Sat Sep 29, 2012 1:15 pm
During last 16 months we worked hard for Junk Jack. We did everything with love and commitment by adding many features and trying to find the right way between what we wanted and what you were expecting from our game.
There also have been moments of complete pain or desperation, like on game release, when the product didn’t work at all with older devices and we had to find ways around problems, this has been our first real game development experience so at least we can say that we learned something even if with some stress included
Now, we reached a sort of turning point for many reasons.
Junk Jack is a good product but it’s still very far from what we want to deliver to all of you. This is because of time and of a big constraint that we have to live with that is the old devices compatibility that clips our wings by forcing us to limit what we can do.
Another reason is that Apple dropped the support for armv6 starting with XCode 4.5. Armv6 is the CPU that powers older devices (iPod2G, iPhone3G) so to provide compatibility with new devices (iPhone5) we are forced to drop support for these devices.
At the same time the AppStore is a strange market, it doesn’t award just how good a game is but it’s an ever-changing ecosystem in which you have to fight against discounts and mass products so chances are that Junk Jack will slowly disappear.
We would like to take the game as it is today and start a new project from there by adding many features that we had in mind for too much time at this point. These include multiplayer, fully fledged equip system, multiple worlds with different environments and many others major features that we can’t simply implement so far because of the old devices compatibility.
The new project will include everything that Junk Jack already has and much more but it would drop old devices compatibility to allow everything to work (we can assure you that we did already everything we could to maintain it so far without cutting out any old device).
Of course this means that we won’t be able to follow Junk Jack as much as today because we will be busy implementing the new game, so unless content updates you won’t see many new things until the next one is ready!
We hope this monologue didn’t annoy you too much, but we want to hear what our community thinks. You and your support are and will always be the fuel that makes us two work so well, everything else is just something to pay our bills.
The Pixbits
There also have been moments of complete pain or desperation, like on game release, when the product didn’t work at all with older devices and we had to find ways around problems, this has been our first real game development experience so at least we can say that we learned something even if with some stress included
Now, we reached a sort of turning point for many reasons.
Junk Jack is a good product but it’s still very far from what we want to deliver to all of you. This is because of time and of a big constraint that we have to live with that is the old devices compatibility that clips our wings by forcing us to limit what we can do.
Another reason is that Apple dropped the support for armv6 starting with XCode 4.5. Armv6 is the CPU that powers older devices (iPod2G, iPhone3G) so to provide compatibility with new devices (iPhone5) we are forced to drop support for these devices.
At the same time the AppStore is a strange market, it doesn’t award just how good a game is but it’s an ever-changing ecosystem in which you have to fight against discounts and mass products so chances are that Junk Jack will slowly disappear.
We would like to take the game as it is today and start a new project from there by adding many features that we had in mind for too much time at this point. These include multiplayer, fully fledged equip system, multiple worlds with different environments and many others major features that we can’t simply implement so far because of the old devices compatibility.
The new project will include everything that Junk Jack already has and much more but it would drop old devices compatibility to allow everything to work (we can assure you that we did already everything we could to maintain it so far without cutting out any old device).
Of course this means that we won’t be able to follow Junk Jack as much as today because we will be busy implementing the new game, so unless content updates you won’t see many new things until the next one is ready!
We hope this monologue didn’t annoy you too much, but we want to hear what our community thinks. You and your support are and will always be the fuel that makes us two work so well, everything else is just something to pay our bills.
The Pixbits
though the fact that I will have to buy Junk Jack again for all that stuff makes me kind of mad, though Pixbits, you deserve it 
