Koi Pond developers release Distant Shore for iPhone

Developer The Blimp Pilots has released its latest iPhone application, Distant Shore, which is hoping to follow in the wildly successful footsteps of their first app, Koi Pond.

Actually, footsteps is the right word. The new app involves walking along an endless beach finding messages in bottles - it's a bit like Animal Crossing, except with all the gameplay taken out to leave just the bottle-message bits.

(So not much like Animal Crossing, really).

Distant Shore isn't a game, just as Koi Pond wasn't, but it's still interesting for games developers to look at - we picked up on it via a Twitter post from Distinctive Developments boss Nigel Little.

Users write their messages and send them off in bottles, and the hook is that those bottles then turn up in the application on other people's handsets. And vice versa - the bottles you find in Distant Shore contain messages written by other people.

Wrapped around this are game-like 3D graphics, and the obligatory ambient sound effects. There's been a lot of grousing about the popularity of 99-cent fart apps on the App Store, but Distant Shore shows that there's some interesting ideas in the ultra-cheap category too.