JohnnyWorks

I’m pleased to announce that StickWars Ultimate Challenge is live on the AppStore. It is a collection of mini-games based on the addictive StickWars gameplay, and allows you to directly challenge your OpenFeint friends to compete for the top scores.

You can read more about it here, or just click here to visit the iTunes page.

I have been working on this update for months, and while it was originally slated to be an in-app purchase included with StickWars, technical limitations imposed by Apple dictated  that I release it as a completely separate app. You can try out two of these minigames for free in StickWars or StickWars Lite version 1.7. Have fun, and as always I welcome all feedback, so visit my forums and let me know what you think.

One of the many articles is up at marketwire.com. Here is my blurb:

Eric Hartzog, StickWars: “StickWars will include a new gameplay mode that will allow a player to battle for a limited period of time and challenge his friends for top scores. His friends will be notified of the challenge through push notifications, powered by OpenFeint, and they will be able to easily load StickWars and respond to the challenge. These challenges will flow back and forth in near real-time, and be easily visible to players even if StickWars is not currently loaded.

A single-player game inevitably has a limited amount of engagement — developers can only add so much content to a game. But by drawing from existing social networks and encouraging social competition between gamers, the players themselves create new tasks for one another and new obstacles to overcome. This user-generated content expands the value of any game far beyond what was initially put into it, and continues to expand as the popularity of the game increases even further.”

You can read more details about exactly what this means for StickWars in this forum post. There are a lot of new features and brand new game modes coming to StickWars. These new features will require a small purchase in game, but give access to many social features that allow you to compete against your friends in many different challenges.

Expect these features ready at the start of July, and for them to be live anywhere between 1-4 weeks after that when Apple approves it.

A reporter had some questions for me about the Palm Pre, and I just spotted an article with some of the interview posted on Bloomberg.com. You can read the entire article here, or read the section about StickWars below.

18 Applications

The Pre will go on sale with about 18 applications available in its App Catalog, including programs from Pandora music player, movie ticket service Fandango and a digital version of the checker-stacking game Connect Four, Letts said.

Some popular games may not make it to the Pre at all. The creator of “StickWars,” where you defend a kingdom against invading armies of stick figures, said he’s not willing to put in the extra effort to re-design the game if it’s not going to make any money back. The game is the third-most popular paid application in Apple’s library.

“I would need a real direct incentive in order to be willing to once again commit months of my evenings and weekends behind a computer screen coding,” said Eric Hartzog, who created the game as a student at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Designing for the iPhone was easier because other developers shared resources in free online libraries, said 22- year-old Hartzog, who has since graduated and joined the U.S. Navy. He said he would only consider doing the same for the Pre if its popularity reaches the level of Apple’s phone.

I’ve been looking more at the Palm Pre and am getting more excited about it. I’d love to develop for a device that has a faster processor, but in the end it comes down to the tools available. I’m still a ‘newbie’ coder and wouldn’t be able to create a game like StickWars from scratch. We’ll see though…I’m a strong fan of competition and am really looking forward to a real competitor to the iPhone.