Pollinate Worlds - Available on the AppStore! (Updated)

Wow, I submitted the game on Friday 12/9, they sent me an email this morning saying they were reviewing it and here we are at 9pm MDT and its on the AppStore!

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/polli...

What a journey, someday I'll have to write a post-mortum. So much more involved than I ever could have dreamed of.

I want to thank everyone who participated in the beta We got so much fantastic feedback and help that, as you can tell, our 10/31 release was pushed back slightly

Anyway, please hope for the best. The AppStore is a lottery from everything I have gathered (Just like Trychy's Amazon submission) and since this is our very first game actually making it out into the world... all I can really do is hope

So here are the final Marketing "blurbs" per se:

IMAGE(http://www.pollinategame.com/images/pr/PollinateWorlds_480.png)

IMAGE(http://www.pollinategame.com/images/pr/PlayerHive_thumb.png) | IMAGE(http://www.pollinategame.com/images/pr/DesertHoney_thumb.png) | IMAGE(http://www.pollinategame.com/images/pr/ForestBumble_thumb.png)
IMAGE(http://www.pollinategame.com/images/pr/MasonStamina_thumb.png) | IMAGE(http://www.pollinategame.com/images/pr/FlowerWorkshop_thumb.png) | IMAGE(http://www.pollinategame.com/images/pr/GardenTerrace_thumb.png)

Join the hive! Use your keen flying skills to collect & transfer pollen while avoiding flyers & plants that damage stamina.

Create & explore custom worlds using power-ups to upgrade your bee’s performance.

Design unique flowers for your personal garden and share with friends and
family. Bee-autiful!

FLY THREE DIFFERENT BEES
Bees vary by speed, maneuverability, acceleration, stamina, and flowers to pollinate:

  • Bumble Bee – Fast mover but lower stamina
  • Honey Bee – Fine balance of all characteristics
  • Mason Bee – Stronger but moves at a slower pace

FLOWER WORKSHOP & GARDEN
Design and build your own flower creations.
Use custom Stems, Branches, Adornments, Sepals, Flower heads and colors.
Cultivate your terraced garden as your personal showcase.

EVERY WORLD IS DIFFERENT
Dynamically Generated worlds means no two worlds are alike!
Choose from 3 different environments:

  • Grassland
  • Desert
  • Forest

And 4 different world sizes:

  • Small
  • Medium
  • Large
  • Xtra Large

POWER-UPS!
Encounter 4 different powerups during your adventures to help you go further and further from your beehive:

  • Invincibility – No damage from collisions
  • Speed – Really get moving
  • Stamina Regeneration – Recover lost stamina
  • Stamina Increase – Increase total stamina

ACHIEVE MORE
38 Game Center achievements for your flying, pollination, and flower creation skills across 5 different leaderboards.

OTHER GREAT FEATURES
Sell earned flower parts for Pollen Points in order to purchase additional flower colors.

Share your flower creations by email, FaceBook or Twitter with friends and family.

Website:          http://www.pollinategame.com
FaceBook:       http://www.facebook.com/pollinategame
Twitter:           http://www.twitter.com/pollinategame
YouTube:        http://www.youtube.com/pollinategame

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PAR

That looks awesome! Sadly, I have no iDevices. Nice looking game, though!

I've got a lot of free time, right now, so I can help. I don't play a whole lot of games on my iphone, and know nothing about the development side, but I can tell you when something isn't working right, if that's what you're looking for.

I'll shoot you an email.

Emailed - I'd be happy to help out.

Yeah, no iDevices unfortunately, so while I would gladly lend a hand at some solid testing, it's simply not an option for me. Great to see this coming along so well for you though, Par!

I'd be willing to give it a shot. I have an iPad2 and a third gen iPod touch that needs a decent reason to be charged up anyway!
E-mail sent.

Got no iOS device atm anymore. But tagging to see how this comes along.

Looks neat. E-mail sent.

Email sent.

What game dev tools are you using?

Email sent.

First batch of beta emails have gone out Those who haven't received an email yet its due to not having your device UDID.

Let me know what you guys/gals think! And thanks again for participating!

PAR

Farscry wrote:

Yeah, no iDevices unfortunately, so while I would gladly lend a hand at some solid testing, it's simply not an option for me. Great to see this coming along so well for you though, Par! :D

Thanks Fars! Its been a very long / tough ride and I have yet to find out if its "coming along so well"... we'll see soon enough though!

fangblackbone wrote:

What game dev tools are you using?

In regards to what Fang? I'm using cocos2d for the engine so its all 2D. And of course since it's on iOS its ObjectiveC.

PAR

Okay that is what I wanted to know.
I was wondering if you were using or had tried out something like Unity 3d. And if so, what your opinion of it was.

fangblackbone wrote:

Okay that is what I wanted to know.
I was wondering if you were using or had tried out something like Unity 3d. And if so, what your opinion of it was.

So... I guess it all goes into what you want to do and how much your willing to pay for it versus how much effort you want to put into it.

I looked at Unity for my other game when we had to switch engines. It was a tie between Unity and UDK and I decided to go UDK for a couple reasons (this was for PC/console). Although the indie price is pretty harsh for UDK (25% of revenue) the engine is ... well there is no comparison. And w/ the UDK you get to use the entire engine for your whole team. Unity you had to have separate licenses for each developer AND artist who was working/building the project. The absolutely BIGGEST thing about the UDK wasnt just the engine was the fact you get Scaleform with it! One thing people who are first starting out never think about is how to do the UI. If there isnt a good UI engine to use you will have a lot of pain. Unity had (at the time I looked at it) no UI engine and Scaleform is arguably the best there is.

As for this game, I didnt even look at UDK or Unity simply because I didnt want to purchase the engine. Apple takes 30% right off the top... thats enough to make you think twice about developing for iOS. But since they tout 200+ million devices in 60+ countries... its hard NOT to develop on it.

If you want to go 3D there is an extension to cocos2d called (amazingly) cocos3d. I have not looked into it.

But let me tell you... coding for a handheld is probably the hardest coding I've EVER done. Resources you take for granted with PC/Console you just cannot ignore w/ the handheld. And dont let the "well at least you only have to worry about one resolution" thing fool you... if you want to open your market share you will be dealing w/ multiple resolutions and its not fun (non-retina, retina and iPad).

It was definitely fun to make though! Its why I keep trying this

PAR

Boo! Scaleform is owned by Autodesk? Do they not own everything now? Gah!

While I don't think I'm a good candidate for a beta-tester, consider me curious and interested, and will happily pick it up when it gets released to the app store.

Aww man. I was hoping there was an Android version.

You had me at FLY DIFFERENT BEES.

par wrote:

First batch of beta emails have gone out Those who haven't received an email yet its due to not having your device UDID.

Let me know what you guys/gals think! And thanks again for participating!

PAR

Me not read directions. Me send new email.

Ok! Second batch of beta's are out! Again, those who haven't gotten a beta email from me its because I haven't received your device info

Swarfigo wrote:

Aww man. I was hoping there was an Android version.

I'm really hoping this does well so we can put it on Android

Pretty psyched, I got Facebook integrated prior to this beta build but today I was able to actually get Twitter working as well.

PAR

Swarfigo wrote:

Aww man. I was hoping there was an Android version.

If you ever do port to Android I'd be up for testing.

Early thoughts (which I will submit once I've had a chance to run through the start a few times)
It takes too long to first start playing the game.

I would suggest that after naming your Hive you should have a small default world ready to jump into.
As a first time player I had no idea what the options in the world creation screen I was selecting would influence and there were no tool tips to inform me what the difference between the sunny field and the darker square with the tree was.

A few of the loading screens took long enough that I thought maybe the game had locked... but that could be because it turns out my iPod is actually sh*ttier than I originally thought.
During the world setup the game would not let me create a third tier sized world because "the 2G iPod does not have enough memory." I looked it up and sure enough my 8GB iPod reports as a 2G, which after a little bit of research is because apparently the 8GB 3G didn't get any of the upgrades for that release cycle and is just a repackaged 2G. Hooray!
I played a few minutes and then handed the device to my girlfriend who had been watching over my shoulder.
We ran into a few cases where a flower was overlapping a branch enough that hovering near the flower would hurt. It wasn't immediately obvious that this was happening since the pollen starts flashing up to the bar and obscures some of the screen.
When we lose our stamina the bee is surrounded by a huge wormhole looking halo that persists through the rest of that session.

Not sure if I should submit those since my device falls below spec.

Great feedback Rezzy and thank you! Yea, like I said in my email to you, the 3G (2nd gen ipod) is under spec and its performance is actually very poor especially if you have iOS4+ on it.

And yes, unfortunately there is a HUGE gap in performance between the 3G and the 3Gs. I have a 3G sitting right here and have profiled the timings between it and a 3Gs and its quite amazing. A lot of the loading in the game is due to I/O (I save a lot of data) and the 3G is about 10 times SLOWER than the 3Gs. We wont even talk about its comparison to the iPhone 4.

There is also an issue with the 3G and the particle system we are using. For some reason some of those particle effects, no matter what I do, just dont go away.

I guess I should have the wording changed on the 3rd and 4th sized worlds because its not hard drive memory that is the issue, its RAM. The 3G only has 128MB and Apple will shut down most apps that go over 30MB. So unfortunately we are fighting with spending time on getting the 3G to work or letting it go.

As for your suggestions about a tutorial, yes I'm already working on it We have a whole thing scripted out and partly worked on that is pretty much exactly what you are suggesting

Again, thanks for the feedback and I'm sorry about your device not being able to run this... I'm working on it!

PAR

par wrote:

Ok! Second batch of beta's are out! Again, those who haven't gotten a beta email from me its because I haven't received your device info :)

Hmm, I sent my device info yesterday (just double-checked and it is definitely in my "sent" folder), did it come through? Should be from an email address that is obviously me.

As for the 3G issues, do you need a 3Gs tester? I have my old phone, but it's currently wiped. I can put my account back on it and get the UDID if that will help.

Hey Rick! I looked for your email, I did not receive it You sent it to [email protected] right?

We will take all of the testers we can possibly get! And like I told Rezzy we'll take 3G owners as well because I *would* like to work it out, as long as they understand there are definite issues w/ that device.

But the 3Gs is actually a little beast! Due to the iPhone 4 having the retina, the 3Gs actually is faster than the 4 in the flight-mode portion of the game due to not having to load graphics twice the size.

EDIT: AAAAHHHH it went into SPAM!? Ok, sending you your info!

PAR

par wrote:

EDIT: AAAAHHHH it went into SPAM!? Ok, sending you your info!

Yup, got it, I'll check it out when I get home tonight.

Update: I managed to play a couple more short sessions before my iPod started crapping out. I think the battery has finally given up ghost and died because I can use it for about five minutes before it just shuts off.

Now I have to decide if I will replace it, fix it, or just say to hell with it and rock my iPad + ZuneHD.

Rezzy wrote:

Update: I managed to play a couple more short sessions before my iPod started crapping out. I think the battery has finally given up ghost and died because I can use it for about five minutes before it just shuts off.

Now I have to decide if I will replace it, fix it, or just say to hell with it and rock my iPad + ZuneHD. :(

So, one thing I have been getting back from the beta testers is the game definitely sucks the battery and heats up the device. In the early stages of development I had done some very low level optimization's in the engine in order to achieve the L&F (look and feel.. i.e. eye candy) and because of that I can run a lot of things at a very high pixel format w/out a huge FPS drop. The downside is apparently it sucks the battery (and I know from my own testing the little device definitely heats up).

In regards to your device... sigh, I really wish I could get the game running well on it again but now w/ the realization that the 3G and equivalent iPod are not supported w/ iOS 5, if I upgrade the code-base to utilize the cool stuff in iOS 5 (ARC) it completely takes those devices away. Decisions, decisions...

I should be having another Beta drop here in a day or so. A lot of the remaining features are now in such as Twitter integration, GameCenter integration, scoring and many many other things. Oh, and because I did the adhoc build correctly in XCode you can now use your iPads. It wont run at the iPad native resolution yet but it'll at least give you the 2X ability.

PAR

Unfortunately, I'm having major issues with my computer, which is why it took me so long to get my info to you. I thought I had it figured out, but the issue returned. i pretty much can't run itunes at all. I do have the files downloaded, so when I fix this crap for good, I'll jump in and give you some feedback.

So quick update!

I wanted to get another Beta push out to all of the testers in the next day or so but its become very apparent that although once the game is "understood" its very easy and enjoyable to play. Like many of you have said, the issue is getting to that point!

I have quite a few fixes and enhancements in now but I want to wait to give another drop until I have the tutorial complete. I think a fully interactive tutorial that walks people through what exactly it is they are doing will help immensely. Plus getting "new" people straight into the game w/out messing around w/ the UIs has always been my goal.

With that said, I hope it will take a couple days to get this fully implemented but we'll see. As soon as its done I'll post here all of the changes along w/ sending new beta updates via email.

Again thanks for all of the feedback and support!

PAR