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)

Bit Blot

Florence + The Machine

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