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.