A week after Tap Tap Revenge 3launched, a couple of our staff and @Mek participated in an online matchup where we played TTR3 of course. We found it extremely enjoyable and wanted to schedule a formal “playdates“, but that didn’t happen until now.
We’re proud to announce that we’re pushing forward with the idea and will be starting with ngmoco’sEliminate Pro.
Find out if there’ll be prizes, how to add yourself on Twitter Lists, how to sign up for a Plus+ account and much more info. This is a one stop shop so you HAVE to read! Come one and come all! This should be some wiiiild fun!
First matter of business, I’ll dish out your first Saturday Surplus SalesFREEgame. Next order of business is a preview of what’s to come tomorrow October 31, Halloween! Are you ready to get things started or ARE YOU READY?
An alien shooter for your favorite mobile device. Protect your cows from Alien hordes as they try to abduct your precious livestock. Alien hordes too hard? Upgrade your weapons and gain smart bombs to blow them out of the sky.
Next matter of business, we’re doing Halloween TheAPPera.com style!
We should call ourselves very lucky for having had the chance to take Justin away off his ferocious car driving bear from Enviro-Bear 2010! What started as an epic joke became an iPhone gaming sensation.
After unforeseen delays, we’re finally bringing you our epic interview with Justin where we dissect his mind full of wacky imagination, such as this one where he wanted to make a car driving bear. We’ll say it now, you’d WANT to read this one as Justin has definitely become one of the coolest, funniest and most personable devs out there.
Who Is THE Justin Smith?
Frankly, we still don’t know the exact answer to the question. He sort of just rose from nowhere with an insane game and had as all listening. We tried to ask him the very same question, and here’s what we got:
I used to be programmer in the games industry. My biggest claim to fame is an old game called MDK2. But after being stuck in too many offices with broken A/C I left that world to join Enviro-Bear Corp., which is a massive organization known to have business in the areas of fruit picking, ski lift operation, and occasional game development.
What can one say after hearing that? Umm that Justin is a rockstar?
If you’ve been paying close attention the site, you’d realize that we skipped June and didn’t declare a Developer of the Month. This is exactly the reason why for the first time ever since January, we’ll have TWO awardees this month.
The first for July (or what I call Mr. pseudo-June) is Justin Smith for his game Enviro-Bear 2010. If you missed what it’s all about, click the game title for the review and watch AOTS’ coverage below:
Correct us if we’re wrong but I think the game is the first DoTM game to be featured on the show which makes it one of the reason we considered him, and his game.
All of our developers of the month thus far have been inclined with iPhone gaming. For this month, we chose to look across the pond to apps and ONE app stood out… Noel Llopis’/Snappy Touch’s Flower Garden!
Flower Garden is definitely one of those show off iPhone apps, but the app goes above and beyond that. The overall execution and thought process into creating the app is so obvious with its final product, check out our full review here. Flower Garden feels based on the fact of simple fun and enjoyment. You get to flower plants, cut them, arrange them into boquets and send them to different people!
Anyway, enough chatter, let’s dig some dirt behind Flower Garden’s idea and execution.
As we previously announced, Firemint is our April Developer of the Month!
If you thought you were a busy person, just put yourselves in the shoes of Robert Murray, Jesse West and Alexandra Peters.
Robert is the founder and CEO of Firemint while Jesse is the “Brilliant Art Director” as Alex suggests (we agree), and Alex of course is their great Office Manager slash the one I bug for game assets and interviews like this one (Thanks Alex!). We have met Rob and Alex, as well as Firemint’s Development Director Kynan Woodman, personally during GDC last March…one of the few events they have to present their games to and accept their award/s of course. As you may know by now, Firemint has won IGF Mobile’s Technical Achievement category for Real Racing back at GDC.
Enough about the future, and let’s concentrate on the now. While away at GDC or jetting back to their native country: Australia, Firemint’s only released self-published game thus far Flight Control has managed to take over Pocket God’s most coveted spot in the charts. You’ve seen our review for it, but ever wondered how this little cute game came to be? Or better yet how many $$$$ it has earned since its release.
It’s mid-month again, and so it’s time to pick out one developer whose achievement/s elevate their company and its games.
For the month of April, we decided to recognize a company whose game took over our March Devs of the Month’s game (See Dave Castelnuovo & Allan Dye) for the top paid charts. Their name wasn’t on the original pool of developers we had to pick on but their WK7JXM name came out of no where and we were sold immediately.
After all, besides Flight Control reigning atop the paid charts (which in itself is already a great achievement), they also have the web abuzz regarding their latest and upcoming game Real Racing.
Dave and Allan knew exactly what what they want to do. But how exactly was it humanly possible to dish out updates week per week. On top of that, how much was the overall cost of the initial Pocket God release?
Being a two-man only project, Dave and Allan started putting in 40 hours each. They work on updates for 2 full days “until 2 in the morning”. The sound was one of the things they had to pay for. The engine was paid for by Dave’s other app (Fwarp). Overall, it cost these guys $1000 initial costs.
Palm Tree Sketch
The first release submission took about a week and a half according to Dave. He says as far as updates are concerned… it takes them roughly 4 days of approval time.
Now Pocket God was ready for release, how did the public see it? How did they rise to the top? What was the overall perception? How the hell can they still update the app every week?
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