"Classic" ElectroTrains now available free on Android

Andy has finished converting the original ElectoTrains to Android. Now available (for free) on the Play Store.

More ElectroTrains is now on Android

By overwhelming popular demand, More ElectroTrains is now available for Android.

Just in time for Christmas, my old friend Andy Murdoch has finished converting More ElectroTrains to Android phones and tablets. It should now be available for download on the Play Store (there's a link on the right).

He's now hard at work converting the original ElectroTrains which should be available soon.

ElectroTrains now has over half a million downloads

The original ElectroTrains game was free for a couple of days earlier this week, to help promote the new sequel. With 150,000 new downloads this week, that takes the grand total for the original game up to a bit over half a million I reckon.

Now, if only some of these people like it enough to buy the sequel, I might actually make a little bit of money out the game!

More ElectroTrains - TouchArcade forum thread

Just noticed there's a thread for the game on TouchArcade.

More ElectroTrains now available in the AppStore

The sequel to ElectroTrains - "More ElectroTrains" is now available in the AppStore. It has 6 new maps, some new graphical effects and now fills the screen properly on the iPad and new 4 inch iPhone and iPod touch. It also looks great on the retina iPad.

I made a new track editor and a set of track parts modelled on my son's toy train track, which makes it much easier to make new maps, and to draw them so they look good on screen. There's a bit more geometry involved in designing parts of a toy railway than you might expect - unless you get the radius and lengths of the curves and straights perfect you end up with something where the two ends of your track won't meet up!

I might make the track editor available in a future update, if I can figure out how to easily let people swap maps.

The original ElectroTrains has been downloaded almost half a million times (sadly for my wallet, most of these when it was available for free), with lots of nice reviews from around the world and a lot of very regular players on GameCenter. I hope lots of people download the sequel too - it's a bit more polished and closer to my original vision.

"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.

Gameplay video

Discussion on TouchArcade

Here's a link to the ElectroTrains discussion on TouchArcade:

Please post your reviews and impressions of the game.

AppStore promo-codes for ElectroTrains

As promised, here are a few promotional codes for the app store that will let you download and play ElectroTrains for free.

*SORRY ALL GONE*

First come, first served, so good luck!

If you do get one, hope you enjoy the game - and if you do, then tell your friends!

If you don't get one, sorry. I'll post a few more in the next few days - just watch the twitter feed for announcements. Or better still, buy a copy - its only 69p (or 99c).

If someone can let me know (comment on post or twitter) when the codes are all used up, I'll delete them to avoid wasting people's time.