Having fun with Outwitters? Head over to the Best App Ever Awards and nominate us for best strategy game! If we win, I think they’ll let us keep the title forever. Even if a better game comes out later. No backsies.
We just crawled out from under our rock and discovered the iPhone 5, so we added long-screen support to Outwitters. It should arrive on your device within the week… or maybe longer if the Christmas holidays have anything to say about it.
Look at all the room you’ll have!
The Outwitters 1.2 should be hitting your device in the next few hours. Here’s what you can expect in this update:
The Veggienauts Team Pack:
- Includes a new special unit, two new 1v1 maps, and a new 2v2 map.
- Free for those who purchased the über pack!
Also New:
- Base avatars are available in the store. You can change them in your profile.
- Player 2 now starts with 8 wits to counter the advantage of going first.
- You now get a bonus wit for each enemy you kill.
- Spawn menus have become prettier.
Fixes:
- Mobi shows up in replays when used within the fog of war.
- Fixed issue with local data cache growing to very large sizes.
- Fixed issue with re-installing causing users to be locked out of on-going games.
- Other numerous bugs and performance improvements.
We’ve tested these changes with a small group of beta testers, and hit a point where we’re confident enough to release it into the wild. We’ll be closely monitoring the live server, and making adjustments if something comes up balance-wise with the Veggienauts or any of the new gameplay changes.
What’s Next?
We’ve got another update already pretty far in the pipeline that’ll bring iPhone 5 native resolution support.
You can now complete your Outwitters Soundtrack by downloading the new Veggienauts Theme, free of charge for everyone (I know it says Buy Now, but you can pay zero). Mike Reagan and his company, REdVOLT Audio, did an outstanding job crafting the music and sound effects for Outwitters. The Veggienauts stuff is no exception.
The Outwitters Veggienaut update has been finalized and submitted to Apple! Their review process usually takes a week or so. Thanks for your patience with the delays (we didn’t see them coming either). If you’d like an email as soon as the update goes live, sign up for our mailing list. We don’t send much, mostly just new release notifications.
The new & improved Adorables spawn menu.
Did I say we’d be submitting Outwitters 1.2 this week? No, I don’t think I ever said that. You’d be hard pressed to find a written record of me saying anything like that.
We’ll almost certainly be submitting next week. Got some last-minute fixes that need doin’.
Had some setbacks, so we’ve moved our Veggienauts submission date to next week. If things go smoothly, you’ll have all kinds of new stuff to play with around the 15th.
It’s not really fan art, but an interesting blog post was brought to our attention by an Australian teacher that’s been using Outwitters in his classroom. We’re a little jealous that his kids have already got Mobi-less teleport technology in their Outwitters maps, but we’re proud to help train the Australian Super-Titans of the future.
Taking some time to jazz up the spawn menus. Don’t worry, it’s not an in-app purchase. Just a nice touch, I think.
Thanks to a nifty tool Alex made, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at Outwitters replays recently. Who won? How many capture point wits did he get? How many units did he kill? How much did he spend moving; how much attacking? My face hurts, frankly. I remember balancing Tilt to Live. We basically just watched how long it took people to die. Ah, simplicity.
A little beta craziness on a new map called Thorn Gulley. It’s interesting to see the different uses testers have come up with for Bramble. You can block paths with him, or just creep up on a capture point. We’re still debating and tweaking, but all of the new maps and content are finally playable. Hope to be ready to submit by the end of the month.
Ryan Rigney (author of Buttonless, which featured our first game Tilt to Live) came to us a few weeks ago with praise for Outwitters’ bold Free to Play model. No gold or extra lives being sold, just good wholesome content like I used to buy when I was a boy. “So how’s that working out for you?” he asked.
We figured we’d share our numbers so other small studios might make a better decision than we did. With 2% of 500,000 users buying something in your app, you need them to spend an average of $30 dollars each to break even on a $300,000 game (salaries for 2 people for 1.75 years, plus company overhead, custom sound, and half a year’s server costs). We should have done that math, and not overestimated the number of downloads “free” would attract. Consumables also weren’t a good fit for a competitive multiplayer game, which should’ve been a red flag that free to play was not a great choice.
So free to play + prominent Apple feature does not equal an automatic slam dunk. Lesson learned. We’re still proud of the game.