Posts by: Tim Nixon

  • Today we’re really excited to release some updates to the core interactions in Flutter that move us closer to a more intuitive, lightweight experience for our daily players. These updates are informed by months of quantitative analysis on player data, and qualitative feedback from both experts and everyday players. Here’s a rundown on what we’ve changed and why:

    Contextual Interactions: For new players and seasoned veterans (developers included!) we found it could be laborious and confusing to know what you should be dragging-and-dropping to keep your rainforest alive and at full productivity. To combat this we developed a system that would clearly show for each object in your world, what its state was, and what actions you could perform on it. With one click you can now expand and upgrade flower beds, feed animals and apply potions. This significantly smooths out the difficulty curve for new players, and makes the daily cycle for experienced players that much more straight forward.

    Reminder Bubbles: We needed to make it clearer where there was something in the world that needed your attention, so alongside these new menus we’ve integrated a neat little bubble that alerts you when an item or creature needs your help. No more will you aimlessly flutter about the forest wondering what to do next, the inhabitants of the Amazon will just pop up a friendly reminder.

    Daily Honeydew: One of the things that makes Flutter great is the fact you can just pop in once a day. A while ago we updated the harvesting system to take into account your local timezone and have the rainforest “recharge” overnight. This meant that no matter what time of day you found a few minutes to check in, you’d still get a full benefit of a daily harvest. We’ve now brought the pollination flowers in line with the idea, so you just have to pop them once a day to get your full 24 hours worth of Honeydew!

    These changes don’t come lightly, and for our existing player base we appreciate that change in the world that you have come to know and love can be tough. We as players love the newfound fluidity that these updates have introduced to the game, and we’re confident they will lead to a better experience for all.

    As always we are close knit with our community and appreciate all of the constructive feedback and generous support we receive from our passionate player base. As such we will continue to refine these new interactions and the game as a whole in partnership with our devoted fans.

    Thanks again for all your support as we strive to make Flutter one of the best games on the Facebook platform :)

  • Hey Flutter fans, just a quick update to let you know we’ve had our heads down working on some really cool updates to the game which will make it easier to learn, smoother to play, and lay the foundation for all our future extensions of the rainforest.

    A lot of new players have found it hard to deal with the game’s complexity, especially when having to drop special items on special objects in the world. That frustration is going to come to an end very soon as we introduce a one-click system for interacting with objects that magically knows what everything in the rainforest wants! You’ll get to see it in action very soon, and hope you enjoy the new fluidity it’ll add to your trips through the forest.

    I’d also like to take this chance to welcome our new Community Manager, Donnelle, to the team. She’ll be round to help you guys out if you have technical problems, game suggestions, etc. We’re really excited to have her on board to ensure we stay right up to speed with our community, and that we’re doing the best we can to make the game better for our players. Join us in welcoming Donnelle here, or pop her an email with a question or suggestion atsupport@runawayplay.com

    Hang tight for a very cool update end of this week :)

  • We’ve released an awesome update for our higher level players today with the release of the Master Potions in the Magic Cauldron. This also includes a new “Blazing Orchid Chest” potion, opening up a new collection of 6 rare and beautiful orchids. You’ll find three new quests to complete, two based around the cauldron and the new orchids, with the third based on the new Lucky Dips. These can be brewed in the cauldron or bought with credits, and are for sharing with your friends to give them a surprise gift. What a treat!

    You’ll notice we’ve shuffled a couple of potions around also, adding a new “Honey Dust Scramble” potion to the Beginner recipes. This is one of my favorite potions, adding a new challenge for you to grab as much valuable Honeydew as possible in 20 seconds! Those faster butterflies would really help you out here.

    Last but certainly not least: You can now take screenshots and post them to your Facebook albums through the game! Not only can you capture the screen you can see, but in the grove you can take a picture of the whole thing in one frame. So get snapping by using the camera (screenshot) and photo (grove shot) icons in the bottom right next to your friends. This is something players have been asking for for a while so we’re thrilled to release it, and will be running a competition here on the blog to see who can create the best grove. Stay tuned for details.

    Next week we have some new decorations for you, and we’ll be putting a lot of work into streamlining the core gameplay to make the game a little more accessible to the widest range of players. This will lay the foundation for some exciting new expansions to the world which we can’t wait to show you.

  • The update this week brings a beautiful new vista to your grove through the New Dawn background. We’ve also added a new HD butterfly for our higher level players to collect (the Snowflake) along with some new premium flowers and HD flowers. Check out all the new stuff in the Feature Store or on the Grow panel in your grove.

    Speaking of panels and tabs, we’ve made some interface updates as well to make managing your items a little easier. Firstly, you can now expand the side panel view to show 4 items across by clicking ‘more’ at the top of the tabs. Want it smaller again so you can fly round with it open? Just click ‘less’ to switch back to the 2-wide option. There is now a “My Stuff” tab as well (looks like a little crate) which will just show you all the items in that category (Grow or Consumables) that you own (good for recycling lots of stuff to save for a high price item). Final change is breaking up the Consumables tab into Food, and Power Ups, as it was getting a little busy with only one tab!

    So the last couple of weeks have been spent busily bug-fixing and optimising the game. The exciting news? We have new features on the way which now we can really sink our teeth into. That means next week we’ll have some new quests to release! Can’t wait :)

  • How bout epiciphyte? Maybe too much of a mouthful. Well we decided to go with Super Bromeliad to keeps things a little simpler. That blue version of the epiphyte produces Super Water that your Fruit Tree will just love.

    Another very exciting (and much requested) additional this week is Moss and Vines for the grove. Now you can make your home feel really bedded-in.

    We have a very exciting update coming for you next week which is going to bring with it a very creative competition. I’ll give you a little hint: brush up on your grove decoration skills. We’re also adding some cool new critters to the forest next week who will liven the place up a bit.

    Stayed tuned and thanks as always for your wonderful support.

  • The palette of the rain forest’s mood and lighting expands again today with the release of the Nighttime decoration set and background. The deep blue and twinkling stars set an awesome scene for arranging bright flowers that seem to glow in the moonlight. Jump into the feature store to see the background, or grab one for your grove on the ‘Special’ tab. You’ll also find new matching foliage and premium flowers to complete the set!

    Also released today is a set of items that have been requested for a while: Fruit Tree style foliage. Now you can make your whole grove environment flow together with the style of your fruit tree, pasting tree leaves all around your grove. You can find them in the normal foliage panel.

    Boy have we had some long design meetings this week! We’ve been very busy prioritising whats next for the game, balancing refinements to the existing experience with new content for our dedicated players. We now have a plan for the next few months and are busily working towards a couple of big upgrades we’ll be able to sink our teeth into. Will be able to share more with you soon.

    See you in the rainforest!

  • Say hello to the Feature Store, a new space in the rainforest you can go to check out neat premium items in the flesh. We’ve packed it full of new goodies including a very special golden epic flower (10,000HD a day for you and your friends!), the Blue Doctor Butterfly, and decorative flowers. We’ve also added an area for Potion Packs, so with one quick purchase you can stock up on insta-brews or insta-grows to speed your way through the game. You even get 2 potions for free when buying a pack of 10!

    We’re working really hard to line up some great new quest progression content for you all, so if you’re a high level hang tight cause theres some brilliant new exploration coming for you soon! We’ll also bring a new background and decoration set next week. I wonder what it could be? :)

    Thank you all for your wonderful support, we hope you enjoy looking around the store, and remember the revenue from all your Facebook Credits purchases is coming back to the developers so we can make more, bigger, better adventures for you to experience in the rain forest.

  • Introducing the Sunset background and premium item set! Warm up your home grove with this stunning background of a sunset in the Amazon, and match it with beautiful new premium item flowers. You grove sure will stand out amongst the crowd. We’ve also added three new “Bright Tropical” flowers which you can buy just with Honeydew.

    We’ve been wanting to get more variety in the lighting and environments in Flutter for a while so it’s great to get this live. It’s incredible how much of a change that background lighting makes, transforming the grove into even more of a calming, sleepy vista.

    So the users keep on climbing! Half a million is a lot huh? We’re so appreciative of all your feedback, it helps a lot in making the game better. Another feature we’ve added today is extra help for the “to-dos” on your quest list. These will steer you in the right direction if you’re a little lost as to where to go next.

    Keep the feedback coming, and we hope you have fun playing around with the new items!

  • You guys asked for it, so here it is, a new way to get more of those elusive fungi you need for your quests and potions!

    The Fungi Generator is a new functional item that sits in your grove, and will produce one of the 4 fungi a day for 5 days before recycling into a seed chest (the fungi is chosen randomly, remember to trade with friends!). We’ve also added a special version that produces Super Fungi (double XP when feeding to the beetle) and turns into a rare chest after 5 days. This super version is 20 Facebook Credits, but you can get the regular version for just 20,000 HD.

    You may also notice we’ve updated our top bar and hint system. Remember to click “Like” to keep up to date, and it’s always great for us to get positive reviews from our fans.

    What an exciting week! We’ve passed 300,000 users and are working on some very exciting new things for you to all play with. Thanks again to everyone for being so supportive :)

  • We’re very excited to unveil the iPhone and iPad game we’ve been feverishly working away on for the past 6 months:

    Puzzle Planets on the iTunes Store

    It’s a co-production with National Geographic, inspired by some of the core concepts in their show Clash of the Continents (produced by NHNZ). Nat Geo were so great to work with and it’s an exciting step for us to collaborate with such a respected brand to bring our style of factual fun to mobile devices.

    Here’s a video of how the game plays, and you can see the press release here.

    We’d love your feedback, so jump on the App Store and grab yourself a copy. It’s just 99c US!

  • What an awesome week! Facebook decided to feature us on the games dashboard which has brought in a huge surge of new players. It’s been a big learning experience for us as the servers had to scale very quickly, but we’re happy that everything is running smoothly and the game should be loading for you all. If anyone has any issues with loading you can help us optimise the game further by sending info about the error or problem to support@runawayplay.com

    So to all our new players: Welcome! It’s great to have you along on the journey and we love your feedback so please send it through.

    Based on this great surge of success for the game we are very excited to announce we’ll be moving the dev team back on to Flutter! We’ll be working to refine the game and add some new items and functionality, and if we continue to grow this month we’ll be locking in a long term plan to scale the game even further which is hugely exciting. We have so many great ideas both from within the team, and from our community, and can’t wait to get started on it all.

    As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve just launched some new quests! These include 8 new magic potions to brew, 2 new types of seed chests, 5 unique orchid flowers to collect, and a new Nurturer quest to complete. These should keep you guys busy while we get to work on more :)

    Thank you so much to our passionate and supportive community of players. You’re the best. Now let’s make this game a hit!

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  • Buy a Brazil Nut Tree in Flutter and support a sustainable Amazon

    You might simply know them for “always rising to the top” of your nut mixture, but Brazil Nuts are a surprisingly crucial element in the plight of the Amazon Rainforest. As well as being a great food, the nut’s uses span cooking oils, cosmetics, artists paints and even clock lubrication! As such they’re a valuable commodity on the global market, but more importantly, they are a sustainable crop that must live in a balanced, thriving Amazon environment.

    The indigenous communities of Versalles and Mategua in the Iténez protected area of northern Bolivia are two communities striving to break the trend of harmful mass logging, instead supporting themselves through the harvest of Brazil Nuts. But they are poor, under-resourced, and need our help. Together with our players we’re raising money to:

    • Improve crop value through organic certification
    • Build better storage facilities for crops
    • Build gardens to support better nutrition for the farming community

    20% of the purchase price of every Brazil Nut Tree in Flutter will go directly to funding these activities through WWF’s support programme in the Amazon. You can find the tree in the special WWF store, or in your Functional Items menu when in your grove.

    We’ll be bringing you updates from the community as we progress the initiative and hear more about their story. Thanks for your support!

  • We were really excited today to learn that Flutter was named 7th best Facebook game of 2010 by the editors at games.com. Check out what they had to say:

    “Flutter’s smooth animation, soothing music and extremely detailed visuals are a sight to behold as you guide butterflies through a rainforest interacting with wildlife and completing quests. In what might be a first for social games, there’s no pressure to be the best in Flutter, just be.”

    This follows on from some great feedback we’ve had from our players on the wall and review page. We’re really happy you’re enjoying the game and we cant wait to expand on it further.

    Our big challenge has been learning how to attract and retain players in the Facebook space. Getting more social interactions into the game has been a great step forward, and we’ve kicked off a new range of ads to pinpoint people in the social network who we think will appreciate the game. So far the response has been fantastic with a high click-through rate and more great feedback from our new players. Welcome guys!

    We’re working really hard on our new iPhone game at the moment which we’ll be able to talk about really soon, and hopefully with a few more players joining in with Flutter, we’ll be able to say something about some expansion there soon too :)

  • 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

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  • 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.