G4 includes Pocket God in Great Games For Your iPhone!

I watch G4 TV all the time, so I was psyched when I heard Adam Sessler's voice talking about Pocket God! I would have been slightly more psyched if it had been Morgan Webb tho.

Video Games - E3 2009 - X-Play

Wow...just wow! Rob Lapthorn and friends really KNOW they like Pocket God!

So awesome. Go favorite, comment, subscribe and all that. Thanks Rob!

Update: i just noticed the video requests video responses with the "catchphrase". Add yours to it today!

The Tyrannosaurus Strikes Back is out!

Woohoo! I was afraid it wouldn't make the weekend. And sorry if putting a spoiler in the promo video was a bad idea. It was a strategy to leak out the images to increase new sales. Not sure if it worked, but as time goes on, it will be difficult to maintain our place in the charts so we are trying new things. Including this new splash page for the itunes store...


The problem with leaking updates, is we start getting criticized even before the release has gone through! Also...keep us posted if people are still having crashing problems. I hope our fix will alleviate the majority of them!

We are submitting the latest update tonight. The features are starting to tax the ipod processor even more...so Dave worked on optimizations today to get into "Return of the Pygmy" so it runs smoother. Hopefully people see the difference!

IGN Alert

Hey guys. Lots of people asking about the next update. It was submitted late last week, and in the past that would have meant the update would have gone through by now. But as we all know, the turn-around isn't what it used to be. We can't submit "Return of the Pygmy" until "The Tyrannosaurus Strikes Back" goes through.

In the mean time, IGN picked up an article about our current updates:

>> Read it here <<

Act of Pocket God

I just saw this interesting preview for documentary about people who were struck by lightning...and how they wonder if there was an unseen hand behind it. Too bad the people who made this documentary never played Pocket God or they would have known its an unseen FINGER!

>> ACT OF GOD TRAILER <<

Pocket God Youtube Mashup and Sneak Preview of the T-Rex!

Originally this began as a longer demo for mobile game competitions, but then we shortened it up for your enjoyment. While we couldn't include every video ever made, this is a thanks to everyone for posting Pocket God vidoes on YouTube. Plus there is a sneak preview of the next release! Warning: if you won't want a spoiler, don't watch the epilogue after the ending bolt logo.

Erictric interviews Dave

Dave talks about Pocket God (what else?) and recalls the its beginning and then contemplates its future.

>> Read the Interview Here <<

Ace Ventura Jr. (Josh Flitter) fan of Pocket God!

The star of the Cartoon Network movie Ace Ventura, Pet Detective Jr. posted a cool shout out to PG!

So, as the animator of PG, I hope people aren't too disturbed that I am very aware of Cartoon Network Programming...which this movie was on. And while I missed the movie itself, I saw the ad campaign..so I was pretty stoked!

Thanks Josh!



P.S. Be sure to leave him a nice comment! :)

Saturday Morning Cartoons

I was scrolling through the Touch Arcade thread to find out the damage on our latest changes. But it looks like entropy took over in the forums. Me love randomness!

by SaintsAlive


by Pocket Kyle



by SaintsAlive


by Shocked



Thanks Pocket Kyle, Shocked and SaintsAlive!

Crashing, Controversy and other Conundrums

This turned out to be a crazy week when I thought we'd be chilling a little. There are several things going on...let's break it down, why don't we?

Dave goes to NY, Pocket God update is delayed, We hire a PR firm
So Dave took a small vacation and also got the opportunity to visit the Howard Stern show (we are both fans, so I was super jealous). In the mean time, we needed to create a new demo video for Pocket God in order to enter a mobile game competition. Now I HATE video taping me playing the game because I am a fumble fingers and if I'm taping it, it gets even worse. Dave and I then brainstormed the idea of borrowing clips from miscellaneous fan/review videos on YouTube. I spent last weekend and this week creating it while Dave was gone. Then, we decided to hire a PR firm, Triple Point, because we felt we were doing a really bad job of getting mainstream media attention. It was then decided to take the demo and shorten it down for a media release. More details on that later....

Apple Surprises us with Approval then the Crash reports
Once Apple told us that it was a simple fix on our app description that was holding up our approval, instead of taking their time, they approve it right away. Soon after, we are bombarded with reports of our app crashing! Oh, the humanity! Dave is in NY with no way to look into the issue so we are forced to hold tight. Dave returns on Thursday and busts his butt trying to reproduce the crash. He jailbreaks it, adds random stuff to it, microwaves it, throws it in a mud puddle, puts a voodoo hex on it and still it won't crash. He then does some coder thingy and is able to reproduce it and then solve it. The update was submitted this morning. And yes...the T-Rex is coming!

>> Read Dave's State of the Island here <<

And finally, the Controversy!
Then, we start reading on the internet about how Pocket God is being called degrading and racist. Read iPhone Savior's article about it here. Now we have a slightly evil sense humor and watch too much South Park, but this accusation did not thrill us. This is so far from our reality and all we were trying to do was set up a funny fantasy scenario in a tropical environment and didn't think people would read any more into it than that. But we were probably being naive since we live in San Francisco, one of the most tolerant multi-cultural cities there is...other places, not so much. It turns out we made two really big blunders...first was the stone statue, also known as Moai. This is sacred to certain Pacific Island cultures. The second was calling them "Islanders" which we thought was generic enough, but was too similar to "Pacific Islanders".

Dave engaged Elaine Howard, one of the people that wrote up the controversy and discussed some fixes. They asked to to implement some pretty major (and costly) changes that Dave discusses in the thread above. However, together, we came up with some easier alternatives. First, we stop calling them Islanders or Pygmies and use a new fictional name: Oogs with the addition of a backstory. Then we remove the Moai and replace it with a fictional octopus (or qudrapus) god statue to be used in a future story. I eagerly await the stream of comments by people who hate these ideas...but I think we ended up creating new and interesting concepts to explore! We welcome an open discussion.

The Dave Report! Progress!

Dave's on his way back from NY today but he took some time out of his vacation to dig into the issues that have been reported.

I guess it was optimistic to think we could continually add to Pocket God without having growing pains. We kept trying to cut down on graphic memory to avoid crashing, but it LOOKS like that our assumption about why it was causing crashes wasn't quite right. Dave updates us on Touch Arcade...

"Crashing, I think I found out what is happening. I didnt know this but there is a limit to the amount of processing you can do before the app officially starts, I have 10 seconds to start everything up and right now that time is being spent connecting to fient, connecting to heartbeat (our crash reporter) loading textures and sounds, and any other initialization. If you have homebrew, or a slow internet connection (wifi or bad reception) the startup time takes longer than 10 seconds and the app automatically shuts down because it thinks it has stalled.

In the meantime, if you have crashes, boot jailbreak in safe mode. turn off wifi. or make sure you have a good connection when you want to do wi fi. fient and heartbeat is trying to see if there is a good connection, if its completely off. it knows its off fast, if its good, it knows its good fast. but if the connection is going in and out. then it takes too long to figure out it is available or not."

>> The rest of his Touch Arcade post here <<

This is good news because now that Dave knows why, he can solve it! He goes on to say that he has to fix the problem before submitting Episode 16. Thanks to everyone for telling us your symptoms! We will hurry out the update ASAP.

New Update Out!

Hey guys! As people might have noticed, the latest update is out! There is a new island with new dangers....but its only the beginning. The outhouse is the latest item for the islander....but more will happen with the egg in Episode 16...which is my new favorite update.

So, a couple things....

- I have to go through and approve comments. I'm using my laptop finger pad and I slipped and I just accidentally rejected 20 comments :( really sorry! I shouldn't be performing such a delicate procedure at 7:30am..

- In those comments was some information about people having trouble with crashing! Anyone experiencing that, please comment again as we want to resolve that immediately if its something more than needing to restart the phone, or involving jailbroken phones!

And yes, that means Dave will submit the latest update ASAP....except we might wait a little bit to hear about technical issues, just in case it is a code issue we don't want to go out in the next release! -A

Status update, links and new catchphrase

So, we are still waiting for Apple to talk to us about the hold up and they are taking their time. So much for our big trilogy! What a drag! If you can follow: Apple is holding on to Episode 15: A New Home. We have Episode 16 locked and loaded but can't submit it until Apple approves Ep 15 (or rejects it). Episode 17 is in progress, but this week Dave C is in New York for a few days.

Hopefully we can get back on track, but we honestly don't know what's going on. We have a SLIGHT concern we might be caught in the wake of the Baby-shaker controversy. I hope NOT.

In the mean-time, here is a cool review from app modo:
>> Click here for Review <<

Also, you gotta love the internet. First Daniel (Moonclog13) writes us a theme song.

Then, we came across this video by Amanda and Aliyah. In the process of these 2 girls trying to film their reaction to the infamous "2-girls-1-cup" video (if you haven't heard of it, you don't want to know), they randomly came up with our new catchphrase: "You KNOW you like Pocket God!" You gotta stick with the video (till about 1:56) but when they get to it, its pretty compelling. Please adopt the new catchphrase and use it often.


Anyway, thanks for your patience! We will keep you posted when we know what's going on!

Daniel (MoonClog13) makes a request

Thanks Daniel....I think. Anyway, you might want to cut down on the helium :)

Now What ????

Here we go again! Apple sent us the following letter:

Dear Dave,

Your application Pocket God is requiring unexpected additional time for review. We apologize for the delay, and will update you with further status as soon as we are able.
Thank you for your patience.

Regards,

iPhone Developer Program

This is the time of week we receive "when is the next update coming out?" notes, so hopefully this will answer the question. We don't know and now you know as much as we do! We hope you will sit tight. We just wrapped up my new favorite update "The Tyrannosaurus Strikes Back" but we can't submit it until the next one goes through. And yes, we are aware this will affect sales badly and probably cause further sinkage on the app list!

Mood: Bummed

-A

New Home - Sneak Peak

While we are waiting for "A New Home" to be approved, I thought I'd post a sneak shot...however I've cropped it. Why? Well, we want SOME surprises!

iPhonespaz.com interviews Dave & Allan

We were pretty sure we were nerds, knew that we're geeks but only up until now suspected we were spazzes as well. Now its confirmed:

>> Click here to read interview <<

P.S. Looks like I've triggered a flood of requests to be on a beta tester list. But we don't have the resources to maintain an ongoing list with this amount of interest. Bottom line is, Dave is maxed out and it probably will be a while before people drop off and we need more. Until then, we need to stay focused on developing new PG features! Thanks again! -Allan

Amazing Youtube Interactive by Rupert (Rup22)

Check out this interactive youtube piece by Ruprt Moreton (Rup22) on Youtube. I didn't even know you could do this, but he did a really amazing job and clearly spent a LOT of time on it. It gives you a great history of the pocket god updates. ah, the memories! Be sure to go comment, favorite and subscribe.


Thanks Rupert!