Archives: Uncategorized

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON October 12, 2010
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    Grow your own Seed Chest

    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 :)

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON October 5, 2010
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    Big Update

    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.

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON September 24, 2010
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    A New Frontier

    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?

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON August 25, 2010
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    Real Rainforest Cross-Over

    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.

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON August 3, 2010
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    Flutter is Live!

    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.

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON August 2, 2010
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    Thank you Testers!

    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!

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON July 28, 2010
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    Meet the Artists in Video Blog #2

    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!

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON July 24, 2010
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    Surviving the Dip

    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

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON July 19, 2010
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    It’s All Coming Together

    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 :)

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON June 30, 2010
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    Competition: Race to Lv 20

    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.

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON June 28, 2010
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    Version 3 + Competition

    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! :)

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON June 14, 2010
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    New build is Live!

    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 :)

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON June 1, 2010
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    Thanks!

    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 :)

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON May 31, 2010
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    Video Blog EP1 – Beta is Live!

    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 :)

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON May 21, 2010
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    Core and Character

    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)

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON May 13, 2010
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    Refine. Test. Scale. Repeat

    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
  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON April 28, 2010
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    Colours

    Following on from our previous post on visual inspiration, we’ve been working really hard to put some spit and polish into the visual style of the game. Very proud to give a sneak peak into the outcome of that hard work above, you can see the world of Flutter becoming more vibrant, refined, and full of life. And only just under two weeks until you get to see it all moving in-game!

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON April 14, 2010
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    Visual Inspiration

    We had a really fun time this afternoon combing through our stacks of reference images to find a few defining pieces that we can use as benchmarks in this final stage of refinement for our in-game assets. We’re aiming to create a bright, fresh, and vibrant world full of light and colour, a magical place that people want to explore and spend time in. These images just captured that for us so I thought I would share.

    Since we love putting stuff on our walls, these are off to the printers to be super-sized! Also been listening to the soundtrack from Flower now it’s been digitally released. It is soooo good, if we can get anywhere near that I will be over the freaking moon.

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON April 9, 2010
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    We’ve made an incredible amount of progress this week, the first in a five week stretch running up to the beta release of the game on Facebook. On the art side, Mark finished all the butterflies for Chapter One while Emma cranked out a ton of functional and aesthetic flowers which add a huge amount of colour and character to the environment. We were also really lucky to have Kei Kasai working with us for two weeks, focusing on the development of our “forest magic” particle system. The depth, light, and general wonder that her work has brought to the world is really incredible and those chain reactions of exploding pollen are really going to be a highlight of the player’s experience.

    On the tech side, we played the game in a Facebook frame for the first time which was really cool, seeing our persistence / database hooked into the platform was definitely a big win. I’ve also been working to refine the mechanics of the pollenation system which will be the core “harvesting” mechanic in our game, while Jeff implements it. Soon we’ll be iterating through these mechanics on a live Facebook build.

    Everything is really coming together, the game is looking beautiful and starting to feel really fun.

    Links that ruled this week:

    Venture Beat features Runaway and Flutter

    Pixel looks good when viewing it with your eyes

    Murray the Nut breaks down the creative process

    Run Jesus Run is a super tidy 10 second platformer

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON March 26, 2010
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    Our Little Ecosystem

    Above you can see a glimpse into our world at the moment as we balance all of the elements in our eco-system. There have been some big developments since my return from GDC. We’ve decided to focus Chapter One exclusively on the Amazon Rainforest as we feel tying it into a locality will give each chapter a heightened sense of identity, while structuring the factual core that inspires / informs our choices for flora and fauna.

    So it’s been a week of research for me, locking down the species, learning about their habits, diet, and various species variations, ensuring that all the t’s are crossed and i’s dotted from a factual perspective. This process has brought up a lot of cool new ideas as well, which we’ve added to the pile while iterating through the core loop of the game to make sure those daily activities of exploring, pollinating, and tending to your grove are fun and rewarding. Soon we’ll be testing that loop with persistence and user accounts linked to Facebook, which is very exciting indeed.

    We also have some very exciting news in the form of a complete overhaul for the central grove area which will put a whole new level of control in the hands of our players, allowing them to create their own truely personalised part of the rainforest. More on that next time :)

    Links that kicked ass this week:

    Jane McGonigal convinces the TED conference that games will save the world

    Dude slices a baseball in half with a Samurai sword

    Spike Jonze tells a robot love story

    Bill Murray bar tending at SXSW

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON March 9, 2010
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    First Teaser Trailer

    And here it is, our first video of Flutter in action!

    It shows off your home grove where you can choose your butterfly, then the decent into the rainforest where you’ll explore, pollinate plants, make friends, and avoid enemies. If you like what you see we’d love to have you as a Facebook fan so you can test the beta when we put in live in May :)

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON March 8, 2010
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    Home Sweet Home

    Since I returned from DICE, our focus has been on building the social mechanics of the game atop our pretty new environment navigation. That means giving people something to do on a daily basis, and rewarding them for returning many days in a row. In the open field, your key activity will be pollinating flowers, which will subsequently produce seeds and spread through the environment. The more subsequent days you return in a row, the more flowers there will be and the more “honey dust” (the game’s currency) you’ll collect, which you can then go back and spend in your home grove (pictured above). This launch screen for the game is kind of like your home in Pet Society. You’ll launch into all your adventures from here by choosing one of your butterflies. You’ll decorate the place with various flora, and over time your vibrant environment will attract other rainforest creatures to make it their home (more on that later).

    If you’ll be at GDC this week, pop me a line as I’d love to show you the game in the flesh. For those that cant make it, we’ll be putting up a teaser video in the next couple of days to whet your appetite.

    Things we loved this week:

    Sushi Cat is Sushi Cute

    The Witness is coming and it looks pretty as hell

    GLaDOS Returns!

    Creators of Zoo Tycoon enter the Facebook arena with the super slick Zoo Kingdom

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON February 15, 2010
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    A Sneak Peak

    After a whirlwind week and a whole lot of dedication from the team over the weekend I’m very proud to announce that we made our deadline, and have a very tidy demo to show off at the DICE conference for which I am about to depart. I’ve thrown in a few shots to whet the apetite, and can now promise that with solid foundations laid on both the visual and technical sides, the content will be coming in thick and fast.

    And you know what content needs? Testers! That’s right we’re now very close to putting this thing out in the wild and are super excited to be moving from a very “under the hood” mode into an iterative relationship with an eager group of testers. This is the fun bit :)

    Links we thought were awesome this week:

    Jamie Oliver gives an amazing talk on the vital role of food in our future at TED

    This sure is a Mosquito getting disintegrated by a lazer

    Scuba Divers ambush Google Street View van

    Robot Unicorn Attack might be one of the best Flash games ever

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON February 5, 2010
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    Refining vision and building pace

    What a full on week! We’re getting some great momentum going for the new year leading up towards the two big conference deadlines of DICE and GDC. We took part in the Global Game Jam over the weekend, which meant we started off the week a little shattered but still full of energy and insight after getting three games together over 48 hours. You can check out the games we made here.

    We then had Emma arrive from Germany after a grueling ~35 hour trip with 4 stops along the way. So we now have the whole team on site here and we’ve been having a lot of fun throwing ideas around while testing, breaking, and iterating through some of the mechanics for pollination and general environment interaction in Flutter. The weather in Dunedin has been epic, lending itself well to outdoor meetings and making the butterfly exhibit and the Otago Museum incredibly hot (35+ degrees on the top story). We visited this afternoon and got a huge amount of reference photos, some of which you can see in the Flickr stream (super awesome thanks to Emily Hlavac for her amazing photos)

    And we decided on a logo! Wow that was a mission, but we’re incredibly happy with the result and have just ordered some super sweet business cards which should be ready in time for DICE. Thanks Hayden from HAMR for such an awesome job, and sorry for being such a fussy client.

    This week also sees us approaching completing of the new rendered and level editor, which together with our new dynamic tree construction system will give us so much power in iterating through our level designs. We’ve had to be very patient so far this year as the visual and technical sides ran seperate from each other to establish solid foundations. Very excited to see the progress culminate in a new playable early next week.

    Links that rocked our world this week:

    This Global Game Entry is a real scream

    Sonic 4 (you can do it Sega!)

    My life ends when Civilisation comes to Facebook

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON January 26, 2010
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    More Fun With Friends

    I read this interview with Playfish‘s CEO Kristian Segerstråle a while back. When asked one of the key challenges in the development of social games, he points to the importance of all elements in the game being more fun with friends. This is of course a rudimentary element of any social experience and seems so simple when its down on paper like that, but as we’ve been working through the design of Flutter I’ve come to appreciate just how easy it is to forget that no player action exists in isolation. This is equally:

    • Enlightening – as this social aspect can add tonnes of competitive or collaborative depth to a mechanic that in isolation could be quite shallow
    • Terrifying – when you realize how bullet proof your mechanics need to be in order to survive in a user driven economy. When friends are being ranked against each other based on your designs, you better be sure your rules and fair and reasonable.

    Thinking about this reminded me of Jesse Schell’s book The Art of Game Design, and the lenses he uses to dissect his game designs. This rule has become a new lens for us:

    • The Lens of the Social Platform
    • Is your game more fun with friends?
    • How does each mechanic motivate a collaborative or competitive desire within your player?

    The subtleties of mechanics aside, these interactions become truly next level when they become (as Kristian says) a way for friends to communicate. Families are coming together over Farmville, Pet Society is keeping school friends in regular contact despite being scattered around the globe. This is why social games are so huge, because these simple playful interactions are given a whole new meaning and relevance when they help to define a relationship between real people.

    What if we could take it even further and make the interactions, environments, themes and messages in the games meaningful themselves? We then start to tap the potential for these games to be a playful discussion of real world issues that the media has become so poor at letting us form our own opinions around.

    But before we get too serious, it’s always most important that its fun! :)