"LED powered train madness"

It's been a while since I've spotted a new review of ElectroTrains on the web, but saw this nice one this morning:

http://reviews.whatsoniphone.com/electrotrains-review-led-powered-train-madness/

Dunno why they reviewed such an old version though, since 1.5 has new maps and features?

52,000 new players

Just got yesterday's download figures from iTunes connect. Hope all these people are enjoying the game and say nice things about it! The free promotion ends at 5pm today (UK time), so get downloading if you want it for free. If you stumble upon this blog after ElectroTrains goes back to full price, then do check it out anyway - it only costs a dollar (or 69p) - and I promise you'll love it!

ElectroTrains - get it for free!

ElectroTrains is now free on the the App Store. If you've been holding back, unwilling to spend that dollar (or 69p), now's your chance to play my fantastic little first production for the iPhone/iPad completely for free - no catches, no in-app-purchases - just the complete game.

New version released!

Massive update to ElectroTrains is now live on the app store, with 3 new maps, signals, fast-forward button and tweaks to the scoring system.

Map 6 - one of the new maps.

More maps coming

Many people have requested more maps for ElectroTrains, particularly more easy or medium ones...

The good news is that I'm almost finished the next update to ElectroTrains, which adds a new set of 3 maps, signals, and a fast-forward button so experienced players still get a bit of a challenge during the first few minutes of each game, while not making it too hard for new players.

This will be a free update (I toyed with the idea of doing the new maps as an IAP, or even a seperate app, but was so pleased with the new maps and gameplay, I wanted everyone to get it).

The other good news is that I've sold enough copies of ElectroTrains to be able to pick up a new iPad soon, so a future version (may) support retina iPad display in addition to the existing retina ipod/iphone support.

Work in progress screenshots below:

Game Center Support

New version of ElectroTrains now available on the App Store. The new version has (much requested) support for Game Center so you can now see how your scores compare to players around the world.

The leaderboards are starting to fill up, and someones already beaten my best score on map 2! :-(

I've also recently got hold of a first-gen iPod touch, and discovered a few graphical glitches - so these have been fixed up too!

New Release out

A bug-fix release of ElectroTrains went out at the weekend, which fixes the couple of bugs that came up. Hopefully I'll have some time soon to work on the next release which will have some new maps and gameplay.

Lots of good reviews (and a bug?)

ElectroTrains has really taken off in the last few days. I've picked up lots of nice reviews across the internet:

geekazine
appchronicles

Annoyingly, I've also seen a few reports of a bug that seems only to surface on some older devices, where the touch screen is "inverted" relative to the display. I suspect that this is caused by the code I added to support playing it "upside down" on the iPad. I will try to reproduce this today and get an update out ASAP. Sadly this is causing a few people to give ElectroTrains a 1 star rating on the app store.

So if you get the bug, please send me an email, since it might help me track it down more quickly. You could also try turning your device upside down, and see if that sorts things out. If it does, again, please let me know. Its hard to fix a bug when it only seems to happen to a tiny fraction of people/devices.

50,000 downloads yesterday, #1 Strategy Game in UK App Store

I was pretty disappointed with how sales had gone since I released ElectroTrains late last year. After a particularly bad day (tuesday, 0 sales), I decided to see what happened if I made the game free for a couple of days.

I've been amazed by what happened. Yesterday more than 50,000 copies of ElectroTrains were downloaded, and (as I write) I'm #1 in the Strategy games charts for free games in several countries, including the UK. Even more amazing, I'm #7 in the German chart for ALL free apps.

ElectroTrains was also selected as one of the 3 apps for FreeAppMagic and "App of the day" on a couple of websites, which no doubt helped me climb even higher up the rankings

Hope that everyone that has picked up the game for free is enjoying it!

New icon

I was never very happy with the original icon for ElectroTrains, so I made a new one at the weekend. I managed to get something I was reasonably pleased with quite quickly, using an open-source package called Inkscape. I'd installed this ages ago, but never really taken to it, since it has an ugly x-windows interface on the mac. However, after a afternoon spent with it, and working through a couple of tutorials (this one got me off to a good start) I ended up really impressed with what this software can do - and I've only used a few of the basic features.

A new version of ElectroTrains with the new icon and iPad support is now on its way to the app store.

Universal Version of ElectroTrains (iPad support)

I'd no sooner got the last update of ElectroTrains submitted to apple, when I decided to have a go at updating the code so it runs as an iPad app. This proved a lot easier than I was expecting, so I will shortly be releasing a Universal version of the game.

This means iPad users will see the full "retina" version of the game (as on the iPhone 4).

Update released

The next version of ElectroTrains should be available in the app-store now. I've rebalanced the volume of some of the sound effects (like the express horn!) and also added a volume control to the pause screen. There's also a new about screen, and most importantly, a Medals screen which shows any medals you earn during the game.

You get medals for various achievements like a high score on a map, and also for a variety of other things I cooked up, like managing to crash lots of trains at once.