Flower-Garden

It’s one thing to go on record saying I wouldn’t be creating an iPad-specific version of Flower Garden, and another seeing the iPhone version running on an iPad with all the ugly jaggies and huge, pixelated text. So when it came time to do a new update, I decided to at least take advantage of the iPad capabilities to make the existing app prettier by making Flower Garden into a universal app. It’s now available on the App Store, so go get it and check it out! ...

Since this Sunday is Mother’s Day (in the US at least), I’m making Flower Garden FREE for the weekend. Yes, that’s right, completely free! Am I going crazy? Giving away the fruit of my labor for so many months? The App Store will do that to people, but this is a bit more sane. The idea is to encourage many more people to try it out. I’m actually hoping some of them will like it so much, they’ll buy a few of the in-app purchases from the Flower Shop. And even if they don’t, hopefully they’ll spread the (good) word about Flower Garden and they might also sign up for the mailing list. And in this business, expanding your user base is a great strategy that can be leveraged for future projects. ...

Pocket Gamer just announced the finalists for the 2010 Pocket Gamer Awards. I was thrilled to see that Flower Garden has been selected as a finalist for the Most Innovative iPhone Game award. On a personal level, this nomination means quite a bit for me. Flower Garden has gotten some great reviews, and some incredible user feedback, and it was even featured as an Apple Staff Favorite on the App Store, but it had never been up for an award of this importance. ...

As part of Indie+Relief, all proceeds from Flower Garden this Wednesday will be donated to Haiti through Doctors Without Borders. Encourage your friends to buy Flower Garden for a good cause! That includes in-app purchases, so feel free to load up on fertilizer :-) If you’ve already purchased Flower Garden and you’d still like to help out, you can check out the great lineup of Mac and iPhone apps at Indie+Relief, or donate directly to Doctors Without Borders here. ...

The App Store is a very hit-driven environment. A few apps sell a large amount of units, and the great majority sell next to nothing. That’s somewhat similar to the music industry, except that the audience for music is much larger, so both the big hits and the small players get more sales. We’ve drooled over the numbers chart toppers sold, I’ve seen sales reports of very successful games, and we’ve also seen what happens when apps languish at the bottom. ...

Aparently Santa came to town a little later this year. Or maybe it was the Reyes Magos (also bit late). In either case, I woke up this morning to find a very nice present waiting for me at my computer: Apple featured Flower Garden as an Apple Staff Favorite! Apparently this is in all App Stores worldwide too (I have confirmations for Canada and Thailand, so I imagine it applies to other territories as well). ...

I feel bad for the designers of games like Civilization or Supreme Commander. And I don’t even want to think about World of Warcraft. I thought it was tricky to balance the different flowers in Flower Garden, so I can only imagine the amount of time and effort than went into tweaking all the properties of the many dozens of units in those games to balance them just right. At first, things sounded simple enough: Create 20 different seeds, with varied looks and properties. I had a really cool tool to tweak the flower DNA in real time (more on that another day), so how hard could it be? ...