Monday, January 4, 2010

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to everyone. What an exciting year we had in 2009, and what we have planned for 2010 is really getting me fully energized and raring to go.

Much of what we are doing right now is around the Android platform (aka the "Google phones"), and so a short pre-announcment seems fitting. A new release of Cribbage Pro for the Android is coming out very soon. It will include some exciting new features that the community has asked for either in comments or emails to us, and I can't say enough how great it is to hear from you all and see your support for us and the game.

So what is the new release going to include, well some of that you will have to wait and see, but here are some highlights:
  • A new shuffling algorithm - producing a more "natural" shuffle and reducing the number of times you see the same cards or same mix of cards in a hand.
  • Full game "Save" and "Load" feature - Allowing you to stop in the middle of a game and come back any time later to continue playing.
  • Full game statistics - The system will track and record all your completed games with all the juicy details you might want to know like wins, losses, skunks, double skunks, highest hand, highest pegging and more!
  • New preferences/settings screen that shows you the card images to choose from and also adds a few new setting to change your player image or "avatar" as well as a "user name". Why a user name.... well....
  • A new "Top 50 Stats" page will let you see your ranking against all the other players of Cribbage Pro! Enter a user name in the settings screen, and you can access the top 50 list any time, from anywhere!
  • Bug fixes and more! We have fixed a few minor bugs as well as tweaked a few things here and there to make the game play even better.
So as you can see, there is a lot going into this release, and as we wrap up testing over the next few days you will see this update hit the market place for you all to download and enjoy.

As usual, keep the feedback coming in and let us know what you would like to see added and it may just be the next thing on the list.

-- Josh

6 comments:

  1. I love your cribbage game. It is best out there. I am looking foward to the new release. Keep up the good work.

    -Joshua Clark
    Rogueakula@gmail.com

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  2. Glad to hear you like the game. The update is now live, so check it out and let us know what you think!

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  3. The update was a great improvement. However, the board is difficult to see--especially the pegs. How about making the board vertical, use the entire screen and make it transparent.

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  4. Awesome game. Agree that the pegging board and pegs are too difficult to see. Love the leaderboard, but it appears that people have already begun abusing it (perhaps quitting games before they are recorded as losses?)

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  5. Thanks everyone for you comments.

    @cal.rasmussen: We are looking into variuse layout options and increasing the visibility of the board - thank you for your suggestion and we hope an improvement will be made in the next release.

    @Mark Ludwick: We have the same suspicions about the leader board and possibly quitting games. We have a feature that was not included in this release that penalized the player for leaving early, but it is a tough call as to whether that would be too severe. We are looking into what we can do beyond that to help improve the integrity of the score. If anyone has any ideas, we are very open to hearing.

    -- Josh

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  6. Just a quick update here on this comment thread about the potential quitting prior to a loss in the game.

    The new update (1.0.4) just now published to the market is intended to improve transparency in this regard. It adds an "unfin." stat for unfinished games, as well as provides the ability to click/select each player in the top 50 and see their detailed statistics just like you can see for yourself.

    Our hope is that this increased transparency will make the community of players more able to self regulate this type of issue, but if in the future it turns out to not be sufficient to curb the type of "cheating" described here, we will look into incorporating a penalty system.

    -- Josh

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