NimbleBit

Last week was pretty busy, here’s a quick summary:

Poison Oak, it is poison and tries to eat your arm. That is what I learned last week. Also, to be sneaky, it will wait about 5 days before making its presence known. It is to be avoided at all costs. As I watched my arm get eaten over the course of a few days, I managed to get some work done on Zero Gear. A few errors related to weapons being destroyed, a really tricky bug that was causing the wrong kart to display, general optimizations, and an unexpected math error (I wish dividing by 0 would just produce 0, dumb math) bug preventing name tags from displaying in certain cases were all taken care of.

There are only 2 more big items left on the tracker. I am planning to take care of those today. On Thursday I am heading down to San Diego for a couple weeks to work with Dave and Ian on polish and testing. The build is really starting to look good!

Last week I spent a brief bit of time working on promotional graphics for yesterdays National Ice Cream Day Scoops promotion, as well as playing a lot of Moon Drop. For the rest of the week I was working on a new Zero Gear map taking the form of a giant skate park, or I guess I should say, kart park. Hopefully it will be the first map of a new stunt-based game mode, although it should make a pretty fun tag map as well.

This week I am going to put some glitter and veneer on the map so that I can post some media of it!

Last week saw the release of our latest game Moon Drop! Sales have started out pretty slow, but what reviews it has gotten so far have been glowing. I spent the weekend hammering on our Twitter integration, adding things like a switch to make your score tweets public or private (invisible to your followers), a Nearby scores page showing scores within 300 miles, and the ability to click on a player and see his past scores. Twitter’s powerful search parameters made it a breeze to implement and since the scores are web-based we don’t have to wait on Apple to push these new features live! Yesterday was National Ice Cream Day and our special Scoops promotion! Close to 35,000 took advantage of the tasty holiday and downloaded Scoops for free, hope they find it cool and refreshing! Scoops will remain on sale for 99 cents for the remainder of National Ice Cream Month. This week I’ll be wrapping up some updates to Moon Drop and other iPhone games before taking a vacation to PC game development land to lend a hand on Zero Gear.