Due to the date being 11/11/11 I thought I'd do something crazy, so I'm putting my app on sale for free to see what kind of response I can get. If enough people download it I might keep it at this price over the weekend. It's a born-digital strategy board game with turn-based online multiplayer. There's already a fairly strong TA community around the game: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=71843 And here's the download link. Hope you enjoy it, and make sure to tell your friends if you do! http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/new-world-colony/id395137626?mt=8
FANTASTIC game! I picked it up when it went on sale last month for the 4.1 update. Highly recommended
Whoooa...was interested in picking this up but looks like with it's latest update it now has an iOS 5.0 requirement. Think that's the first game I've seen requiring 5.0. Ashame, would have liked to have given it a try.
Just a final note that the sale is ending tonight, so grab it if you're interested. Sorry for the iOS 4 folks - I'm a solo dev and maintaining two separate code bases (new and legacy) would just not be feasible given my time and financial resources. But if you're running iOS 4, aren't you able to upgrade to iOS 5 for free? Is there anything in particular holding you back from upgrading? By the way, the sale has been tremendously successful - NWC hit the top 20 board games in tons of different countries and generated 10k downloads in two days - by far my biggest download haul to date. Of course, I didn't make any money off of these, but I'm hoping it'll generate some momentum for when the app goes back to paid. Anyways, thanks for the support and for spreading the word!
Yes, the massive pita that it was to upgrade my iPhone 4. I have little desire to spend an entire weekend+ straightening out my 64gb iPad 2 after the "upgrade process" gets through with it. It was not exactly pain free on my iPhone 32gb (took me a week to get things somewhat back to normal, and even then I lost data). Btw, I bought your app a while back, and still have the iOS 4 compatible version on my iPad. What changed besides multiplayer?
Hmm, I understand your hesitation now. I've lost valuable game data during an upgrade and it was a big bummer. I know of another dev that lost pictures of their kid's first birthday during an upgrade. But if you do manually sync first it should be ok...and future iOS updates will be 'over the air' and should be much easier to perform. There's a fair amount of new stuff besides the transition to being a universal app and the turn-based matches. I increased the starting resources so that games didn't start so slow (especially important for online turn-based matches). This should also make it more rare that a player is totally shut down from the very start, because fields and orchards are no longer as critical at the very beginning. There's still some balance issues related to the start of the game though that I still need to work out. There's now an 'Action Point' system that determines how many actions you can take in one turn. You earn more action points as you build more town and forts. Finally, you now need a Fort to invade. This should prevent the problem where one player builds a town quickly and them immediately starts invading another player before they have a chance to even get started.
If you have an iPod Touch 2G, the highest you can upgrade to is 4.2.1. So, yes, unfortunately, even if you're running iOS4 you can't upgrade to iOS 5.0 on older devices.
Did the manual sync first. It still deleted half my apps, blew away my folder structure, erased my images and while my songs supposedly made it through they wouldn't play so I had to reinstall them all. To top it off, it killed some of my favorite apps (they no longer function under ios5) and made my battery life worse. I've been in IT for 25 years, and this was the worst migration I've ever seen let alone had. And the benefits, to me, were marginal. I'm not even updating my iPhone to 5.0.1 as some users are reporting an even worse decrease in battery life as opposed to 5.
True, those older devices are locked out. But the other factor in my decision is that these older devices wouldn't be able to run NWC very well (it uses OpenGL, and there's lots of drawing and layering) and I'd probably get punished with bad reviews in the store. Players can be pretty fickle like that.
Yes! Thought I'd see what the revenue looks like now that there's an in-app-purchase map editor. If I get a lot of free downloads, the IAP might generate sufficient revenue. We'll see. Also, the app now supports iOS 4.3, so those older posts on this thread about backwards compatibility are now obsolete.
Well I've played a couple games against the AI. I can definitely say that the game has a lot of options to customize the way you play. There is a lot of strategy, and while I'm on the topic of strategy, I'm terrible at strategy games so I lost each match that I did against the AI hehe. (I was also playing on easy) I think if I play some more I could definitely get better at it. Most definitely worth $2 and even better free. I can definitely see myself using pass&play to play with friends if I can teach them how to play. Don't think I'll be going online anytime soon cause I was get stomped. Good game
Update on the sale: the game just hit the top 100 free games overall in the app store. It's beating Angry Birds Lite and Cut the Rope lite. My revenue rank has decreased (since it's a free app), but at least a lot of people will be aware of the game now.
Well, I've been playing strategy games my whole life, and though I'm sure I could mold my approach to beat the AI, this game still has serious balance issues. Read through like 30 pages of tutorial, and still they give you far too little to run with in terms of forming a solid strategy. Watching the AI helps, but I don't have the patience. There are far too many better games to spend my time on
