Happy Holidays!

Merry Christmas / Yule / Hanukkah to one and all!

Thanks for the support over the last year. Your comments and interest keep Fluttermind going more than any amount of sales.

2010 should be interesting. Flaboo! 1.10 and beyond will be available, and perhaps even the Mothwing Empire will see the light of day.

That's it - no more to see here, so go and enjoy the festivities.

Dene

Global leaderboards now in!

Not much of a blog, but global leaderboards are now in, thanks to Open Feint. It'll need some testing before I'm happy to send it off, but it's in! Woohoo!

That's 1 day turnaround time, folks. That's what I love about the iPhone...

Also, website is updated with video.

Holidaybegone - 1.01 imminent

So Flaboo is out and responses have been very good so far. For those of you who have bought it I send a huge 'Thankyou'. Please spread the word if you've enjoyed the game. If you're feeling particularly generous write a review or score the game in the App Store. It all helps. Indeed, it's vital for a tiny company such as mine to have good word-of-mouth in order to compete with the larger outfits.

Since the game was launched earlier than I expected I was planning on taking a break until January before doing any further work or PR for Flaboo!. You know, put my feet up and play those games I said I was going to play when I left Lionhead.

Things never work out that way, do they?

Several people have rightly pointed out that my lovely Flaboo! music isn't what they wanted to listen to while playing the game. Apparently some people want to play Norwegian black metal ("Nightspirit, nightspirit, Embrace my soooooooooooul!" intones Ihsahn) while bouncing a fat yellow chick into a bright puffy-cloud-filled sky. Others want to play the spoken works of Sylvia Plath and weigh up the relative merits of various white goods as facilitators of suicide while playing.

As a result, I just uploaded Flaboo! 1.01 to t he App Store. You now have the option to continue playing your lovely iPod music regardless of suitability to the game's mood. The update should be available in the next couple of weeks.

Now to rest... I mean, code the global high scoring. Hopefully I'll be done by Christmas.

Piracy? Already?

I'm doing very little work, marketing-wise, at the moment. Version 1.1 will be coming out in January with global high scoring. I'm waiting for that to be finished before doing too much PR. As such, I expect little initial interest in Flaboo! Word-of-mouth takes time and nobody knows a game exits until PR happens. Right?

Thus, I am - perhaps naively - stunned to find there are already countless crack sites out there with Flaboo! listed among their downloadable content. That's less than a week.

I have always assumed piracy was linked to price-point and that with Flaboo only being $1 I had little chance of being added to the list of cracked software.

As I say, naive.

If they can't afford a dollar then I can only imagine that the guys pirating it are genuinely needy: you know, destitute, smelly individuals with little chance or hope of a good life living in cardboard boxes while eking out a living selling matchsticks supplemented by their sales of iPhone games from the backs of lorries piled high with louse-infested sacks of games.

Hang-on... these are kids with iPhones.

Hmm.

Second, I'm surprised by the number of random people who now contact me thus:

tw@scumbag.com: Dude - your game looks sweet and I'd love to give it a 5 star review in the app-store. Can you give me a promo code?

These aren't reviewers - who are entirely welcome to a code - but regular kids who just fancy trying their luck. To avoid paying a dollar. One. Dollar.

All I need is a few reviews saying: 'Dis shud be free' and I'll have the set.

The wonderful thing about technology is that it is a social catalyst: society morphs with it, often becoming unrecognisable in a short span of time. Some of that change is bad. The internet's anonymity and cheap data transfer have made piracy more pervasive than ever before.

However, with each negative change that new technology brings there is a corresponding change for good. In this particular case the world's vocabulary has been increased by one wonderful word.

App-holes.

Flaboo released

Flaboo! is now available here.

Overall, the release process was relatively easy, painless and surprisingly quick. It only took about 12 days in total. That's from 'Agh! I have sent the game off! I hope it works!' through 'What the hell is this form? What do they mean, "Please name the primary beneficiary?"' all the way to, 'Yay! My game is available for people to buy! Wow. Now I have to do the work in supporting it!'

Many thanks to the folks who have bought Flaboo! and also to those who have said kind things about the game. If you're feeling particularly generous, an iTunes rating would help build customer confidence and help the little yellow chick to fly even higher. Although he really should do more exercise, too.

Next: global leaderboards and Facebook integration!

P.S. Forgive the lack of wit or humour in this post. I'm jetlagged from a two-week behemoth theme park holiday in Disney World.