ryancash
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The developers of 'Alto's Adventure' are building a skateboarding game
Snowman, the creator of ultra-chill snowboarding game Alto's Adventure, is keeping busy lately. In addition to the sequel Alto's Odyssey, it is also working with studio The Game Band for Where Cards Fall and partnering with Australian studio Slingshot and Satchel to build Distant. That's an ambitious workload for a small studio, but that isn't stopping Snowman from announcing yet another new title in development: Skate City. The all-too-brief trailer and Instagram clips show it to be a side-scrolling skateboarding iOS/Android game with the same chill vibe as Alto's Adventure.
Queuing and downloading in the App Store
Here's a great idea from Ryan Cash to put iOS apps unavailable for immediate download into a queue that will automatically resume when they become available. Ryan notes that he often buys iOS apps when he's out and about, whether it be on the recommendation of a friend, riding in a car, etc. The problem is that many of the target apps are over the 20MB 3G limit. I've experienced this myself, as well as the inevitable conclusion: I forget to try again once I'm within range of a Wi-Fi network, and the app's author has lost that sale. Ryan suggests an "add to queue" option to accompany or follow the notification at right, which would put that download into a holding pattern until the iPhone found a Wi-Fi network. That way, the download would resume, we'd get that cool app we were motivated to buy earlier, and the author will get the sale. Additionally, Ryan suggests that a queue could keep the user from being pushed out of the store to initiate a download, so that they could tap and get several apps going at once. They're both interesting ideas, though I wonder if battery life would be affected if a queued app were continually polling for a Wi-Fi network (say you're out for 9 hours). What do you all think?
