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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.
Minecraft-like builder The Blockheads arrives from Majic Jungle
Majic Jungle Software, the developer behind Chopper 2 for iOS and Mac, has released its latest game at last. The Blockheads (free) is a "2.5D" take on the exploration and building formula of Minecraft, offering a large block-based world but presenting it from a side-on view rather than a first-person perspective. Unlike the similar Junk Jack, however, The Blockheads still uses polygons to render the game world. The gameplay should be familiar to anyone who's played Minecraft. You hack away at resources to gather them, then combine them to craft new materials in order to build shelter, clothing, tools and more. While the game is free, there are in-app purchases in the form of time crystals that can be used to speed up the collection of resources. There's also a one-time in-app purchase that can be used to permanently reduce the amount of time required to gather things. The Blockheads seems perfectly suited to touch devices, and in fact, may play even better than its inspiration because it doesn't require 3D movement. It runs in portrait mode on the iPhone and iPod touch, making it playable with one hand. On the iPad, it's full screen in landscape orientation, making the most of the tablet screen. Two players can collaborate within the same world via Game Center, and the game supports voice chat. If you've given The Blockheads a shot, share your thoughts -- or even drop a link to a favorite screenshot -- in the comments!
NZ earthquake hits Mac/iOS devs; Dejal Software creates relief effort
The magnitude 6.3 earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand on Tuesday has caused incredible damage and hit close to home for many of us at TUAW. Developer David Frampton (@majicdave on Twitter) from Majic Jungle Software had a particularly scary few days. Although Dave lives in Wellington on the North Island, his mother Ann Bodkin was trapped in rubble for several days before being rescued. We were thrilled to read Dave's tweet when she was close to being rescued: "Mum is alive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Still trapped, but talking to rescuers. So so unbelievably happy and relieved." Another developer and regular on the TUAW Talkcast is Layton Duncan (@polarbearfarm) from iOS development house Polar Bear Farm. Layton was at work when the earthquake hit, and he quickly started sending photos and videos via Twitter. You can see his office in the photo above, and read about his experience on his blog. We were very glad to see that he made it through the devastating quake unharmed, and we can't wait to talk with him on the next Talkcast. Relief efforts will continue for some time, and New Zealand expat developer David Sinclair's Dejal Software (@dejal) is helping out with an incredible deal -- he's donating 100 percent of all profits from the sales of his Mac Apps (Simon, TimeOut, Caboodle and BlogAssist) between now and Sunday to rescue and relief efforts in New Zealand. Here's your chance to do good and get some great software at the same time. Many thanks from those of us at TUAW to David Sinclair and Dejal for this wonderful outreach to the people of New Zealand. Photo by Layton Duncan
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.
iSight Screensavers: Interact with your screensaver
Some of you may have noticed that some of your screensavers don't work after upgrading to Snow Leopard. If you're running a 64-bit instance of the operating system, you won't be able to use most of your old third-party screensavers because they're probably not compatible. Many of our favorite screensavers weren't working... so instead of waiting for the developers to release them in 64-bit, we decided to see what else was out there. iSight Screensavers from Majic Jungle (the creators of FluidTunes) isn't new, but it's something we've never covered here on TUAW. It was one that showed up first in our search and ended up killing our productivity for the rest of the day. And the next day. In fact, we've not really recovered productivity since we clicked the "test" button in System Preferences. Majic Jungle has made a killer screensaver that allows you to interact with different effects and filters using the iSight camera, or any webcam attached to your mac. I won't get into the countless scenarios we created (we're pretty easily entertained), but here's a list of interactions from the creators' site to help explain what it does: Fluid - Play with a beautiful fluid dynamics simulation Particles - Create magical looking brightly colored particles wherever you move Champagne - Immerse yourself in a champagne world and watch as bubbles appear all over you Fire - Set yourself or your desktop on fire - in a painless kind of way! Water - Ripples appear wherever you move Flipping Grid - Can you get all of the squares to flip over together? Core Image - Over 30 configurable effects using powerful Core Image filters iSight Screensavers is Universal Binary and Shareware. If you'd like to remove the watermarks, you can purchase a license for $4.99 -- pretty cheap considering my wife and I are more entertained by this than by a $25 night at the movies.
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.
