Happy New Year everyone! We’re so excited to be kicking off 2012 all guns blazing, heads down on a project we care for very dearly and many more opportunities on the horizon.

The start of a project is always an energetic and fun filled time, but it also plays an incredibly important role in setting the expectations, direction, and ultimate vision for a product. Given how much potential we think this game has, we’re taking that very seriously and making sure we incorporate all our learnings from prior projects to ensure this is our absolute best.

In other news, the office has been completely taken over by Hero Academy fever. If you have an iPhone you should get it immediately!

Oh and by the way, has everyone picked up a copy of Howling Mouse? If not you really should go ahead and do so. We have a cool update coming out in a few weeks too.

It is with a heavy heart today that we announce Flutter for Facebook will be going offline on the 23rd December. But wait! This is not the end, but instead the beginning of a transformation that will take Flutter to whole new heights. We’ve had a fantastic time producing and maintaining Flutter, it’s a product we’re proud of and care for deeply, but for us to take it further we need to look at the game from the ground-up and address some of its key issues to ensure that it can become a mainstream success. We are a lot more experienced now than we were when we first designed the game, and have been working very very hard to design an approach for the next version of Flutter which is a far better core experience. So from 23rd December we will be going into our chrysalis, putting our heads down, and emerging with a much more spectacular creature

But we had to give this version of the game a proper farewell! So here’s what we’ve done for you guys to play with over the last couple of weeks:

• All premium items except potions, powerups, and WWF items, are now purchasable with HD!
• We’ve made an epic finale quest for our loyal fans involving a little magical mishap with the Owl.
• The main forest is in sunset now, and in the last week will turn to nighttime before going to sleep
• We have two new flower packs that will be going live for FREE over the next two weeks

Next week we take the adventure deeper into the rainforest. We’ll open a new environment, introduce you to a new creature, add a new daily action, and tease the look and feel of the second main forest area. We also have some great new items coming to the WWF store and a really exciting announcement about the work we’re helping with in Bolivia.

Stay tuned, will be an exciting week

Good news team, there’s now a very good reason to visit Flutter more than once a day!

Recently we revised the way the flower beds worked. We did this to bring them in line with all other resources in the rainforest in “recharging overnight”. This gives our game a unique differentiator in that you can pop in once a day (at any time that suits you) and really feel like you’ve been productive, not pressured to come back every five minutes. This is in line with the more relaxing nature of the game, and also makes the flowerbeds functionality a whole lot easier to understand.

However! We recognize that some fans are very keen to return more than once a day, so we wanted to make sure there was something for them to do and get a little bonus. New to the rainforest are “Honeydew Flowers” that you’ll find popping up around the place, with one appearing every hour (up to a max of six). These become worth more as you progress, so they’re still meaningful for higher level players. All flower beds orange? One of these will be worth one orange flower.

Also, the Honey Dust will now regenerate every 6 hours, giving you even more to pick up!

We’re happy this update gives the best of both worlds in that the main Honeydew collection source supports our casual, once a day players, while those keen to return more can get a little advantage for their dedication.

Look forward to your feedback as always

P.S. Thanks again for all your feedback on the new interface items, we’ve been listening and making refinements through the week, so as a little thank you we’ve sent you all a free pack containing: “Instant Grow Formula” “Blue Seed” “Instant Brew Formula” and a “Luck Potion!”. Have fun

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

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

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!