Tiny Tim Games

So I decided to take a little time off from developing Sol Defender for a while to get a few other “quick” projects finished. The first of these projects was a prototype that I’ve been wanting to do for some time. I think the prototype was a success, and we’ll be exploring a full version of it in the future. But at the moment, we have far too many half-finished projects to start yet another one.

The other project I wanted to pursue was updating our existing games. It’s been a long time since we’ve pushed out any updates, and our games seriously needed them. As you may have seen from our news section, we managed to release an updated version of Sheepstacker. I’m going to go into a bit of what changed and what we had to do to get this update out the door.

(more…)

After what seems like a lifetime, a new version of Sheepstacker is now available in the App Store!

Here’s what you can expect from this massive update:

• Game Center leaderboards and achievements
• Retina display graphics
• iPad support (Universal)
• Revamped UI
• Better performance (60 fps on most devices)
• Gameplay tweaks (extra hearts and time in Speed Stack are now awarded for every 250 nickels)

There is one caveat to all of the great new features: the AGON Online service is shutting down on June 30th, so we’ve removed it from this version. Unfortunately, we were unable to salvage the scores and achievements from AGON due to library incompatibilities with Unity (and believe me, we tried).

However, since we’ve made some fairly significant gameplay changes, the old scores and achievements wouldn’t be representative of the current state of the game. We apologize for the inconvenience of this and hope you can understand that we were simply out of options. We’ve begun caching this information on our own for future versions in case this situation ever happens again.

A new version of Sheepstacker Lite will be coming shortly as well. It won’t have Game Center support, but the other changes will be coming along for the ride.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who signed up! We’ve got all the beta testers we need for this release.

We’re pleased to announce that Sheepstacker version 1.4 is almost ready to be shipped off to Apple, but we need your help! While we have a very stable version of the game running, we want to take extra care to make sure this is the best version of Sheepstacker yet. So we’re asking you to sign up to become a Tiny Tim Games beta tester!

We use a service called TestFlight to distribute our beta builds and to gather information from our beta testers. To sign up for beta testing, just follow this link:

http://bit.ly/mHSTxv

We’ll be handing out promo codes for Sheepstacker to the lucky ones who make it into the beta test to give to a friend (or to use yourself, if by some chance you haven’t played the game yet). We can’t accept everyone into the beta, so don’t fret if you don’t make it in. We’ll have plenty of beta opportunities in the future.

So way back in January, we started a project called Safety First, and I wanted to blog about its development. The problem with blogging about indie development is that sometimes life gets in the way (day job, baby on the way), and there’s just nothing to write about for a long time. There’s also nothing to write about if you run into a creative wall.

We had put together a few quick levels, and while the general idea was fun enough, I found myself unable to come up with interesting level designs. Part of this has to do with the fact that I’m just not that into level design. I like creating game mechanics, but I don’t necessarily like coming up with interesting variations on them. I guess that’s why I became a programmer and not a designer.

So is the game canned?

(more…)

A new Word Monkey update has just been approved by Apple! Version 1.2 includes support for iOS 4.0, including fast app switching. In addition, it fixes a few bugs that some users had reported. The update is available in the App Store now.