Chopper 2 has just hit the App Store worldwide. You can download it from this link. It is $4.99 US, but on sale at $2.99 for a limited time.

Check out the glowing touchArcade review, and if you haven’t seen the trailer yet, here it is:

Chopper 2 has now been approved by Apple. It will be available on the App Store from Tuesday the 27th of July.

Chopper 2 will be priced at $4.99, but will be launched at a sale price of $2.99 for a limited time. For more information have a look at the Chopper 2 web page

The official Chopper 2 trailer:

Chopper 2 is finally complete, and has now been submitted to Apple for review! It has been a huge amount of work over the past year or so but the result is something I am very proud of. Testers have been blown away, and the bluetooth remote control feature has to be tried to be believed.

Review times are a bit of an unknown, but if all goes well, expect to see Chopper 2 for iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad in the App Store before the end of July. Keep an eye on the (recently updated) Chopper 2 page in the meantime.

You’re looking at the new website design for majicjungle.com, hope you like it! Resize the window, it’s cool

I’d been meaning to lighten up the design for a while now, and also optimize the viewing experience on the iPhone, which should now be a lot better.

Now seemed like a great time to update the site, with the iPad just days away from launch, and Chopper and Chopper Lite version 1.3 for iPhone and iPad waiting patiently for April 3rd.

Both Chopper and Chopper Lite have been made universal. So if you have them for the iPhone now, they will just work on an iPad at no extra cost. You can see a screenshot for the iPad version on the Chopper for iPhone and iPad page. It hasn’t just been blown up. Though it does have new HD graphics, it actually allows you to see further and fly higher. So it should be a different game experience, with more enemies and projectiles on the screen at once, but a bit more height to work with.

Chopper 2 is coming along nicely, with the first alpha version back from testing, and 12 out of the 36 final missions completed. Chopper 2 will also be a universal app for iPhone and iPad, and an in depth article was posted on Touch Arcade recently with some juicy details and new screenshots.

Things are really gearing up with Chopper 2 coming together, the iPad launch and a number of things in the pipeline for after Chopper 2, not the least of which being the Mac version. It’s going to be a very exciting year!

This is a current (4th Jan ‘10) screenshot from the level editor for Chopper 2.

Chopper 2 Editor Screenshot

The level editor has taken a huge amount of my time and energy, but I am aiming to create over 30 missions, and they need to be awesome. I also am hoping I can release the editor for people to make their own levels.

For now, I’m just trying to make this level a completely playable experience, before I move to finishing the other levels. And I’m close.

The game view in the bottom right is displaying my current progress on the ‘mission failed’ screen. I just hit too many birds, and when you die, it goes red, the Chopper explodes and some other crazy stuff happens. The completion and introduction screens are more advanced

I recently added the first trees, and in the top right, you can see the white lines showing where the the 3D tree model intersects the 2D level plane. The tree is made of 3 quads, which seems to be a good compromise for now. The trees add hugely to the visual appeal of this level, and also add obstacles for low fliers, which works well for gameplay. I recently made the Chopper fly much faster when close to the ground, which has some awesome implications for gameplay and scoring.

I’ve already created all of the background graphics for all of the levels, and have made a good start on the other graphics, though many still need to be refined further.

Most of the systems for the enemy AI are in place. The level structure is well planned and in general all of the fundamental building blocks are in place. I’m now in the level design/tweaking phase, and it’s a pretty fun place to be.

So there is some great progress going on, but this is not an ‘It will be done by X’ project. It’s also not an ‘It will be done when it’s done, AKA Duke Nukem Forever’ project. I’m aiming for less features now than when I started, and I’m spending very little time re-writing things. It is now just a matter of completing my vision, and there are very few unknown details yet to fill in.

Once again, please follow @chopper_2 on twitter to keep up to date.

Hopefully, it will be ready within the next couple of months. But it’s just me here… And I got fat sitting in front of my computer last year. This year I’m surfing more!

Hold your breath, it’s not too far off

TouchArcade recently posted a gameplay video of Chopper 2 on the iPhone in action! Check it out on toucharcade.com.

UPDATE: Unfortunately Apple reverted back to the old data formats soon after this post, and MajicRank 1.4 stopped working. You can download MajicRank 1.3.2 which still works fine here. The rest of this news item is now in limbo, but I’ll leave it here for now! Hopefully Apple will restore top 200s again at some point.

With the release of iTunes 9 came a completely new App Store which now displays Top 200s and has a new ‘Top Grossing’ chart.

As a result, MajicRank 1.4 can now display ranks right up to 200, and display Top Grossing results as well.

In iTunes currently, some categories don’t have visible top paid/ top free 200s, and most don’t display top grossing. However, MajicRank is able to display an applications rank in the top free, top paid, or top grossing chart for any category or subcategory.

MajicRank product page
Direct download (0.5MB)

Update: MajicRank 1.3 has been released, and now has it’s own product page.

MajicRank is a free application for Mac OS X (10.5+) designed to give iPhone App Developers an easy way to see how popular their applications are around the world.

It automatically downloads top 100 statistics for any iPhone app, for any categories or game sub categories, for most regions from iTunes, and displays the results in a colored table. Note that though the screenshot only shows 8 regions, the rest can be added in the preferences menu.

MajicRank 1.2 can be downloaded from http://majicjungle.com/MajicRank.zip (0.5MB)

Screenshot:

It is likely that at some point Apple will change their formats and the scrapping algorithms will fail. So it’s also likely that at some point this app will crash or give false results or have some other problem. However I will try to keep it working, and please let me know of any bugs you find.

I’m @majicDave on twitter, or you can email me: developer@majicjungle.com

Usage

Press the ‘+’ button to add your app, edit the name by double clicking on it. The name must match exactly the name that is currently called in iTunes. Select the categories that your app falls under.

Every time you refresh or restart the app, MajicRank will attempt to download every category that is selected from every region. Sometimes a download may fail, and a yellow exclamation mark represents this.

The more categories you add, the slower the load time will be. 10 apps all set to Games/Action should be as quick to load as 1 app set to Games/Action, but 10 apps each with uniquely different categories will be 10x slower to load than 1 app.

Every time you make a change to the apps list or an app’s categories the changes are saved automatically and will load on relaunch of the app. If you come across a crash on launch, or want to get rid of your saved configurations for any reason, remove ~/Library/Application Support/MajicRank/appsModel.plist

By default MajicRank will only download the ‘Big Eight’, the eight largest (arbitrarily decided by me) regions. This can be changed in the preferences.

Archiving

There is a preference for Archiving the results (disabled by default). If you enable this preference, every time you do a search, a potentially quite large (200KB-4MB+) file will be saved in ~/Library/Application Support/MajicRank/. This is a gzipped Keyed Archive of an NSDictionary of all all apps in all of the top 100s that have been downloaded. Currently this file is not used by MajicRank, but if you do want to start keeping a history now it may come in useful later.

Future

I would like to add change tracking. A simple trend indication should come soon, but graphs would be better. It depends how high the demand is, and how much I feel like procrastinating work on Chopper 2!

Firstly, Chopper for iPhone is on sale at 99c. It’s not the first time, and it probably won’t be the last, but it’s as good as any a time to get it - iTunes Link.

Secondly, Chopper for iPhone 1.2 has been submitted. Version 1.2 adds a new control option that makes it so touching the right half of the screen fires the machine gun, and touching the left half drops bombs. I wanted to do this initially, as it is the best way to control weapon fire. The only reason I didn’t make it this way from the start is that it is not obvious you can fire a weapon without having a button to press. As an option, though, it works well. Chopper 1.2 also offers some improvements in performance. The frame rate should be smoother now, and battery usage should go down. This update should show up within the next few days.

Thirdly, Chopper Lite has been submitted. Chopper Lite gives 5 levels in the normal and hard difficulties, and will be free, without advertising. I have been waiting for Apple to provide a fully sanctioned way to offer demo versions, but it hasn’t happened, so I’ve caved and released the ‘Lite’ version. It’s a way to try Chopper out, if you were not convinced by the screenshots. It could be a week or more before Chopper Lite is approved, but this should be the iTunes link when it shows up.

And last, but sure as hell not least, I am now working on Chopper 2. My priority is to release an iPhone version, but I do hope to release a Mac version at a later point, too. Chopper 2 is using a lot of the code and ideas from ‘Chopper Assault’, and will replace it.

I am being completely open about the development process, and the best place to keep up with Chopper 2 as it progresses (and voice your opinion) is by following the @chopper_2 twitter feed. A couple of very early screenshots are available – and more will be added – in the Chopper 2 flickr set.

As a side note, there will not be a Windows version of Chopper 2. Chopper Assault was compiling for Windows, but it was written in C++ with Windows in mind. I am now firmly addicted to Objective C/Cocoa/OpenGL/Apple hardware, and have no interest in doing the huge amount of work porting to a language/API/system I have little knowledge of, for a platform with such high piracy and such (rightly so) low trust in shareware. So sorry, Windows folk. Chopper is not heading your way.

So this is what I’ve been working on for the past month.

5 Fingers Games Bundle  - http://5fingersbundle.com

I teamed up with five other developers to create a bundle of our best five games. We faced some interesting challenges along the way, mostly technical and legal. But despite living in 4 different timezones, communicating via email, and having 5 different conflicting code bases, we managed to pull it off.

Initial feedback has been very positive, hopefully there is something in the bundle for everyone.