blog.squz.com

Wow, it’s been way too long since we’ve posted here. We have spent a good deal of effort trying to put a decent upgrade to Your World out. We are really pleased with the results. Here’s the quite lengthy list of new stuff (from AppStore description)…

• Over 270 countries and territories
• U.S. states and five continent levels
• Huge 100-megapixel earth, full HD for iPad
• Swipe, twirl and pinch-zoom to spin the earth.
• Realistic globe shows the world’s oceans, forests, snow, mountains and deserts.
• Facebook and Twitter sharing (including posting images)
• Save screenshots to Photo Album
• Game Center achievements and leaderboards
• Game timer (best times are added to leaderboards)
• Wikipedia links for all countries and territories
• Two ethereal soundtracks to choose from
• Compass (tap to point north upwards)

Phew! We almost bit off more than we could chew. This release is setting the stage for some nice additional polishing features, but, as always, we are interested in your views about what we should add next.

One interesting thing to note is some of the statistics about which countries people are placing. We created this chart that shows how many people (in a few weeks) get through each country.

On a different subject, our app ranking (for Australia) has been quite good with us in the top 100-200 for both iPhone and iPad. The U.S. has been a different story, and we haven’t been able to get within a whiff of the top 500! If you have any U.S. based friends and family, please tell them about Your World!

We have had extremely good feedback regarding Esfera on iPhone and iPad. Thanks to everyone who has played the game.

Previously Esfera was being sold for ~$3 and there was no free version. We did this mainly because we thought it was a good quality, unique game that would be followed up by a network version of the product. Since that time, we have produced Your World which came together very rapidly and was definitely the right thing for us to focus on. Your World has very broad appeal and is getting downloaded by many thousands of users. However, this meant that Esfera took a back seat.

After much soul searching we have decided against building a new game until we put all of our must have features into each of our games (MultiMaze, Esfera and YourWorld).

For Esfera this means that we are now committed to producing an online playing capability so that you can play against people from around the globe. We think this, along with a base product that is free, will enhance the penetration of Esfera, which is ultimately an unfamiliar but great idea.

So, for now, enjoy Esfera for free.

As always, feel free to drop any feedback into the comments section below.

We were pleased to see a YouTube video review of Your World today at MMGN, we are so stoked. These guys run one of the best game portals out there.

MMGN have loads of stuff about games: XBox, Wii, Playstation, iPhone and more, check them out.

We have decided to get a little bit more serious about SEO. The blog has now moved to http://blog.squz.com

Your World iPhone, iPad, iPod

We have finally launched Your World for iPhone/Pad/Pod. I say finally because we had all but completed this app when we decided to pull it from the AppStore approval process at the last moment to make two key changes. More on that later…

Your World has been spawned from a simple idea, challenge users to place the countries of the world into their correct locations. We thought, what a simple idea surely this has been done before. As it turns out, no one has implemented this on a nice 3D earth, so we built it.

To play it now download it from iTunes

We have also updated our website at http://squz.com take a look and please drop us any feedback on the new game or the website below in the comments section.

It’s been a long time coming, and we have now released Esfera for iPhone and iPad

You can now download it from the AppStore.

Esfera (the spanish word for ‘sphere’) is a chess-like game on a spherical object with 132 tiles. The rules of chess have been adapted to the sphere and what has resulted is nothing short of stunning as far as turn-based strategy games go.

Esfera iPhone & iPad

We have put in a fair amount of work to make a complex game usable by supporting touch spinning and twisting (two fingers) of the sphere. Also we made it translucent (see though) so you can view through the sphere as if it were made from glass. One last touch was to make the pieces flip over when on the opposite side.

We have also built computer AI into the game so you can play against it. It’s not terribly strong, so given some effort you should be able to beat it. It’s not easy though.

We have now put a site up at http://squz.com. That will be our main site, but we will still blog here, so please stay subscribed.

For those interested in technology, we run our website out of a Ubuntu/Linux node at Linode.com (highly recommended for startups). We use Nginx as a reverse proxy to handle different sites and plain old HTML5, CSS and JavaScript/jQuery. If we need to serve up an API we will serve this using either mochikit (for simple / scalable services) or pylons (for more logic intensive work). We are open-source junkies!

Oh and kudos to the creator of 960.gs css framework, we love it.