Announcement: Era iPhone

[cbk1994]

Based on the success of the Classic iPhone application, the Era staff team has decided to undertake the project of creating an iPhone version of Era. This iPhone version will be a fork from the current Era Dev project, and will be using the new systems that we have been working with there.

The goals of this project are:

• To create an fun, self-supporting arcade-style playerworld based off of Era, where iPhone/iPod Touch users and possibly PC users will be able to enjoy a casual modern-themed Graal server.
• To motivate the Era development team and speed the process development, especially with graphics. The application will be using a revised tileset which will eventually be brought to main Era with the conclusion of the dev project.
• To put the Era Dev scripting systems to a test, especially the overhauled item system, to be certain that they won't fall apart when they are released on the Era main server.
• To bring new players to the main Era server, as well as Graal, by properly advertising and promoting the desktop version of Graal. We expect to be able to get at least 200 players during peak times, based off the recent trends of the Classic iPhone server.

The staff team of the server will be almost all development, with later a competent manager who can oversee the development, and deal with player issues. At this time, the server will be co-managed by Sales (Era manager), Vulcan, and myself (Era development administrator).

The timeframe of this server is between 2 weeks to a month. We wish to develop this very rapidly and release it on the App Store. This means that in the very near future we will be hiring many development staff, especially levelers. We will post more about these positions as they open up.

We are announcing this early because this will place the development project on a temporary hold. We understand that the project has already been delayed many times, and that this is inconvenient for many people, but we believe that the benefits of this project, especially the rapid development of content to be used on both servers, outweigh the delays caused by it.


For those of you who don't want to read:
The Era development team will be working on porting an arcade version of Era to the iPhone platform. We expect this project to take between two weeks to a month of time. We will be hiring many development positions soon, and will post more information about that as the positions open up.