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Has Pocket God finally hit saturation point?

Boost power of updates weakening

Has Pocket God finally hit saturation point?
Episode 25 - 'Sharks With Frickin' Laserbeams Attached to Their Heads' - just went live, but Bolt Creative's Dave Castlenuovo has revealed that as well as it becoming increasingly challenging to come up with good ideas, and make sure new features integrate with the previous ones, updates to Pocket God aren't having the impact they used to.

"Our last update didn't give us a boost in rankings," he says, on the Pocket God forum thread at TouchArcade.

Of course, when you've sold over 1 million units and released that many updates, there's always going to be a point where some of the audience has moved onto pastures new.

And whichever way you look at it, Pocket God must have one of the long tails of any piece of software on the App Store.

As well as this point, in his post - which is well worth a read - Castlenuovo reveals some of the technical challenges of supporting Pocket God through multiple updates.

"Once I'm done with all our xml conversion, I will probably start converting the rendering engine to C++ instead of Objective C. Objective C is a nice language but it's just too high level to work for game development," he says.

"With our future games, we want to have an engine that can handle a lot of sprites on screen, and frankly, there is no reason why Pocket God can't operate at a consistent 60 frames per second. We just need to undo a lot of the code we used to learn the platform."

Still, it seems he'll be able to get his teeth into something new soon. Bolt Creative's second game should be announced before too long.

In the meantime, don't forget to read our feature about the Making of Pocket God.

Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.