[GAME] ForestFolk « cocos2d for iPhone

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[GAME] ForestFolk

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Started 2 years ago by PhilM
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PhilM
Member

Studio Siafu is proud to announce our first game/entertainment-app 'Forest Folk'.

iTunes Link

A MASSIVE thanks to riq, and the whole cocos2d community for helping make this possible!

The app is a cross between a group of virtual pets and a god sim, with some magic sprinkled in to bring it all to life.

http://www.ForestFolk.net (site currently being updated)

Apples quick approval time caught us by surprise (not that we're complaining at all!). 5 days total, including a rejection and re-submission. We haven't had time to record the trailer yet, so expect one in the upcoming days...

Development Details

ForestFolk currently uses cocos2d 0.8.2, along with box2d & CocosDenshion, and will be updated to 0.9 as part of the next update.

The app took approx 6 months in total to develop. Made up of about 4 months of spare time/late nights, and 2 months nearly full time, between 2 of us, myself coding & Matt Latchford, a good friend and award winning illustrator/animator who designed and animated everything. We collaborated with Gravy Media, and other friends to help with audio, music and marketing, some of which we're still in the process of getting into full swing, ready for future updates.

Version 1 is our starting point, and we have ALOT of updates and features to add in over the upcoming months.

To stop the development time dragging on too long, we dropped some content and ideas early December, so we could focus on polishing the core character interactions, and other base features.

Theres a lot of other content ready to add in, but we're looking to get user feedback first, before we start adding in too much.

Promo Codes
Heres some promo codes, if you use them please leave a (honest) review in the store. And we'd really appreciate any feedback here too. Thanks!

LNYNMM99P4K7
NX3X3H7TMRN4
PW6PLPFFXHPL
H4EML6TH4M36
4KWYTA9WX9HX
3K3AALKYNH74
E73E7RF9HJTP
Y4FNJ9YJ3KPH

iTunes Description

Welcome great spirit to the world of the Forest Folk!

You are responsible for the care and attention of the Sapling tribe, who live in this forest and worship you as a deity.

These cute little beings rely on your magical powers to bring food, water, happiness and health to their little lives!

Play games with them, nurture them, and keep them alive as your personal pocket companions. They can't help but bring a smile to your face!

Or if your not in a good mood, throw them about to take out the stress of your day.

You decide....

*** WE WANT YOUR COMMENTS AND FEEDBACK! ***
We have many great updates and features planned for Forest Folk, and want your comments, feedback and suggestions to help shape the future of the Saplings world! So get writing, & let us know what you want to see in upcoming versions!

iTunes Link

Posted 2 years ago #
redsky
Member

looks interesting! i like the art style.

i grabbed 3K3AALKYNH74 (thanks)

i will post feedback after i give 'er a whirl

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

Thanks. Just checking out your new app now, will post back on your thread.

Posted 2 years ago #
redsky
Member

I played for 20 minutes over dinner. I like it! It definitely has some Pocket God influences but it clearly has its own identity. I look forward to seeing where you guys take it with updates.

It feels polished and I don't have any qualms about the controls or interface.

One thing that bugged me just a little was that I played the echo mini game til round 10 or 11 then decided to try the other game. The stats screen didn't record my echo progress. I assume its because I didn't play until I failed :) All things considered, its a very minor gripe.

I'll leave a positive review for you guys on itunes. Good job.

Posted 2 years ago #
pgpprogram
Member

I really like it. Very well made and unique. However I was wondering if you were planning on updating it to add in more content. If so I have a few ideas.

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

Hey guys, thanks very much for checking it out, and the kind words!

@redsky: thanks for pointing that issue out, I'll see about adding in saving if you exit early. The mini-games are just a start, and we want to develop those 2 more, as well as add a whole load of others, some of which are almost done.

Yes it was partially inspired by Pocket God (back from its early days), amongst many other great games and apps, but we're hoping to take it from a casual entertainment app, into something more indepth and game like, where you develop the characters personalities as you go. Its currently more of a sandbox type experience, where you can just de-stress from your hard day ; )

@pgpprogram: YES, we've got so many updates and plans, but would LOVE to hear peoples ideas and feedback.

Without giving too much away at this stage, we're currently planning to give users 2 main routes to develop the characters. The current 'cutsey' type play, which is more of a virtual pet route, and later a battle/fighting system which we're currently proto-typing. Were also planning online leaderboards/achievements in one of the first few updates. Just trying to make some time to add it all in!

Posted 2 years ago #
Tim
Member

Hey Phil,

I took E73E7RF9HJTP. It seems to crash when trying to load the game after going through the help screens. It did it twice so I then rebooted my phone and still same symptom. I'm running 3.0 on a 3G. This only appears to happen when trying to start a game after going through all the help screens cause in one case I came back and selected 'start new forest' and then 'skip' at the first help screen and it loaded fine. I then went back, selected start a new forest, went through the process to ack that I'd lose the previous game, went through all the help screens and it crashed when loading after the last help screen. I again retested the ability to skip the rest of the help screens at the first one (loaded fine). I then exited and was able to load an existing game just fine as well.

So for sure something's not happy when transitioning to game load from the last help screen. I haven't had a chance to now play it but will do so and provide some feedback. Initial impression though is I like the graphics and sound ambiance.

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

Ouch! Thanks for taking the time to test & report it Tim! Very much appreciated.

We had that issue a while back, thought I'd fixed it. A reboot after initial install used to work, although that was on 3.1.

I'll run some more tests ASAP, and see if I can find the culprit & submit a quick fix update.

Cheers for pointing it out!

Has anyone else encountered the issue?

Thanks,
Phil.

Posted 2 years ago #
Tim
Member

No problem, I have seen where you can get crash reports in itunesconnect that are generated when people sync their phones. Have you seen anything show up?

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

Can't find a link for crash reports in iTunes connect. Should it show up in 'App Details' when in the 'Manage You Apps' section?

Maybe the link doesn't show until reports have been submitted, and perhaps theres a delay until they do. I'll keep an eye out.

Posted 2 years ago #
Tim
Member

It's probably too soon since it was just released, but go into where you manage your application. When looking at your specific application you'll see on the right the links for crash reports, app details, etc. My two active apps do not have any reports, but I had a program from almost a year ago that used the sound engine from crash lander that started having problems with the 3.0 code release. I've since pulled it to redo it (just a free program that played various sounds but continued to have at least 1k downloads/month).

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

Cheers for the tips Tim. Will see if the reports appear in the next few days.

Posted 2 years ago #
serveace6
Member

Grabbed Y4FNJ9YJ3KPH, cool game and definitely like the art style. However, I did find the bubble mini game hard to see since it was on a white background and it crashed once.

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

@serveace6: thanks! We're looking at ways to make the mana bubbles stand out more, but still keep the look right. We might tint or remove the cloud to help.

As for the crash, could you give any more details? e.g device, OS & at what point it happened? Otherwise I'll chk the report when it comes in.

Thx,
Phil

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

For anyone interested, we're starting to get our first (non developer) user impressions in on the Touch Arcade forums:
http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=40293

Posted 2 years ago #
pgpprogram
Member

First of all I think the mana should disappear faster. I also think that, in order to make it more like a virtual pet, there should be a screen that shows how much satisfied they are at the moment: (food, water, fun).
Also, I was going to suggest some new ideas for mini games. Perhaps you could have a game where you have to make them catch as many falling fruits from the tree as possible in little baskets. Perhaps there could be a game, where the clouds try and chace them and you have to help assist them avoid the rain. Perhaps a mini game where they have to shoot butterflies out of the sky.
I also really like simple little animations like changing enviornments. (tap the sky and it turns to night, tap the clouds and a rainbow appears, hit a butterfly and they change colors, touch the grass and bugs and flowers appear...)
However what you wrote above about future update ideas sounds really great and I can't wait to see it.

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

Great suggestions pgpprogram. Thanks!

We were worried that if the mana reduced too quickly, users might get annoyed. But back then, you could only top up your mana via the mini games. We hadn't added the clickable floating 'in-miracle' bubbles at that stage. We'll be looking at that closely in one of the first few updates, so its very useful to hear others thoughts on it.

Have you tried double tapping a sapling to get to their stats page? Is that the info screen you wanted to see? I meant to add hints about how to get to it in the help mode, but ran out of time. Will address that shortly!

Sweet mini game ideas. We've actually got a proto-type for a 'falling fruits' type mini game done from a few months back. It was put on the back burner to concentrate on finishing other bits, but should make it back in soon.

I'm creating a list of all the suggestions we receive, so we can prioritize the ones we really like, and any that start popping up repeatedly.

Thanks again for taking the time to check it out & give your feedback. Its greatly appreciated!

Posted 2 years ago #
pgpprogram
Member

I really appreciate that you care about my feedback! Glad you like some of my ideas, if I think of anything else, I will let you know. I have to try out tapping them on the head-was that in the instructions? I did not know that was an option, thanks for the hint.

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

I love the fact people are suggesting all these cool ideas we'd of never thought of!
I just hope we can find the time to add in as many as possible!

No, I didn't get round to adding in the help info on any of the sapling interactions. My bad :-( Will be working on it this weekend.

Posted 2 years ago #
riq
Key Master

very nice graphics. congratulations!
More minigames and more miracles would be nice.

I'm not sure if this idea is aligned with your game. Here it goes:

- Add some kind of RPS features to the game like:
- You can choose to be a good god or evil god.
- If you are constantly killing your saplings, then you start the evil career. The more saplings that you kill, the more "levels" you gain.
- If you are an evil god, then the miracles/minigames that are available are related to killing the saplings
- The god can have a good/evil level variable (like the levels of the RPG characters)

good luck with your game!

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

Hey riq, thanks for checking out ForestFolk, and taking the time to make some cool suggestions!

We toyed with the idea of being able to be good or evil to the Saplings (& actually removed a bunch of evil related content shortly before submission). I like the suggestion of theming the mini-games dependent on how good/bad you've been to them, and having the RPG style level ups.

The reason we removed the evil side for now, was it just didn't fit in with everything else quite right. It seemed to be 'tagged on', where-as the cutsey/happy side seemed to work better as a whole.

Were planning our first few updates now, and are leaning towards adding more miracles and mini games first, & wait for general user feedback & suggests to see if the good/evil thing crops up more.

Thanks for making this all possible! Cocos2d is a truly amazing framework & community!

Posted 2 years ago #
plasticpower
Member

I agree with not having the evil stuff. This game doesn't look like it should have a whole lot of evil in it. But puzzles and small mini games are always welcome.

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

Thx for your input plasticpower. We've had quite a mixed response to the good/evil idea so far, people either really want it, or totally disagree with it, or so it seems

Admittedly, as we shipped with a very relaxed, calm world, the evil theme wouldn't fit in with a lot of the users were attracting so far. So if we do go that way, we'd have to do it very carefully, so if you don't care for it, you can play without ever seeing an evil action. Will wait n see what other feedback we get before deciding...

Posted 2 years ago #
plasticpower
Member

It looks like you've got quite a thread going on TouchArcade! I can see this game get featured in the near future. A very nice alternative to a lot of violent games out there! I think there's lots of room to expand with the non-evil theme. I'm not sure if you remember the game called Black and White, but this one reminds me a lot of it. Playing the "good" side was always arguably more rewarding, and you could do all kinds of little quests to help your followers, so I'm sure there's a lot of potential in your game. I wish you the best!

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

Yea, its starting to get going on TA : ) We're trying to get as much feedback early on as possible, and have already had some great ideas and suggestions put forward by users.

I think your totally right on expanding the non-evil theme. And we deffo plan to do so, even though our original plan was to actually go more evil than good, we've had a lot of people comment similar to yours, that its nice to have something at the other end of the good/evil spectrum. So we plan to put alot of effort into that side of things!

I don't remember Black and White myself, but Matt said it was one of his fav games years ago, so that was quite likely one of the many inspirations that led us here. I'm off to check out some youtube videos of it....

Thanks for the kind words!
Phil

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

and here's the trailer, we finally got it done :)

Posted 2 years ago #
mobilebros
Moderator

Wow, this is very cool, this game really has the potential to go very far.

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

Thanks! Its taking us a while to get all the PR bits ready, all in good time...
Although it looks like a big player is just entering into the same genre, so will be interesting to see how it all plays out ;)

We're just getting ready to submit the first update later this week (if no major bugs crop up!).

Posted 2 years ago #
adik
Member

wow, this is fun! I like background music :)

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

Thanks adik ;)

Update 1.1 came out the other day, which included a new base feature, miracle, a tweak to the Saplings life cycle (fits much better now), and lots of small tweaks and bug fixes.

iTunes Link: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/forest-folk/id339869450?mt=8

I'm working on the 1.2 update at the moment, which includes an upgrade to the latest 0.9.0-rc cocos2d branch (& I'll get onto the final in a few days), and Open Feint integration. Although we opted to keep an older version of box2d for now, as had some strange issues with the latest one, and didn't want to spend ages tracking it all down at the moment.

Matt's been working on designs for some much larger updates coming in 1.3 & 1.4, including new miracles, objects, and possible areas.

Here's a few promo codes for fellow devs. We'd really appreciate honest reviews on the App Store if you use them!

MLR3J3WWYJEY
W46L3LKWMWKA
JKK4MKWMENYN
AWMJN9EL46TK
PLN7LA3FLAXT

Any feedback or comments, please let us know!

Thanks,
Phil

Posted 1 year ago #

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