Tag: Community »

Supernauts is a pretty spiffy looking hybrid of Minecraft and Clash of Clans that we were able to get an early peek at last year. It's still a bit of a ways off from a worldwide release, but if you're hankerin' to get a leg up on your eventual competition you should head over to Pocket Gamer and check out the new Supernauts Hub that just went live.

What can you do in the Hub? Well you can check out a bunch of exclusives, guides, and news items for one. And if that's not enough, you can also add your own content. Get help from the community when you have questions, share your work (assuming you're already playing Supernauts, you lucky duck), publish your own walkthroughs, etc.

You can check out Pocket Gamer's Supernauts Community Hub here.

If you're obsessed with Angry Birds Go! then our pals at Pocket Gamer have just the site for you: The Angry Birds Go! Community.

This dedicated space for fans of the game to gather, meet, and even improve how they play the game is jam-packed with detailed toy guides, character profiles, strategy guides, achievement listings, community screenshots, fan art, and much more besides.

Best of all, it's a space that's shaped by you, the fans, giving everyone the opportunity to help build the greatest Angry Birds Go! site ever made.

So stop stalling, and race on over to The Angry Birds Go! Community now to see what everyone's talking about.

What's New in Version 1.4.9
• Updated portfolio design
• Comments: now with replies & emoji
• Can visit other Maker portfolios
• New Explore view
• Design tweaks & bug fixes

The idea behind the app is to skip the sign-up sheets and mass emails in favour of directly accessing the necessary sign up information and then to let parents communicate efficiently with the right people to get the job done, be it planning a homecoming celebration or spending time as a classroom aide.

VolunteerSpot boasts that their coordination tools, which are primarily located on their website, "boost administrative and management efficiencies by up to 85 percent and increase parent participation by 20 percent.” If you or your school use the service or the app, we’d love to know what you think in the comments.

As part of the program, the developers have released the unfinished King Pong app for free, with the idea being that the consumers can help design the final product.  The Kickstarter campaign is hopefully going towards funding King Pong's development as well as designing a platform that all developers could used to interact with their paying consumers.  Call us crazy, but if implemented properly, this could be a interesting look into the future of game design.

Check out their full product pitch below and let us know what you think in the comments.

It's Friday night and you've got no plans. What do you do? Well if you're up for a bit of adventure you could fire up Roamz and let it guide you to all sorts of local fun and excitement. The app scans your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and FourSquare accounts to find out what other folks in the area are up to and what local establishments are jumping on a given day.

What sets Roamz apart from similar apps is that it tailors itself to your personal tastes, recommending locations which are not only popular, but which you'll also find interesting. Who cares if your friends are checking out an art museum if you're not into that stuff right? Basically, the more you use the app the better it can predict what you want to see, and the latest update has improved the app's learning functionality so it will be more accurate than ever. Want to know more? Check out the video for a quick rundown of what Roamz can do.

The app scans your Facebook and Twitter feeds and grabs links to articles that seem to be really resonating with your personal community. If you tend to associate with a more gamer-specific crowd then you'll see a lot of stories revolving around video games; if you lean toward sports then scores and highlights from yesterday's games will appear onscreen. News.me strives to deliver all the content you care about and nothing you don't.

The app also supports offline reading so you don't have to worry about having a signal, as well as displaying what friends are saying about each story on the feed so you can have your finger on the pulse of the conversation. With so much information out there we have to be smart with how we consume it, and News.me seems poised to be one of the best tools out there for doing just that.

If it's one thing that GDC taught me it's that the iPhone has a long way to go as a game console. It's still a tiny little player in the whole gigantic video games world. But in the nine months since the app store launch, it has made some great strides.

For one thing, the iPhone totally dominated the Independent Games Festival Mobile awards. Not only did they will all the categories, they had most of the nominations as well. The iPhone is now, as far as most are concerned, the best mobile phone platform to develop on. As one developer put it, finally a mobile platform that doesn't suck.

This past week we did get many clues about what 2009 will bring for iPhone games. First, this will be the year the big boys go full force after the iPhone market. EA, Chillingo, Glu, and others have announced some huge portfolios of games coming out this year.

We will also see an explosion in backend community systems, think XBox Live for your iPhone, and probably some consolidation of those services as well. Consumers aren't best served by having multiple community systems, everyone knows that, but who will win out as the best? With GameSpy announcing they are bringing over their backend that already powers many console and desktop titles, they will likely start out in the lead. Then ngmoco announced they were opening up their platform to third party developers, another strong contender, but no release date announced. Then you have the underdogs such as OpenFeint, ByteClub, and a new contender, Agon. Then there's also the Facebook Connect for iPhone that many systems are using. It's not purely a gaming system, but many have adapted it. A force for sure, with Facebook having over 160 million users.

We also were fortunate to meet with some really cool developers and get a sneak peak at some of the great games coming out in the not too distant future.

Real Racing from Firemint
Release Date: Late April, 2009 at an unknown price
Without a doubt, the best we saw was Real Racing from Firemint. Real Racing is a racing game just short of a racing sim. It's ultra-realistic and features some amazing community and asynchronous multiplayer modes. You even have the ability to publish hot laps to YouTube, automatically. The controls by default work great and are very responsive. This is one to watch for. Firemint are being close to the chest with the price on this one, but it will be released late April.

Touch Pets from ngmoco
Release Date: unknown
I'll have to admit I was originally nonplussed on Touch Pets. But after spending some time with it I can see what the excitement it about it. For one this, this game is deep. There's lots to do, lots of things to collect, there are missions to go on, there are achievements, tons of stuff. But above all, this game has a social aspect that could set it apart from all of the other virtual pet type games. This all ads up to a game that will be very enormously engrossing to many people, maybe even me.

Star Defense from ngmoco
Release Date: pretty soon at an unknown price
Tower Defense games are filling up the app store quickly. And many are really good. Star Defense takes a slightly different direction and adds 3D to the standard game. So instead of playing tower defense on a flat landscape, you play it on a 3D world. One of the more interesting parts of this is that, in one level, you are playing on a cube instead of a sphere. This basically divides up each level into 6 parts as you have to place defense on each of the sides since the weapons don't seem to work around the corners of the cube. The game itself seems really well done and stable, and should be released soon. We'll give it more playtime when it comes out and get a full review.

Star Trader: Moon Madness from HermitWorks
Release Date: very soon at $0.99
This game is an expanded version of the DopeWars genre that I'm sure everyone is familiar with. But it's set in outerspace and uses the Quake engine to provide a 3D world where you can walk around and barter. The controls are a modified 2 location virtual touch pad as we've seen on other games and works well for movement and changing the angle you are viewing the world. The developers are releasing this at $0.99 and will be raising the price as they add features such as multiplayer in the future.

All in all a fantastic GDC. Had to great opportunity to speak with some amazing people. We'll try to get full reviews of these games up as soon as they are available.

Finishing up our interview with August, I ask him about what it is like being an iPhone developer in the lime-light, or Celebrity Developer. He talks about how much fun it has been to break out of the traditional role from time to time, and how it has really helped out his programming business.

I also get his opinions on Apple's filing to have jailbreaking iPhones judged illegal, what that means to the development community, and how jailbreaking is actually beneficial to the App Store and making the iPhone a popular development platform. August also tells us why he has avoided it.

Most importantly, August gives us the breaking story about the soon to be released app, YOWZA!!, and how it will change the way you shop and use your iPhone.

Listen to how August met Greg Grunberg (Matt Parkman on Heroes) on Twitter, and joined forces with Rick Yaeger from MacMerc, to create a whole new business model for an iPhone app, and how they have tackled the problems of turning your iPhone into a money-saving shopping tool! And it's going to be FREE!

Here is a little taste from Greg himself.

Enjoy!

You can check out August's digital book, Optimizing Your Website for Mobile Safari on your Kindle from Amazon, or buy it in PDF format here.