Gravity Sling Deluxe has just been released to the App Store. This is the deluxe version of our hit game Gravity Sling. Feature-wise this is identical to the original game, with the difference being that Gravity Sling Deluxe is a paid app that gives you all of the in app purchasable content, without any additional cost. This means that we’re able to support OS 2.2.1 devices (iPod Touch users who haven’t upgraded) as well as anybody who is unwilling or unable to purchase In App content.

As a special incentive for all of you, we’ve decided to release Gravity Sling Deluxe for just $.99 to the first 5,000 players, $1.99 to the next 5,000 players and then the price will reach it’s normal price of $2.99. This won’t last long so be sure to act fast!

We hope you enjoy playing and look forward to hearing your feedback. While you’re waiting for it to download, go ahead and check out our gameplay trailer:

What are you waiting for. Go get it from the App Store now!

This update has a lot of big changes and improvements to it. Most notably is that we’ve introduced moving planets, which adds a huge amount of complexity to the levels that have them. We’ve also added star pickups to most levels giving you more opportunities to earn points on each level. With these changes we added a total of 64 more levels to the game so there’s a LOT more content to play too. Here’s a list of all the big changes we’ve made:

• Moving Planets
• Star Pickups on most levels
• 64 new levels (4 free + 2 new level packs)
• Display indicators for if you’ve met a level target or not
• Better help for the first few levels
• Improved game flow between levels and retries
• Much better UI performance
• Updated OpenFeint to 2.3.1
• New achievements
• Fixed multi-touch bug in gameplay
• Numerous other tweaks and bug fixes

We hope you enjoy this update, and as always let us know what else you’d like to see!

Circle of Life from Gravity Sling v1.1

Gravity Sling Deluxe has not yet been approved for sale. It is identical to this version except that all level packs are automatically unlocked, and you will need to purchase it from the start (instead of it being free with In App Purchase).

Gravity Sling is now available in the App Store. We are all very excited to have this released, and can’t wait to hear what you think about it. Leave us a comment here, review it in iTunes, and be sure to tell your friends about it on Facebook and Twitter.

Gravity Sling is a free download, so really there’s no reason not to try it out. If you enjoy the first 15 levels, then you can purchase the next 30 are available for just $.99 from within the app.

It also features OpenFeint integration so you can check how you compare to your friends, and earn achievements while you play.

This game concept was originally developed during the iPhone Game Jam held at the 360iDev conference in September. It is a collaboration between Riptide Games, PyroMonkey Productions, Spatial Reasoning, Crucial Games and NoiseBuffet. All Denver-based iPhone developers.

What are you waiting for? Go get Gravity Sling now!

Here’s the trailer to watch while it’s installing.

It’s hard to believe that the iPhone Game Jam was less than 3 weeks ago. Things have come a long way for Gravity Sling since that first 12 hours of furious overnight coding. When we finished that night we had the core gameplay down fairly well, with a very rough OpenFeint integration, and some pretty graphics but that’s about it.

Now we have a complete game. The physics have been reworked so gameplay is a lot more fun, we’ve created a total of 45 levels to play through, added an awesome soundtrack and swapped out nearly every graphic in the game. We’ve also decided to release Gravity Sling for free and hope that enough people will enjoy it that the sales of the In-App purchase level editor will be worthwhile.

While some would say this is the end, that’s not true for us. We have lots of plans for what the future holds. We definitely want to polish up the level editor so anyone can make their own levels. We also think we have a way to enable moving planets and obstacles, which will add a huge amount of life and challenge to the game. Of course, all this is in addition to more levels!

There’s no way to know the exact timing for release, but we submitted it to Apple last night, and our best guess is that it will take a couple weeks to get approved. Follow @riptidegames on Twitter, or check back here often to keep up to date on the progress and to be the first to know once it’s approved.

In the meantime, here’s a reverse-order screenshot timeline of Gravity Sling development for you.

A great run on the Crazy Face level

How things looked on October 7th

Gravity Slingshot at the end of the iPhone Game Jame - just 12 hours of development

We’re just a bit behind on getting Gravity Sling submitted to the app store, but things are definitely getting close. Check out the trailer we put together, and keep checking back to follow our progress.

Tuesday night, Brian Robbins teamed up with Jonathan Hartstein of Pyromonkey Productions and Eric Lannan of Crucial Games to participate in the iPhone Game Jam at 360iDev. We got started around 7pm, and stopped working on our game Gravity Sling around 7am. It was a fun night, where we met some really cool people, saw some great things being built, and learned a lot about how to get something done incredibly fast.

I used to pride myself on being able to develop games very quickly and just focus on getting things done. In fact at my first job at CleverMedia we would release a game every Thursday, and occasionally spend just a single day getting the game done. The focus there was to build a game, get it up and move on to the next one. However it’s been several years since I’ve tried to do something that fast, and it was definitely a challenge to get back into the mindset.

What went right?

Team comfort Eric, Jonathan and I have all worked together at our previous job, and know what each other brings to the table, and we know how each other works. We certainly weren’t like Team Phobic with their full team of 7 there, but we didn’t have to spend any time getting to know one another or anything like that, and this made a big difference.

Subversion A few hours before this started I setup a local SVN server on my laptop that we could use that night. The Internet connection was a bit flaky and I wanted to have an easy way to share our code with each other. This worked out brilliantly as the 3 of us were working. We only had a couple minor conflicts through the night, and those were very quickly resolved. Without SVN setup we probably would have wasted a couple hours through the night trying to integrate code, and keep everyone on the same page.

Having an idea We started off the night with 3 ideas we thought about building but almost immediately decided on Gravity Sling and never looked back. We just focused on that, and tried to see how far we could take it.

Splitting up Responsibilities Almost immediately we determined who would be working on what parts of the project, and we generally stuck to that as we went. Eric did the art, Jonathan did the core physics and I wrote all the framework and interface stuff. This kept us each focused on our specific areas, and we could see how everything was coming along, even when we couldn’t integrate everything together. I was a bit worried at 3am when everything was still very separate pieces, but once things started to come together around 4am they came together very quickly.

What didn’t go right?

Honestly, not much given the timeframe, and goals. We had hoped to have a game complete enough to submit to Apple at the end of the night, and we didn’t quite get there so I guess that’s what didn’t go right. We did get to a point of having a very solid initial prototype of gameplay, and just need to finish it up before we can submit to Apple.

What’s next?

We’ve talked about it and we all want to finish this up, so we’re going to tweak Gravity Sling a bit, build out some more levels, and put some additional polish into the overall experience, and then we’ll get it submitted to Apple so the whole world can see the final result.

Wrapping Up

The feedback and response on Twitter has been great. Dan Grigsby at Mobile Orchard covered the event as we were getting started (and took 3 hours to get it posted thanks to the poor hotel Internet). Peter Bakhirev at Byteclub posted about how to survive a Game Jam event and it looks like Mac Most and Touch Arcade will be covering the results in some way too.

You can check out all of the Projects on the iPhone Game Jam site too.

Thanks to Noel Llopis of Snappy Touch for getting this organized, and John and Tom hosts of 360iDev for letting us do this!

Overall it was a lot of fun, and I’m definitely looking forward to the next one!