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Game updates today: The Blockheads, Heroes of Order and Chaos, and Borderlands 2 on Mac
There are a number of big game updates today on both Mac and iOS that are worth picking up if you happen to have the apps installed. First up, the excellent The Blockheads has a big multiplayer update coming, which will allow players to host multiplayer worlds with up to 32 people (which means 128 possible blockheads) in a single world at a time. The update also comes with a free Mac-based server app, which can host worlds for various devices and save items, structures and even queued actions. There's also lots of new content to find, and a map view that provides a nice overview of everything. Developer David Frampton tells us that the server app is being developed for Windows and Linux, too, and the Android version of the app should be on that store soon. Gameloft's free iOS MOBA Heroes of Order and Chaos also has a big new update, with new heroes to play, and a new 5v5 steampunk-styled map. There's also a new matchmaking system, and the game has introduced weekly tournaments, so you can win some real prizes if you're good. And finally, Aspyr tells TUAW that it has released the latest Borderlands 2 DLC, called Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep, day-and-date on the Mac along with the PC version. You can buy it for both PC and Mac through Steam for US$9.99. This is a long-awaited expansion for the popular open world shooter, and Aspyr has timed out the port exactly with the regular PC version, which is very impressive.
Majic Jungle's The Blockheads charges on
Developer David Frampton is one of our favorites around here at TUAW -- he made a big splash on the App Store a while ago with Chopper 2, but these days he's working on a huge sandbox app he's made called The Blockheads, which is a Minecraft-style game where you can explore a world with the titular characters, making and building items and contraptions from the items that you can find and collect. The Blockheads is doing very well for Frampton -- he says the game has seen over four million downloads so far, and it's definitely the biggest project he's ever worked on. The game's gotten even bigger after a recent update that allowed "backgrounding," too. When the game first arrived, you had to basically watch your Blockheads perform their tasks, and leaving the app caused the task to pause as well. I mentioned this in the game's inital review, and while the game was still a lot of fun, longer tasks could be very annoying. Frampton says he agrees that requiring the app to stay open while those tasks were running could be annoying, but during the game's initial development, he just wasn't sure if backgrounding could work, "whether I could do that or not." The game's monetization depends on using time crystals to skip past tasks as well, and Frampton included the ability to bring in a few different characters at a time, which he hoped would help people with the waiting periods. Unfortunately, he says, "only 1% of players warped in a second Blockhead," which means that most of his players didn't use the tools he'd given them to make the waiting more bearable. That convinced him he had to find a solution, and the backgrounding patch went in recently (along with a price drop on actually bringing in a second character). Frampton says the change has helped him, both with exposure for the app as well as growing the audience. "Everything doubled," he says about making the change. As for what's next in Blockheads, Frampton has a huge list of features, both from things he wants to do as well as fan requests. There's a tutorial coming into the game, to smooth out the initial player experience, which he feels can still be a bit confusing. Fans on the message boards have asked him for the ability to create signs (because right now there's no way to see what's in the game's chests until you open them up), but Frampton isn't sure that's a good idea. He's more interested in providing "shelves," which would be storage items where you can see exactly what's being stored at just a glance. Currently, there is two-player local multiplayer, but Frampton says that Game Center is really causing problems with any larger multiplayer game, as the system is not very good at keeping game sessions running when one player leaves or enters. So multiplayer is up in the air for now, though Frampton says it's definitely a possibility at some point in the future. In other future plans, he says he'd love to bring more complicated machinery to the game, like copper wiring, elevators, and even electricity. Fans have asked for more goals, so he'll be filling out the endgame as well. But unlike Minecraft, says Frampton, he doesn't want the game to "end" at all. "I can keep adding more and more games to it," he told me. One idea he has is to allow players to build up technology to the point where they can travel to other worlds, which would obviously open up a whole new set of resources and areas to explore. That's all in the distant future of the game, however -- Frampton is just brainstorming ideas, not simply working on actual features for that yet. Still, The Blockheads is definitely a popular title, and Frampton says he personally is excited by the process of creating and developing this game, in a way that he wasn't with Chopper 2 or his other titles. If you haven't gone to check out The Blockheads yet, you can find it on the App Store for free right now.
The Blockheads changes the game with a major update
The Blockheads is an excellent game by New Zealand developer David Frampton, also known as Majic Jungle Software. We covered it when it first released earlier this year, and the game has now picked up a really substantial update. iOS updates in general happen pretty often these days (I think I have about nine sitting in my iPad from just the past week or so), but this one is fairly significant, in that it really changes how the game itself works. In addition to some new items, bugfixes and the ability to now run four different characters at the same time, the biggest part of the update is that instead of having to be in the app while your characters perform various actions, the app will now run in the background, which means you can set something to run and then go and do something else outside the app. That's literally a game-changer, because it means the previously boring task of just waiting for items to be crafted or combined has now gone away. In other words, even if you didn't get into The Blockheads before, it's probably time to give this one a look again. It's free on iPhone and iPad.
TUAW's Daily iOS App: Sand Pictures
Sand Pictures is an interesting app -- it might not appeal to everyone, but I think there's an audience for it on the iPad nevertheless. It's from David Frampton, overseer of Majic Jungle Software, and creator of the popular Chopper series for iOS. But this is a much less violent affair than that series: it's basically a simulation app for those falling sand picture frames you sometimes see at gift stores. Despite its simplicity, there's a surprising amount of options to play with, from changing the background picture with just a two-finger swipe to changing the color of the sand, and flipping around the iPad to send the sand falling the other way. You can also play with the sand realistically, pushing it around, or holding a finger down on the screen to create some bubbles in the water. You can even save pictures, and send them off to services like Twitter or Facebook. If you think the whole thing is silly and frivolous, I can't say I'd argue. Still, there is a following for this type of thing (why else would those sand picture frames still be around?), and the launch price, at just US 99 cents, is cheap enough to grab the app even if you only get a bit of enjoyment out of it. I hope to see more games like Chopper 2 from Majic Jungle in the future, but Sand Pictures is a fun diversion.
Chopper 2 for Mac controlled by iPhone
You've probably seen Chopper 2 here on TUAW before -- we originally covered the app's iPad-out-to-TV feature and then chatted with creator David Frampton back at WWDC last year. With the news of the Mac App Store coming soon, Frampton has decided to port the game over to the Mac, and since he already included a way to control the universal iPad app with an iPhone, he's decided to do the same thing for the Mac. On the next page, you can see a video demo of the app on the Mac being controlled by the iPhone version over Wi-Fi. It's very slick, and I don't think this will be the last connection we'll see between iOS apps and the Mac App Store. When developers are able to "control" versions of all three of their apps (iPhone, iPad and, eventually, the Mac), there are probably many more ways they can connect them up, from straight controls like this to regular syncing of information and other connections. I wouldn't be surprised if we even see Apple getting in on the action, both enabling this type of cross-platform compatibility in its own apps (controlling Keynote on the Mac from an iPhone, for example) and including helpful calls in the API to let developers do so themselves. But kudos to Frampton for his work on this one -- he tells TUAW that he wants to have the Mac app ready to go on launch day, so if you're a Chopper 2 fan, you'll be able to load it up and play right away.
Chopper 2 out now
We've mentioned Chopper 2 a couple of times during development, once to show off the TV out function built into the game, and again when we met up with creator David Frampton at WWDC. Now, development has finally finished, and he's released the game out on the App Store. You can pick it up for a launch sale price of $2.99. It's an excellent game, very polished, and while it starts out simply, the combat builds up well. It controls about the same as the last game (tilt to fly the chopper, and tap the screen to fire), but the firing controls have been refined. The presentation is probably the most amazing thing, actually -- the 3D world looks terrific, the music is excellent, and the titles on screen are in a kind of 3D as well, so that they seem to actually float in the game's real-world space. All in all, it's a very cool game and some excellent work by Frampton's Majic Jungle Software. The game is universal for both iPad and the iPhone, and if you install it on both, you can actually play the iPad version with the iPhone or iPod touch as a controller. It's not a huge gamechanger, but it is a fun extra feature that probably required some coding work to get going. If you've been waiting for this one like we have, it's on the App Store ready for you right now.
WWDC 2010: Hands-on with Chopper 2
Chopper's been in the App Store since day one, and David Frampton of Majic Jungle Software is the guy who put it there. Since then it's garnered over a million downloads, he's made a number of other App Store titles (and brought the game to the Mac), and he's hard at work on the game's sequel. We've actually posted it here on TUAW before (more on that implementation in just a bit). but I got to go hands on with the game on the iPad at WWDC. As a game, it plays about the same as the first one -- you control a chopper across 36 missions in 12 different locations, doing things like blowing up enemies, rescuing hostages, and so on. But the intriguing part of the game is the control scheme -- while it uses the same tilt-to-fly method as the first one, the fire button isn't on screen any more. Instead, you just touch anywhere to fire, and then adjust your finger on the screen to aim. It's amazingly intuitive -- the lack of a UI solves the problem of graphics getting in the way, and Frampton's figured out a great balance of skill-based aiming and touch-anywhere-to-fire.
Touch Arcade interviews maker of iPhone Chopper
Touch Arcade has a nice interview up with David Frampton, author of both the Mac game Chopper and its upcoming port to the iPhone. Apparently the game is feature complete and now in testing, so hopefully it'll be one of the first apps up on the App Store when it arrives, supposedly sometime this month.The game will use the iPhone's accelerometer to control the little helicopter, and Frampton says it's both a blessing and a curse, in that it makes things more fun to control, but the iPhone also has to be held at a certain angle to center it out (they're planning to get around this by adding a way to calibrate it for different playing situations). He also talks about how the iPhone's OpenGL ES version works, and says that, despite our worries about battery life, the iPhone is able to churn out a pretty consistent FPS as well as keeping battery usage fairly low. To be fair, Chopper is probably on the low end of graphics potential, but we'll take any good news we can get here.The game is still on track for a release in late June, and while even Frampton doesn't have details to share about the App Store's launch day, Apple's past support of this title means that if any third party games make it into the App Store, this one will definitely be there as early as possible.
