If you’ve been following my Twitter page, you already know that version 1.2 of War Evolved has been submitted. In this post, I want to do a quick walk through of some of the changes.

When you download the update, the following will be listed as added/changed:

- Save game feature
- Air units on EVERY level
- Air turrets on EVERY level
- Cheat mode – enter your name as CHEATER
- Facebook Integration
- AI/Unit Tweaks
- Performance enhancements
- Minor bug fixes

This release was packed with improvements, and I was really surprised with everything that was in there as I was writing it out. For a quick walk through, I will start with this image:

You will be able to continue any single or local two player game. For obvious reasons, networked games cannot be saved. For a bit of a warning, the restored game will not be exactly as it was exited at. Each unit contains a lot of data about its state, and we didn’t have enough time to test all of the various scenarios. So instead what we did was just save the variables that deal with the game, such as amount of money and what level each player is at. When you exit, the game will automatically refund you for the money that you spent on units that will not be restored.

The second major addition are air units! Each level now has at least one air unit, and it really does make things more fun. On the cavemen era we have a pterodactyl, Egyptian era has a phoenix, medieval has dragon, and cowboy has a rudimentary flying machine. I won’t ruin the surprise of what the air units look like in this blog, you’ll just have to play the game to find out

We also have a cheat mode:

In addition to you being able to cheat, the AI can also cheat in single player. This should add some extra challenge for those who are really good at the game. To get to the cheat menu, enter your name as CHEATER on the main screen. Obviously, when in cheat mode, your score will not be recorded on the global scoreboard.

Other changes include Facebook integration, AI/unit tweaks, some performance enhancements, and bug fixes. All in all, this was a really solid release and I hope it adds a lot of play time to War Evolved.

What’s next for Opsive?

Glad you asked. We are first planning on redoing some of Opsive.com. I know the layout is terrible and you can hardly read this blog, so that is number one priority. We are also in the design stage for our next game, which will be on the iPhone and hopefully one or two other platforms. In addition, we are about to start a small non-game app that personally I’ve been wanting for awhile. This app should not take long at all to complete, and I’ll have more news when the time comes. Finally, we also have a block of time set off to do more War Evolved updates. For anything that you’d like to see in the next game, reply to this post or send an email to support@opsive.com and we’ll try our hardest to get it in.

Until next time,
Justin

In the last blog post I promised to post some sales numbers, and here it is. But first, the graph below is from TopAppCharts.com and shows the ranking of War Evolved for the past 30 days.

As you can see, there has been a positive trend. This is really good news for us, as we have yet to spend a dime on advertising (we keep wanting to crank out new features for War Evolved!) Sarah and I are really happy with these results, and are glad people are enjoying the game.

In terms of sales, War Evolved has also been doing well. The past three days have been really fun, as all app developers know. Christmas day we had our largest number of sales in 1 day – 184 copies of War Evolved were sold.

Click on the image for a full view. This graph is similar to the one posted earlier. The red line represents the number of scores submitted and the green line represents sales. In appreciation for all of these downloads, we have been in development of War Evolved 1.2 for the past week or two. Development has been going really well, and tomorrow I should be able to hand it off to our main testers. I will then be gone on vacation until the 5th, so I hope to submit it sometime that week. I will make a new post with all of the features closer on to submission.

Until then, keep enjoying War Evolved and somebody please take aberfloyd’s first place spot on the leaderboard

Just in time before Apple shuts down for five days, version 1.1.1 has been released. This version contains minor AI/unit tweaks. 1.2 is still in development, and things are going well. So far we have cheats built in and air units on every level. I’ve also done some bug fixes here and there. I am trying to fix a few more (minor) bugs and hopefully get one more major feature in, I’ll let you know when I have it.

In other news, we are going to do a minor-make over to Opsive.com (it needs more color), and I have also started to work on a different small app. More details on that later. Also in my next post I’ll post some sales numbers.

A quick update to War Evolved has been submitted and waits for Apple’s approval. Version 1.1.1 is very minor, only tweaking three things:

- The AI reacts to air units better
- Increased the Calvary’s strength
- Decreased the air turret’s strength

Particularly on expert, the AI did not preform well after you reached stages with air units. Also we noticed that Calvary units are not used as much as we would like, so we bumped their strength up a bit.

In other news, we have come up with a feature list for version 1.2:

-Air units on every level – no need to get to WWII before you can build a plane!
-A cheat more – want more money? What about the ability to skip levels? It’ll be here, plus we’ll see if we can come up with some interesting settings
-Integration of Facebook Connect.
-Minor bug fixes – I have a small list of bugs I would like to fix, none that effect gameplay

We have already started dev on version 1.2, and hope to have it submitted early in the new year! I’ll keep you updated.

War Evolved has been off to a pretty good start. As I type this, there have been 985 submitted to our database. On average we see about 50 scores submitted a day, with a high of 99 (just occurred today). The next score was submitted 31 seconds too late, otherwise we would have hit 100. I’m going to work on getting some statistics on WarEvolved.com so you can see in real-time what is happening. The chart below shows a line graph of the history of the number of scores submitted.

In other news, War Evolved 1.1 has been released and people seem to be enjoying it. The major features of 1.1 include an overall smarter AI and a new expert mode (which only a few people have attempted… by far the most played difficulty is easy). We are already hard at work on War Evolved 1.2. Planned features include a cheat mode, integrating Facebook Connect, a new level, and some minor bug fixes. I don’t know if all of that will get in there or not, but I’ll let you know

That’s all for now, I’ll try to get some numbers with the sales of War Evolved in the next post. I’m going to try to start posting at least once a week.

War Evolved has been on the app store for about 48 hours now. Things have gone better than I expected, and there should be some exciting things coming up. I first wanted to say that I hope everybody is enjoying War Evolved, and if you have any suggestions please email Justin@Opsive.com.

The next thing I wanted to discuss was the focus of this blog. I plan on being as open about War Evolved as I can. This includes sales numbers and what worked and didn’t work. This first post is short just to get it out, expect more soon.

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=338343971