Well it had to happen sooner or later and this is our first venture away from the Apple platforms. Frootrees, our fun, little arcade game is now available to download for the Palm Pre and we’re also looking to have this available for the Palm Pixi very soon too.

Frootrees was well received on the iPhone with some great reviews when it first appeared. If you don’t know what Frootrees is or want to read some of the reviews then go to the Frootrees page.

If you own a Palm Pre and want to play Frootrees then download now while it is FREE!

Gamebook Adventures 3: Slaves of Rema is nearly ready for release and to get you in the mood, we wanted to unchain the author of the gamebook, Gaetano Abbondanza and find out his motivations for writing the story as well as find out a bit more about his gamebook passions!

Read his interview here!

While we busy ourselves with getting GA 3: Slaves of Rema finished (and *ahem* unannounced GA 4) some interesting things have been happening…

First up, we’re really proud to announce that we’re finalists for Best Audio at this years Freeplay Awards for Gamebook Adventures 1: An Assassin in Orlandes! Adrian Watkin’s evocative soundtrack for our first gamebook quite rightly caught the attention of the judges and fingers crossed we cross the finish-line on the big day! We’re up against tough competition though from our Melbourne indie chums, The Voxel Agents and Brawsome.

We’re also chuffed to reveal that we’ll be making an appearance at the Freeplay festival this year on a few panels. Firstly Ben Britten will be hosting a session called Getting Started with Unity, and Andrew Drage (Brewin’), our Gamebook Adventures editor will be part of the The Design of Everything panel. Finally, Neil Rennison will be a panel member on Everything Old is New Again on Saturday Aug 14th as well as chairing the One Man Band panel discussion on the Sunday 15th Aug too.

For more information about the Freeplay Independent Games Festival to be held at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, check out their site.

Added 12/08/10 – Neil Rennison also interviewed on the Freeplay blog -> link.

We also recently wrote a small blog article for Invest Victoria about our upcoming iPad versions of Gamebook Adventures and why we feel it’s right to take our time with them and also why we’re simply not rushing out cheap ports. If you want to have a read then gander over to our post on Invest Victoria blog.

Ben Britten Smith, our amazing Gamebook Adventures coder has to put up with a lot of things that we throw at him, bless him. Recently we made a key design decision for GA in that we wanted to make all aspects of the app to work in only one orientation on the iPhone and iTouch – namely vertical. Originally we had both GA1: An Assassin in Orlandes and GA2: The Siege of the Necromancer switching between horizontal and vertical. With our upcoming GA3: Slaves of Rema we wanted to keep everything consistent and that meant having our intro video vertical too.

It seems a straight forward fix, but if you head over to Ben’s blog and read his awesome Compression settings for iPhone video, you will find it is anything but! Ben has found a very interesting solution though and wanted to highlight the problems he faced and share with the world his elegant solution. If you’re an Apple developer, pop over and give it a read as it may save you hours of fiddling about!

If you’re like me you’ve been glued to the TV watching the World Cup over the last few weeks. As we’re in Australia it’s meant lots of late nights in the pub or early mornings sat with a large cup of coffee. England (my team) were rubbish throughout, Australia (the official Tin Man team) were rubbish, got better and in the end were actually unlucky. After seeing the Germans demolish Argentina the other night, our money is now on them as long as they can maintain the form against the Spanish and either the Uruguayans and Dutch.

Anyway, we wanted to let you know about World Soccer Champs 2010 from Uprising Games, which our art outsourcing chums at Fraction Studios were involved with and is now available to buy on iTunes. The retro game harks back to the golden age of football/soccer games like Kick Off 2, Goal! and Sensible Soccer and adds in some nice playability touches, like ball trapping, which takes advantage of the iPhone’s touch-screen. It also has this year’s World Cup tournament included, so if you’re into retro footy games or want an awesome game to re-create those magic World Cup moments then please support this awesome indie dev team!

Here’s a link to the Touch Arcade forum thread which includes a video!

If you’ve been following our blog posts over the last couple of months, you’ll know that we recently blogged about our upcoming iPad versions of Gamebook Adventures. With the release of the iPhone 4 this week in the U.S. we thought it was worth mentioning the wholesale changes and updates that we are looking to implement into our Gamebook Adventures titles over the next few weeks.

iPhone - To make use of new retina display we are currently increasing the resolution of all our in-game gfx, which includes illustrations and text. This means GA will look crisp and sharp, making it look great and most importantly easier to read.

We are also looking to modify some fundamental aspects of the game. A lot of people have found the difficulty quite tough in both GA1 and GA2. To combat this we are looking to firstly add in difficulty levels based on the Fitness you have at the beginning (meaning you will no longer need to roll for these), and secondly increasing the amount of bookmarks you can use while reading.

We’ve also had some complaints about a key gamebook logic mechanic in An Assassin in Orlandes that has frustrated some people (we can’t say without giving anything away). We’ll be looking to modify this too which should make it feel slightly less hardcore for some.

iPad - The iPad version is coming and we’re working really hard to make this as amazing as it deserves to be. As we’ve mentioned before, we do not want to do a simple port of the iPhone version and want to maximise the awesomeness of the game to meet the hardware. iPhone owners can rejoice as we are planning to make this a universal app, meaning that if you own the iPhone version you can download the iPad version for free, and vice-versa! Keep an eye on our blog over the coming weeks for more news on our upcoming iPad versions. Trust me, if you love our gamebooks these will take the whole experience to a new level!

With beta testing underway on Gamebook Adventures 3: Slaves of Rema, we wanted to give you a sneak peak of some of the new artwork created for the gamebook by Alex Drummond!

We decided to show Rema, an old empire that lays to the south of Orlandes in a slightly different way and Alex has used his unique style to bring life to the strange and mysterious land. We’re hoping to get a submission to Apple in the next couple of weeks, so expect to see GA3 coming to the App Store sometime in July!

We’re always into bigging up anyone that wishes to cover our games. It takes time and effort to review a game or feature some information on a site and as an indie developer with a marketing budget which covers the cost of a trip to the supermarket, we’re always appreciative of every little bit we get! Here’s some of our recent Gamebook Adventures 2: The Siege of the Necromancer coverage:

Featured in Staff Favourites on the Australian App Store!

Tucked in-between Google Earth and Glee, along with Sonic and Space Invaders above! Honoured.

Games Uncovered – Review ‘B’ grade – “The quality of the writing here is superb. Like the first game the author manages to keep your interest held, with the vocabulary rich and the writing witty and descriptive, holding an element of tension throughout.”

Know Your Mobile – Review 4/5 – “The presentation of The Siege of the Necromancer is quite superb, with a great page turning mechanic and lashing of ambience thrown into the mix thanks to the great dice rolling mechanics, background music and artistic styling throughout the pages and illustrations. It’s all secondary to the quite excellent storyline, but the host of smaller parts really make The Siege of the Necromancer shine in comparison to the increasing number of adaptations of the old books.”

Drjft Gaming – Review 7.5/10 – “With a gripping and fast paced story, amazing detailed artwork this very well polished game is well worth taking a look at. I was a huge choose your own adventure reader when growing up and playing this game has made me relive those exciting times.”

TouchMyApps – Preview – Included in the 10 New App Store Games to Watch feature

TouchMyApps – Review – “The graphics are simply excellent, with selectable fonts and backgrounds available. The quality of the design is such that it’s easy to forget you’re holding a mere iPhone in your hands and not a real-live book.”

We’ll update this post as more coverage appears. Thanks to all our supporters!

It’s great when we’re approached to do an interview and it’s even better when it’s a site like Cool Shite, which is dedicated to all the kind of geeky pop culture that we at Tin Man Towers love. Not only is it a great site to catch up on your fix of TV, film, comics and games it’s also Australian which gets major brownie points! Thank you Chris Rattray for the opportunity to appear on the site.

To read the interview, click here.

(Quite chuffed too as we’re featured on the front page next to a video interview with Dave Gibbons, the artist behind Watchmen – a personal hero of mine!)

The day has finally come and our second gamebook, The Siege of the Necromancer makes its debut on the App Store! It’s been a long time coming but the mysterious Erid Buul has finally had his wicked way with us.

This new story takes you to the western side of Orlandes and the coastal town of Myr, ruled by Lord Bliryn. You have returned home from an arduous few months working in the Durath Tor mines to the north, but Myr is not as you had left it. The opening of the book thrusts you straight into a vicious encounter and the pace never lets up as you must try to break into the stronghold and lift the siege of the necromancer!

With more achievements and more illustrations than there were in An Assassin in Orlandes, this second Gamebook Adventures title is one we’re really proud of! For more information on the gamebook features, check out our The Siege of the Necromancer page.

Gamebook Adventures 2: The Siege of the Necromancer is available to buy here on the App Store from today for $4.99 (US), £2.99 (UK), 3,99 € (Europe) and $5.99 (Australia).