Thanks to everyone for the warm reception for Charadium II! Right now it’s Top #1 free iPad word game, Top #3 free iPad app overall, Top #2 free iPhone word game, and Top #16 free iPhone app overall on the US AppStore. It’s fantastic that so many people enjoy playing the game.
Our servers turned out to be somewhat vulnerable to such high load, our engineers are doing their best to fix all the issues and get Charadium to work perfectly as it always did and how it should.
UPDATE: We believe to have solved all server issues. Please let us know if you are still facing problems.
An On5 engineer fixing the Charadium engine on the fly
We promised that we wouldn’t retire We Doodle and the old Charadium until we have a replacement for them. Now Charadium II replaces both games. It includes everything both games had, and even more. We keep enhancing the new game with frequent updates.
Now it is the time for sunset of the old Charadium and We Doodle. The date is January 15th, 2012. Sunsetting the old games will allow us to use the money and effort we used to spend on their servers’ maintenance for the new Charadium instead.
The game which we’ve been working on for over a year is finally almost ready for the release, and will go live on the App Store in December (published by Chillingo).
The game name is Spice Invaders.
Spice pirates are coming to Earth to suck spice from our planet. They really need spice, and just can’t leave without it, and we have to understand them.
We’ve done our best to reinvent the tower defense genre, and we strongly believe we succeeded in that. Tons of possible towers and their improvements, a selection of “magic” effects, smart enemies try to find the safest route to the base (not the shortest), upgrade system for the character, and much much more. You can even choose the outfit for your pirate.
The really great stuff? It’s online multiplayer! You can play one of the three single player modes, or one of three multiplayer modes, one of which is cooperation. There are over 50 unique custom drawn levels set in different places on Earth. Well, writing how awesome the game is is pretty useless, you won’t get the real feeling until you try it, and you will definitely try it.
One more great thing is that it’s going to be a free app!
Update: unfortunately the launch was delayed until early 2012. Stay tuned!
As we promised last week, we have submitted Charadium II to the App Store early this week, and right now it’s pending approval from Apple. This means that if everything goes smooth with approval, we are going to go live somewhere next week!
Looking back we see we’ve done a tremendous job because this new Charadium is completely re-created from scratch, with new features, new game modes, new ways to connect to friends, and more! Even though tons of new stuff are already in, we have much more great features in almost-done state, and we will add them in updates. We decided not to wait till every awesome feature is finished, so that we could release the game right now for everyone to start enjoying it as soon as possible.
Turn-based games are greatly improved in the new release. Now you can see the complete history of pictures within a game, and even individual guesses by each player, check out the screenshot above. This is just one of the many new cool features.
Both iPhone and iPad versions are available from day one. Both paid and free versions will be available.
If you love Charadium and We Doodle, please support our release by spreading the word! Just write to your favorite app review sites and tell them that an awesome game called Charadium is coming out.
Thank you for your support, and see you doodlin’ soon!
We’ve finished a good playable version of Charadium and now doing a final polish to it. We’ll submit it to the App Store for Apple approval on Monday.
To tell the truth, some new cool features are not finished yet, we are going to add them right after the launch with an update. We understand that everyone is eager to play, so we decided to make it the most awesome game in 2 fast steps
And here is just a nice picture from new Charadium.
Thanks to everyone for your support and thanks for sharing good ideas for the game. We are indeed listening, and try to make the game as good as possible.
Here are a few things which should make you happy:
ability to view your history of drawings
smart distribution between live rooms: play more with friends and less with jerks
anti-troll system
Also, we’ve decided on the name. It will be called Charadium! We made this choice because this name is more international.
We are pushing very hard to have the game ready ASAP, going to go feature complete this or next week. Then we will be getting to the app store. We are still planning to have it in fall, not winter
And here are some pics from filming an awesome Charadium promo clip. Seems like at last we are going to have a video which is as awesome as our games.
We’ve just went through some Charadium and We Doodle stats, and thought that this may be interesting to you.
In Charadium and We Doodle players have written more than 530 million words. If they were writing “Lord of the Rings” (Tolkien’s biggest novel) they would have written it about 1,120 times. If one was reading one word after another continuously without eating or sleeping, it would take about 7 years.
Another thing… Players have drawn over 86 million drawings so far. If we printed each of them on a sticky note (like the ones on the photos), and stacked them, the height of the stack would be 25km or 16 miles, so it would be ending somewhere in stratosphere. Or, that is 77 times higher than the height of the Eiffel Tower. Just image 77 Eiffel-tower-height stacks of players pictures
And one more… If you start laying those sticky notes on the ground, they would be enough to cover 53 acres (over 215,000 square meters). It’s like 21 baseball fields, or 30 soccer fields, or 40 football fields, or 120 hockey rinks, or 512 basketball courts, or… whatever.
Dear We Doodle and Charadium fans! Just want to share the status of our project with you.
Today we completed the transfer of We Doodle and Charadium games to our servers. No worries, Doodlers! The games will keep functioning until the new We Doodle + Charadium game goes live on the App Store.
We are getting closer to completing the development of the new old game. It goes somewhat slower than we initially anticipated, but please be patient We are doing our best to make this game even more awesome. (Sometimes just testing little bit more than we have to, because it’s pure fun!)
Please support the upcoming release by telling all Doodle fans that the game is going to go live really soon!
Huh, we also added a subscription plugin to our blog. Should make it easier for you to follow comments threads Enjoy!
Yes, finally it’s live on the App Store!
