Only 5 days until we go public. Crazy! While we have a huge list of little things to get through we’re very happy to be at functional complete. So a lot of play testing and a lot of refinement to go on over the next few days ensuring that we get the best possible game out to you on Monday. Wish us luck!

It’s really nice when things work out. Like our awesome new quest system, new grove, and revised layout to the forest. We were talking today about how difficult it is to nail that last 10% of any creative project, how you can find yourself lost in a soup of self doubt and hopelessness at struggling to find a solution that you can truly be proud of.  But those times when you break through and end up with something awesome really make it worth while.

We’ve decided on a live date, and it is Monday 2nd of August, 10 days from now. Exciting! We’ll also be ramping up our public exposure, starting with a new Twitter domination plan orchestrated by our resident funny-man Mark. You can follow us here, and here.

If you’re in Dunedin and keen to do some play testing later next week, message us on Facebook or in the comments here. We’re getting brutal on refining the user experience and need fresh people’s clicks to analyse (wow that didn’t sound creepy at all).

Couple of things that we thought were really cool this week:

Transformer Owl

Kevin Butler takes on New Zealand TV3

Ian Bogost presents a Facebook game parodying Facebook games

Final Staracraft 2 story trailer

Woah intensity. We’re into our final ~week of development before we reset for good, and while everything is looking awesome I gotta tell you, we’re certainly running this one down to the wire! We’ve responded to a stack of your feedback asking for tweaks to the movement, load time, and the implementation of a quest system. That info we get through the surveys and feedback form is hugely valuable so keep it coming.

Oh, thats a peek at the new background graphic above. Heaps of the art assets have been overhauled and we’re working hard to make sure the environment is bursting with life (and secrets!).

Thanks so much to those people that played through to Level 20 for us, you’ll be getting a real boost next week and we’ll announce who got there first very soon. The data we got from your play throughs has allowed us to adjust the XP model so its smoother and more rewarding to progress in the game. We’re very interested in hearing from everyone on what they like / dislike about: a) social posting through Facebook e.g. announcing an achievement on your wall, and b) premium item sets (what would be of huge value that you could see yourself paying for in the game). Fire us your comments below, on Facebook, or by email.

We move into our new home in a few weeks, and we have also been quite into animated GIFs recently (swimming in our overtime madness) so these two facets of Runaway life bred this abomination:

Hang tight, we’ll have something pretty awesome for you next week

Time for our first competition, with an opportunity for you to help us heaps with testing the level progression model, while grabbing some awesome in-game bonuses unique to this testing phase.

The goal is to reach Level 20

Participants will be rewarded with a big boost to their profiles when the game restarts for the last time in a fortnight (so you’ll get to keep these forever, no more server resets!). Here’s what you’ll get for achieving the following:

IMPORTANT: To be eligible you must also have completed the survey!

• - Play the game: 10,000 HD
• - Reach Lv 10: 20,000 HD
• - Reach Lv 20: 20,000 HD + Limited Edition Alpha Flower

And we have a special something in store for the first person to reach level 20

Good luck everybody, have fun, and remember to help each other out by visiting groves and gifting items. We’ll post an update on how everyones going in a couple of days.

PLAY HERE

It’s been a grueling couple of weeks but we have arrived and Alpha Version 3 is now LIVE for you guys to play with.

Please remember to take the survey as its incredibly import for us to gauge reaction to the game. We’ve now hooked it up so that if you click the link below the game and complete the survey, we’ll reward you with an extra 5,000 HD! (the bonus will be processed for you overnight)

This version was a big deal for me as we crossed the line where I started having honest to goodness fun with our own game. It’s always been the objective of the game to  feel warm, relaxed, connected to the natural world while letting players work towards something they can craft as their own. I felt that involuntarily, without having to fill in the blanks with my imagination, it’s just there. So now the more important part comes, to see if YOU get it too. New stuff:

- Grove Expansion! You grove will get bigger at levels 3, 5, 10, and 15. These expansions also bring with them a Fruit Tree, Frog, Hummingbird, and Toucan

- The Fruit Tree starts out little and will grow to soaring heights if you come back to water it daily

- New creatures for your grove as above

- Refined XP progression, blockages are now free to clear once you get to the required level. Yellow Seeds are now a big deal and could be the key to you advancing quickly (they make a flowerbed double in XP and HD)

- Stacks of new foliage and flowers

- Caterpillars now walk along the bottom of your grove, and are fed in the same way as other animals. Make sure you feed them the right host plant!

- Visit your friend’s grove by clicking on their portrait. This will grow their Social Flower, and you’ll be able to harvest from their visitor flower

- Gifting. You can drag any item out of your inventory and into your friend’s grove to leave it for them as a gift

Stay tuned for details of a competition that could win you a serious in-game bonus when we start the game for real in a couple of weeks. We’re creating a race to level 20, so if you’re super keen to start you could begin …. oh… NOW!

Alright team the next build of the game is ready for you to take apart. Play here!

The updated survey is really important for everyone to take so that we can see whether the game is getting better. It also provides crucial feedback specific to the improvements and feature additions in the latest build. This survey resets every time we reset the build so make sure you fill it out for each revision. Remember: be honest and critical. Here’s what changed since the first release:

• - Tutorial introduction to the game
• - Feed the frog and beetle for XP
• - New pricing structure means you can get more, and unlock more areas faster
• - New pollination rules: Flowers recharge honeydew over time, really fast at first (1 HD per 5 minutes) then slower over time, stopping after 24 hours. This means you can choose how often you want to come back without having to set some crazy schedule, but you still get rewarded for returning often
• - Upgrade your flower beds! See if you can find a super rare Yellow Seed in one of the treasure chests, then drag it on to a flower bed and double your Honeydew!
• - Harvesting HD from friends (50 per friend per day)
• - New pricing structure means you can get more, and unlock more areas faster
• - Significant frame rate and smoothness improvements

Thanks again so much for all your feedback and help with testing, we’re working hard to make sure you have the best possible game to play

Awesome feedback coming through from our testers. It’s hugely appreciated and as you can see above its already being put into great use in prioritising bugs / tweaks / feature requests. We’re now focusing on:

• - Tutorial intro with dialogues to explain mechanics
• - Tweaking flying to make navigation simpler
• - Some quick framerate fixups
• - Interaction with animals

We’ll be fixing bugs through the week, with a big release and reboot happening next Tuesday. In the meantime keep firing in those ideas and see if you can get to the top of your friends leaderboard

It’s time! We’re very happy to announce that the beta is now live for all of our Facebook friends to try out. While its still early days we’re keen to see what you think of the core gameplay and help us refine our ideas on where to expand the game.

Read the Beta Intro then Click here to play

Also see above the first of our video blog episodes which will be coming to you roughly once a week, each focusing on a different part of our development process. Let us know what you think and what you’d like to see more of. Also when you’ve had a play of Flutter please remember to fill out the survey. It’ll only take one minute and it gives us hugely valuable feedback

Check this guy out! He’s awesome, very happy with how our animals are turning out, which is what Emma and Mark have been working on for the last couple of weeks. They’ll be in the game and live for everyone to play with a week from Monday.

While the art team have been heads down on new stuff, the coders have been iterating through the live build, adding features, fixing bugs, plugging holes, getting services and APIs to play nice with each other. We’re working hard to refine the core loop we have, packing enough stuff in to do on your daily visits into the world of Flutter, while making sure its all balanced and intuitive. I’m pretty happy with a couple of huge simplifications to the pollination design I’ve made this week which should streamline the experience and not require you to plan your whole life around when you need to check back in with the game (we’re looking at you Hotel City!).

Jeff was unwell earlier this week, but is on the mend now so send him your positive healing energies and all that hippie stuff

Some cool links:

“Indie Game: The Movie” got funded through Kick Starter and is looking like an amazing documentation of the indie game dev spirit

Mark is bigtime in to the works of Adventure Time’s Fred Seibert

Darwin’s Beetle is both tireless, and ruthless

Zynga and Facebook conclude their very public squabble, with a favorable outcome for our chosen virtual currency solution (Facebook Credits)

We made it! The game is live on Facebook, all the elements have come together into a cohesive experience and our design focus shifts away from dreaming up user stories on paper to refining a playable experience. That’s a screenshot right there from the game playing, and you’ll be able to get your hands on it real soon.

So what happens now? We’re going to spend about a week iterating and refining ahead of focus tests in house here at NHNZ. Watching people play through the first 5 levels of the game will give us some great feedback for ensuring everything is intuitive before kicking a version out the door for our Facebook fans. We then have a great feedback system for all you guys which will allow us to capture a ton of qualitative and quantitative data, all of which will mix into a close feedback loop as we iterate through the game. Through an 8 week process, we will expand the base of testers, add features, refine and reset the balance of the world, all in the quest to fine tune a fluid, rewarding, and meaningful gameplay experience.

I’m personally very proud of where we are now, and hugely grateful for the supportive structure here at NHNZ which has given us the time to refine this game to be all that it can be as opposed to kicking something average out the door. We’re very lucky to have such an awesome team here, let’s get cracking on some serious spit and polish guys!

Neat new things this week:

1. The Humble Indie Bundle raise over $1 million for indie developers and charities
2. Steam comes to Mac with free Portal
3. Zynga and Facebook butting heads over credits and the constantly evolving social platform (p.s. we’re personally down with the whole credits thing)
4. If Super Mario Brothers was made in 2010, it might be a little more social