Things have been fairly quiet on the Hemisphere blog recently. The last year saw us busy on:
- Osmos Multiplayer, which we released on iOS this Summer, and updated soon after with voice-chat. This is where we spent most (read, a lot!) of our time.
- The Android port, released at the beginning of the year.
- A few other minor projects/updates, like iPad Retina, Game Center support for the Mac App Store, etc.
Then, in August, Dave and his wife Mel had a beautiful baby girl. (Congrats, Dave! 
) And, finding myself more or less on my own for a while with nothing “on fire”, I decided to take things down a notch and enjoy the beautiful weather with family and friends.
But It’s now late October, fully into rainy shoulder season, and Dave and I are both back at it, planning what’s next for Hemisphere.
On one hand, we’re excited to be working on games besides Osmos, picking up some prototypes we had worked on between the cracks over the last 1.5 years, as well as hitting some new ideas we’ve been discussing. But at the same time we feel like there is some “undone” work on Osmos we plan on hitting over the next few months. Here’s our list, broken down by platform:
- Android: we’re working with the fine folks at Apportable to bring Osmos Multiplayer to Android tablets and handsets.
- iOS: We’re adding support for 4-inch (iPhone/iPod 5) screens and the iPad Mini. (It should just work “out of the box” on the Mini, but we’ll tweak the UI a bit, making the buttons and fonts a bit bigger.) We’re also adding support for iOS 6, including Facebook integration. Finally, we’re thinking of merging the iPad and iPhone versions into a single “group” so they can play multiplayer against each other through Game Center.
- Linux: we’re working with Valve to bring Osmos Linux to Steam.
- Mac: we just added Retina support to the version on our website, and will be updating the Mac App Store version with this soon as well.
- Windows: we’re looking at Windows 8, Surface, etc., but the reviews have been pretty bad! We’re wondering if it’s worth supporting them explicitly. (There’s already a Win 7 multitouch version available which hasn’t generated much interest.)
Last but not least there’s some blogging we want to do, mainly on the subject of multiplayer.
- One subject we want to tackle is “expert play”; namely, how it’s difficult to connect with other strong players on iOS. As such, we’d like to spearhead an effort to get people playing in some high-calibre Osmos matches. More on this soon!
- From a developer perspective, we learned a lot about creating a polished, real-time, multiplayer game on iOS. During development we found ourselves wishing there was more information on this subject on the web. So we plan to share some of our experiences in the hopes they can help other developers, both on technical aspects (Game Center, bluetooth, networking techniques for physics/simulation-heavy games) as well as some thoughts on design.
And with that, it’s time to get back to it. We have plenty to do!! 
on Oct 29th, 2012 at 6:29 pm
Interested on the devblog part, will look forward to it! ^^
on Dec 29th, 2012 at 5:38 pm
Please merge the iPhone and ipad to play together online. Local is great but all one is better.
If there is a discount gifting it that would also be amazing.
Thanks for this games it’s great.
on Jan 16th, 2013 at 4:49 pm
@Tie: We’re on it. iPad & iPhone should be able to play against each other online (ie. via Game Center) in a couple of weeks when 2.2 is available on the store.
As for cheaper gifting, Apple doesn’t provide a way to do that, sorry!
on Jan 19th, 2013 at 9:28 am
That is really too bad about the Windows 8 stuff. I was stopping by to see if there was any news regarding win8. I whole heartedly disagree with the “bad reviews” for the platform. The media is unfortunately biased against anything not Apple… I love the platform and I have Win8, Surface RT, and WP8.
I can understand with such a small group being hard to make the game as a financial investment is required to get all you need (windows 8 64 bit for emulators) to develop for the platform. But W8 has sold some 60+ million copies already and WP8 is (while the number isn’t known just yet, next week) around some 6 million devices I believe from rough estimations. However windows store and sites like WPCentral that feature popular apps and drive traffic will most likely help sell products more so than sitting in a corner on Steam. I don’t know too many people that look around steam for casual ambient games like they would their phones or tablets, and the now app integrated win8.
Hope you guys are still considering it, or perhaps just a bare-bones version of the game with a “more features to come if it takes off” style approach though I don’t know your business practices so I’m not sure if you’re like that.
on Mar 19th, 2013 at 3:34 am
Great to hear that things are starting to tick along again!
I can’t help but notice that there’s a glaring absence of comments on multiplayer for PC platforms. Any thoughts on whether this might happen at some stage?
on Mar 24th, 2013 at 8:16 pm
I also concur that Osmos should be brought to the Windows app store and Windows RT. I notice the original isn’t even available via the store for x86. Certainly it wouldn’t be a bad thing to bring it to RT, and for Windows phones too; there’s will be a huge market for Win8. And the fact that there are already knock-off’s in the Store for Win8 and Windows phone suggests people do want this sort of game.
on May 17th, 2013 at 11:46 pm
[...] promised, multiplayer Osmos has come to [...]