I really don't know. I thought the idea sounded cool at the time. I'd been wanting to produce a social networking app, and one that used both in-app purchases and the Bump API. But who knows?
It is implemented reasonably well, and it is free. Though I've found that ironically users tend to be even harsher on free apps than they are on paid ones. You do get a lot more downloads with a free app, so the chances of it catching on are increased by the price tag. It should take another week or so for the app to be approved (or rejected). If the app does reasonably well on the iPhone, I will develop an Android version. The Bump API allows for transactions between iPhone and Android devices. But we'll have to see how it does first.
The crucial part of Microsoft’s new phone strategy is the quality control it imposes onto its hardware partners. Rather than code an operating system and allow manufacturers to do whatever they want with it — like Google is doing with Android — Microsoft is requiring hardware partners to meet a rigid criteria in order to run Windows Phone 7.
Each device must feature three standard hardware buttons, for example, and before they can ship with Windows Phone 7, they have to pass a series of tests directed by Microsoft.
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The effort to control quality and consistency may be just what Microsoft needs to regain some ground in the phone battle.
Yep, I'm sure a more closed, rigid OS is exactly what's needed to gain more market share. Good grief.
Microsoft may carve out a marginal slice of the smartphone market share. It's a rapidly expanding market with lots of room. But they are not going to pose a serious threat to Android's trajectory to become the dominant player in the market. The two main reasons are: apps and specs. Microsoft has actually done a pretty good job providing the necessary tools to devs to make cool apps for the platform. But there has to be some intrinsic appeal to cause devs to cross-port or migrate. With Android it was an obvious platform to lure devs away from iOS because it is a less restrictive development and publishing environment. The two things that are going to lure a dev to a new platform are either money or coolness. Android initially didn't have the first, but it had the second. What does WP7 have? If the app store ramps up and they get enough phones into people's hands this holiday season to make it seem like a viable decision to port apps over, then Microsoft might be able to muscle into a minority market share.
But the other big issue is the one highlighted in the article, which actually works against them: hardware.
As one commenter pointed out, when you put more restrictions on the hardware manufacturers, you get more consistency, but you limit the range of devices and the speed of adoption to new hardware. The new WP7 devices are shipping with chipsets that are already second-best in the market. That gap is only going to get worse as the development cycle for WP7 phones lags while Android devices flood the market at blinding speeds. This is the same reason Android will continue to chew away market share from the iPhone. The rate of innovation for Android, both in terms of the OS and hardware, will drastically outpace other restrictive platforms. Very soon we'll be seeing dual-core chipsets in devices running Android, with version 3.0 and a revamped market. Android will be on a broader spectrum of devices, meaning a wider demographic will be able to buy the phone for their budget, and the high-end devices will be clearly superior spec-wise than models with competing OSs.
And Microsoft's head-scratching marketing campain won't help either. Check this out:
The commercial is well done, if what you want to do is make people feel bad or guilty for using their smartphones. It would be a great public service announcement to spend more time and pay more attention to your loved ones. What they're sort of trying to say is that their phones are so efficient you won't want to use them. I think that's pretty counter to the motivations of most users and buyers, though. This is exactly the opposite of "There's an app for that", or the Droid's campaign of morphing you into a next-level cybernetic entity by augmenting you with their device. The WP7 campaign isn't saying you'll want to spend more time with your device because of all the cool stuff it can do, but that you'll want to do less with it. I understand the strategy, but it's a horrible one.
I'm always ready to eat some crow when it comes to prediction, but in this case I'll be very surprised if WP7 is able to carve out even 5% of the smartphone market.
Our release of WordWise for iPhone was rocky, to say the least. That first version probably shouldn't have been submitted or made it through review. We really rushed to try to be first-to-market with Android/iPhone cross-compatibility, and the quality suffered.
But today 1.01 of WordWise for iPhone was approved, and most of the major issues should be fixed. Specifically, the game was crashing on most older phones and the iPod touch when loading games with lots of tiles, such as a game near completion. This was a memory issues and should now be resolved. There was an issue with loading games that should have affected all versions, but was particularly problematic on the iPad, keeping games from being launched at all. This should be fixed. And overall, performance in terms of moving and dropping tiles should be smoother.
Thanks a heap to the guys over at In a Day Development for their help. Go check out their apps (and buy some)!
As mentioned in an earlier post, while testing, we reverted to the development keys for notification, and forgot to change them back to production keys, so notifications are likely broken. We're going to submit yet another update (sigh) to get those working again. Hopefully the game is much more playable and those of you who want to play between Android and iPhone should be able to.
WordWise was developed primarily on iPhone OS 3, and we tested it on iOS 4, but we're getting reports of issues in two main areas:
1) Error connecting to server 2) Crashes loading the game after several moves are made
The first issue is likely to do with storing and using authentication information. What's probably happening is that the authentication used to log into our servers is timing out, and we need to fix the app to either refresh or fetch new credentials.
The second is most likely a memory issue. Each tile is a separate graphic, and since the crash is occurring later in games, while attempting to load, it is likely because the memory required to render a larger number of tiles is causing the crash. This is probably mostly occurring on older devices.
Sorry for the issues. We're going to get them fixed as soon as we can. In the meantime, if you do have problems, if you could email us at polyclefsoftware@gmail.com and let us know what happened and what device and OS you're using, that would really help us troubleshoot.
The wait is over...WordWise for iPhone is now available in the iTunes App Store for just 99 cents!
Judging by the amount of emails I get requesting Android/iPhone cross-platform play, there is pretty big demand for a game of this type. So if you've got an iPhone, check it out. If your friends have iPhones, tell them to check it out.
And remember this is v1.00, so it's not going to be nearly as polished or feature-rich as it will with a few more updates. But it will get you started on playing between Android and iPhone.
