Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Highborn Video Trailer & More!



The game has been out for a week now and still doing pretty good. I expect another bump as some more reviews come out. Here is another great review from The Portable Game just came out last night and another one from 148 Apps just came out a few minutes ago.

I also posted another Developer Diary that talks about why we didn't include an Undo Feature in Highborn, and what we are going to try and implement to compensate for that. It also talks about a few other things we are working on for the game.

We also have this wonderful review that was posted about the game in Apple's App Store:Highborn App Store reviewHighborn iPhone token examplesFinally I want to post this sneak peek at some of the tokens we are redoing for the iPad version of Highborn. We are increasing the scale of the game by 150%, notice that isn't the standard doubling. The new scale allows you to see more of the maps and still have bigger squares to touch. The original tokens from the iPhone are above, and the new ones for the iPad are below.Highborn iPad token examples

6 comments:

BugHunter said...

Only on the 3rd mission, but I like the gameplay and the sense of humor.

I do have some suggestions though.
It takes 1 minute 15 seconds to load up a mission on my iPhone. That kind of takes it out of the "I have a couple minutes, maybe I can get in a turn" kind of game.

Tapping "Move" "hold Action", etc. should probably give an indicator immediately, just to let me know that I did really hit the button, and I don't need to tap it again.

Joseph B. Hewitt IV said...

What are you playing on? I did some testing on an older iPod touch and it was pretty slow, but the load times on my 3Gs are just a few seconds and button presses are instant.

I would like to put in some visual indications on the taps, but not sure when I may be able to get around to that. Doing the upgraded iPad stuff at the moment and then back to working on Chapter Two, which is when I expect we'll make some UI tweaks.

Anyway, glad you liked it.

BugHunter said...

It's a 1 year old 3G. I don't know much about the iPhone really. I guess there's a bigger difference in power between the versions than I would have thought.

I read a review the other day saying Highborn didn't include some sort of resource management to purchase troops. Sounded like they thought that was a negative thing. I certainly don't agree. Talk about destroying any ability to play a map in small chunks over many days. I wouldn't remember what my plan was from one day to the next...and I'd have to have a plan!

Joseph B. Hewitt IV said...

In that one negative review we have gotten, it seems pretty obvious that he just wanted a different, more hardcore game. That isn't what we were trying to create at all.

I remember reading a review for Max Payne way back when. It listed a negative thing being that it was too short and you could play through it in a weekend. When I saw that I bought it on my way home from work; because, that was all the time I had to spend playing a game at the time. For me it was a good thing.

It's like you make the world's best vanilla ice-cream and somebody tastes it and complains it isn't chocolate.

I'm also a little disappointed that none of the reviewers (even the ones that given us glowing reviews) have done even a little investigating as to that or what we are working on adding. They keep mentioning how we use Facebook Connect (as do a whole lot of other games because it is easy to implement and free) but we have announced and talked about how we are implementing something else as well several times. None of them mention that at all.

Overall thought, I am blown away by the good things people have said, especially about the writing.

Unknown said...

I just downloaded and fell in love with Highborn this weekend. I was wondering if you had an ETA for the Chapter 2 release? Your game is very addictive, I couldn't put my iPad down!

Joseph B. Hewitt IV said...

Thanks! Glad you liked it.

Highborn Chapter 2 took a backseat for a few other things, but it is back up and in production.

A first pass has been done for all the missions which are currently being reviewed. Once that is done I'll go back and do a writing pass and making tweaks (currently thinking of swapping mission one and two) while the map artwork is created. We work on mocked-up maps with nothing but colored squares when creating the missions. After that it will get a week or two of testing before submission to Apple which could take around a week for them to approve.

At a guess you are looking at at least 4-5 weeks before its out. I know that sounds like awhile, but we are trying to squeeze in a few improvements while we are at it. We are also putting out a free version, which will have a tutorial and the first 1 or 2 missions. That is being play tested now.