iPad Update

Yes, we are working on a Universal update. Yes, it is taking a long time. No, iPad users won’t have to pay for this separately. No, we don’t know when it will come out.

But that’s not really news. We do at least have some concepts and user interface artwork that can go in the game (instead of the placeholder artwork we’ve been using).

Here is a sneak preview of one of the dialogs. You can see that we’ve enlarged text and buttons (since you hold an iPad differently than an iPhone). And since there is room to fit all the advisors all the time, it’s easier to consult them. But it’s the same dialog as always — you won’t have a different play experience on iPad (although the larger screen does make some things easier, such as less need for scrolling text).

This is the only dialog that’s completely converted to the new look, so there is a lot more work to do. And we still don’t have all the new artwork. But there has been progress.

Gone Missing?

A recent App Store review (five stars, if you were wondering) wrote:

I have noticed some things are missing from the iPhone version (this one) that the old PC version had. Like allotting magic points to children and hunting and the ability to slaughter sheep, pigs and horses for food when the clan is starving. I can only guess what else is missing, though I hope it's not a lot. I'm not sure exactly what is affected but I personally am something of a perfectionist and would love to have the entire full game same as before.

I’ve written about this before, but in summary: I disagree. The new edition is better. A lot better. It removes a lot of fiddly bits that made little difference (Children magic, for example, was very rarely used), and we added over two dozen new scenes and a bunch of treasures. We improved the maps and added Game Center achievements. There are new advisors, and a lot of new advice. And you can play the game via VoiceOver.

One thing that was removed for practical, rather than design reasons, was the Tula screen. It was certainly a fun screen, but it really didn’t impact game play a lot. (And to answer another App Store review, no, it will not be in a Universal update.)

Fixed Bugs

We also made a lot of bug fixes, many of which were impossible to fix for the original.

Oh, and you can still slaughter horses if you’re desperate for food.

So, I too am a perfectionist, which is why the game is not the same. I believe it’s a much better game than the original.

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For more details about what’s changed, see these articles:

What’s New
Crafters
Livestock
Treasures
Map
Automatic Save
Choices
Back-Patching
(Or search all Design articles)

Skills, Expanded

I wrote before about the seven skills a leader is rated in. But we wanted to support OSL code such as

test Deception(expeditionLeader) vs Crankiness d6

In other words, like many roleplaying games, people have all sorts of abilities. But seven was already a fairly large number. So we came up with the idea of composite skills. Deception is the average of Bargaining and Leadership.

Including the composite skills, a leader can be tested in

Animals
Bargaining
Combat
Custom
Deception (Bargaining + Leadership)
Diplomacy (Bargaining + Custom)
Exploring (Bargaining + Combat)
Farming (Animals + Plants)
Hunting (Animals + Combat + Plants, special for Odayla worshippers)
Leadership
Magic
Plants
Poetry (Custom + Leadership)
Prophecy (Magic + Leadership)
Strategy (Combat + Leadership) 

Note that not every attempt to compose a poem is automatically use of the Poetry skill — it would depend on the context. But without some obvious reason to do things differently, that’s how we would have coded the scene.

Still Not Universal

Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of progress to report on the Universal build of King of Dragon Pass. Due to unforeseeable issues, our artist wasn’t able to complete the work. We’ve arranged for another artist.

Since we sometimes get asked: we are making a Universal build. That is, a single app that will run on iPhone or iPad, and take advantage of the screen size of each. If you already have the app on an iPad, it will be a free update.

(While the game doesn’t fill the screen of the new 3rd generation iPad, that device does use its Retina Display to display text, so the game looks very nice when blown up to 2x.)

We’ll let you know when there’s more progress.

News: Sale(s), Move

We here at A Sharp have a couple pieces of news to share.

King of Dragon Pass for iOS has sold 15000 copies! We don’t have an exact count for the original (the second printing sold slower and our record-keeping got worse as time went on), but this is several times as many copies as we sold for the CD-ROM version. Thank you all so much for trying the game, and letting your friends know so they’d give it a try. Obviously this is not as many copies as Angry Birds has sold, but it’s not the same sort of game. And we’re really pleased that so many people have enjoyed it.

To celebrate, we’re putting the game on sale for 20% off until 1 April!

The other news is a bit different. With David’s new job as Development Manager at Shenandoah Studio, we will soon be relocating to Philadelphia. Hopefully this won’t result in any interruption of our web server (which is currently in the house where we created King of Dragon Pass). It will mean we’ll be a bit slower to respond before, during, and after the move.

And this isn’t news at all: we don’t have anything to report on the Universal version of King of Dragon Pass. At least on the new iPad, the text looks wonderful even when you magnify the iPhone screen to 2x (this wasn’t the case with the previous iPads). We still intend to release a Universal build when the art’s ready.

A Taste of QA

While cleaning up the house (King of Dragon Pass was created in our home office), I ran across a notebook kept by Rob Heinsoo, our QA lead. Here’s a typical page:

While for the most part we avoided the branching problem, King of Dragon Pass still had a lot of content, and we wanted to make sure each response of each scene was tested. Most of these had success and failure results, so our QA team had to keep track of when these happened. (It was possible to force things to happen, but I think our preference was to have them come up naturally, since in many cases things depend on something that happened earlier. Forcing a scene or outcome might be buggy in its own right.) Note that a scene might behave differently depending on clan status, e.g. R288 depends on morale.

The new scenes in 2.0 went through a similar process to make sure every branch and outcome worked.

Regional Variation

It’s interesting to look at some of the sales figures. Denmark just became our number 9 market (with 1.61% of revenue), edging out Norway. This appears to be largely due to a single review (I don’t know if this is an online review or also appeared in print).

This is a bit like the original version of King of Dragon Pass, where a review in the print magazine Pelit made the game a top 10 hit in Finland.

But it’s unlike Norway, where we got 50 sales in one day thanks to a single review (I suspect this was online only).

We can see the difference in these graphs. The bottom graph shows worldwide revenue by date. You can see the birthday sale, and the Sacred Time sale (and the overall effect of the holiday, which is to raise sales to a somewhat higher level — apparently there are a lot of new devices). The top graph shows Finland (orange), Norway (light purple), and Denmark (dark purple). All three Scandinavian countries have about the same population, so they’re interesting to compare. Sales in Finland more or less track worldwide sales, except for a bump when we got reviewed by the print magazines Pelit and Pelaaja. The effects of the Norwegian review are very obvious — but there is almost no long term change in the level of sales. Maybe nobody in Norway let their friends know about the game. But Denmark has a sales spike from the review, but then sales continue at a significantly higher level than before.

I don’t really have an explanation as to why these countries have such different responses to the game. But I think this does show that reviews are still an important way for people to learn about games.