24 June 2014

Scene Contest (and 14 other scenes) now available!

Some time ago, we held a contest for players to create new scenes. The winning scene (and another popular one), along with 13 other new scenes, are now in the 2.3 update in the iOS App Store.

One issue we faced was that we wanted to make sure players who have already played the game get to see the new scenes. This is potentially a problem, given there are now 575 scenes in the game, so in any playthrough, you have less than 50% chance of getting any particular one. It didn’t seem fair to tell people there was new content, and then not show it to them.

So we added special code that checks to see if it’s the first time you’ve run version 2.3, and tries to give you several of the new scenes. “Tries to” because one of them does have preconditions. And others only show up in a long game.

The first time check is so that you don’t get a predictable game, where the contest favorites show up every time.

Besides new scenes, playing on iPad mini made us realize that text that works well on the larger iPads might be a bit small. So there’s an option to enlarge text in many places (not all because some of the layouts are pretty carefully tuned).

Playing the game again brought up situations where it would have been nice to get advice, so we added a bit more. (We always encourage checking with your advisors, as they may comment about recent events that are not otherwise obvious.)

And we fixed various minor bugs and typos.

So we hope it has enough to be worth checking out for even experienced players.

P.S. Since updates hide old reviews, we hope you will find time to give the game a rating or review in the App Store. This really helps. Thanks!