Posts by: Tim Nixon

  • We’ve kicked off the new year with a fresh lick of paint on Flutter, dialing up the sparkle factor big time! Over the last two weeks we’ve added in more feedback for when you interact with the environment, and revamped the intro tutorial to make the game easier to pick up. There’s never been a better time to invite your friends to play.

    You’ll find now that the moment-to-moment play is a lot more rewarding with clear and exciting feedback for quest progression, leveling up, pollinating flowers and harvesting items.

    We’ve also added in a ton of new social posts so you can share all your achievements on your wall. Here’s a sneak peak at some of the post graphics, can you guess what they’re all for?

    Our focus now is growing that userbase! We’ll be working with the WWF to spread the word about our initiative with them, and working hard to get some buzz rockin round the internet.

    Not too long now before we’ll be able to let you know what we’ve been up to on the iPhone as well, excited to show you all. Hope you had a fantastic Christmas and New Years, here’s to a huge 2011!

  • We’re incredibly proud this evening to announce a partnership with one of the greatest conservation organisations on earth. It’s been our ambition for a while to give something back to the environment which inspires and informs the setting of our game, and when it comes to the Amazon, WWF are at the forefront of building a sustainable future for the forest.

    The project we’re sponsoring is all about supporting the native people in their traditional practice of sustainable farming.

    Find out all about the initiative here

    Thanks to all of our players for their support thus far. We hope that this new initiative can bring you even closer to the incredible environment which is the Amazon.

  • The latest greatest addition to the rainforest has arrived today with the release of the Magic Cauldron area, accessible to those Lv 14 and higher from the main forest. In this creepy new corner of the forest players can brew super-items like:

    • Potions to shrink, grow, and speed up your butterflies
    • Rare food for your animals that gives double XP
    • Exclusive super decorations

    There are also two new quests to complete as you figure out all the recipes. This first level of “Apprentice” concoctions will be followed up in a couple of weeks with more recipes.

    Have fun and mix up a storm!

    Play Flutter on Facebook here

  • horror

    Miami Horror

  • mario2

    Nintendo

  • Available now in the store! Place this little green chest in your grove and water it for 3 days for it to become a pop-able Seed Chest. You can have up to 5 going at any one time. We’ve put the same cap on number of bromeliads in the grove for technical and game balance reasons.

    Remember you can drop a luck potion on these to turn them into a rare seed chest, which is bound to give you a super awesome item.

    We’ve also released three new “explosion” flowers for you to shower over your grove.

    Next week we’ll have another small content update like this, then the week after we’ll be opening that glowing door in the forest to reveal a very exciting new space that will keep you guys busy for a while :)

  • We’ve just released a big update which adds a whole lot more character and life to the rainforest. These will be the last big updates for the current area, so now we can move on to the next space! Here’s what’s new:

    Totem Quest

    Quite an epic challenge for you all with a reward that is worth every second. Makes the world feel a little more magical, and very keen to hear what you guys think of these sorts of problem solving quests. Good luck!

    Hidden Bugs

    We’ve also changed the way that the hidden bugs work. As opposed to getting XP for finding them, there is now a third Out of Sight quest which awards you two of the bugs to take back to your grove.

    Premium Item Store

    Some really neat premium items including a brand new butterfly and my favorite, a spectacular animated waterfall background with glowing rainbow and flying birds! We also have new flowers, a Monkey Grasshopper, special epiphytes, and a Brazil Nut Tree which produces nuts for a 2x XP bonus with your Toucan.

    Thanks to everyone who has picked up some premium items so far. As a very small development team these purchases fund the game’s on-going opperation and development. We hope that you find them valuable and as always, we love your feedback and ideas.

  • Since we launched Flutter, our focus has been on refining and adding depth to the grove and first forest level, making sure that their level of quality and life is of a standard we would expect for the expanding forest. With next weeks update, we’re happy we’re getting to that point (exciting stuff coming), so we’ve started to seriously conceptualise the deeper parts of the rainforest. We’d like to share our thoughts and concepts with you all to get your feedback and create this space together, as now with all these amazing new fans, the game is just as much yours as it is ours.

    The second forest area will see you dive deeper into the Amazon rainforest. It will be darker and more dense, yet full of colour and bustling with new life. We’re thinking of it kind of like the first forest level was your backyard, and this new area is like going to “the big smoke” for the first time. We want to make it feel like something is always happening, with or without your involvement. There will be more random events. The environment will change more, and there will be more characters to interact with.

    A cool example is the Titan Beetle. These guys are fighters and have their own agenda. You may come across a couple of them fighting on a branch. Now a butterfly wouldn’t stand a chance in that fight, but maybe you could put a wager on which one will win? We want to add in a whole lot of these random little encounters.

    The second area will also be a lot bigger than the first, but broken up in to smaller sub areas. This means we get a performance boost from handling less items, and gives us flexability to expand the area over time.

    Sprinkled through this area you’ll also find a number of doors which you can unlock with quests. They will lead to special rooms with mini-games, intriguing characters, and all sorts of treasures.

    All round this area will feel more “adventure gamey”. We will also work more on the first area to keep it as your harvesting spot, so if you just want to jump in for a quick bit of gaming, then you can just visit that area and still be progressing.

    So that’s the direction we think would be really cool, but we’d love to hear from YOU! What do you want to see in the game? What creatures, insects, flowers, features, games, puzzles, etc do you think would work great?

  • Last night at the Otago Museum we held our official NZ launch for Flutter and announced an exciting partnership with the Discovery World Tropical Forest which will bring our players closer to nature.

    From today onwards, everyone who visits the museum’s live butterfly exhibit in Dunedin, New Zealand will get a special card to redeem an East Blue Frosted Banner, a butterfly exclusive to this type of promotion. You can see the butterfly in the flesh, then take him home virtually to play with in your grove and fly around the forest.

    This is the first of many real-world tie ins we have planned for Flutter. Stay tuned for more exciting annoucements in the coming weeks as we look to empower our players to effect real change in the Amazon rainforest.

  • After months of design, development, testing and refinement, we are very proud to announce that Flutter is now live and available to play on Facebook. We can’t wait to hear what you think!

    We also have a mini-site with a How to Play page and FAQ. Remember to follow the game on Twitter, and “Like” the game on our fan page to keep up to date with the games evolution.

    This is the first step on a great journey, one we’re embarking upon with our players to shape a unique and magical social game experience which pushes the genre forward. We can’t wait to play, craft, think and explore with you guys, its sure to be one hell of a ride!

    See you in the rainforest.

  • As we prepare to launch the game, we’d like to take a moment to send a massive shout out to our testers, especially those who stuck with us and made it through to Level 20! If you took part then you’ll be getting a big bonus to kick start your new Flutter adventure. These will be added to your account the Friday after you login to the game for the first time. Details of what you get here.

    The flower above acts as a special badge of honor for those who tested the game. You won’t ever be able to get it anywhere else in the game, it’s just for you guys to show off!

    And one last annoucement. Who got to Level 20 first? That would be Lars Johansson! He gets the very special bonus of being awarded one of every premium item we launch over the next month for free. Thanks for going so hard Lars!

  • 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 :)

  • uncharted

    Naughty Dog

  • Juggernauts

    Midnight Juggernauts

  • 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

    (NOTE: You must “Like” Runaway to be allowed access to the beta, this will allow us to stay in touch with testers)

    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)

  • Aquaria

    Bit Blot

  • florence

    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