Freshly baked! We’ve got some great little wallpapers for your iPhone courtesy of Mikko – why not dress up your background with a taste of Rolandoland?
Get your iPhone wallpapers here. And don’t forget – they work great on an iPod touch too!
Wow, what a week! Personally, this has certainly been one of the most amazing weeks of my life. Its so awesome to see so many people out there enjoying Rolando. With over 400 reviews in the AppStore and an average rating of 4.81 stars, we really couldn’t have wished for a better reception.
One of the first reviews was Pocketgamer’s, which gave it a perfect 10/10, the first time they have awarded an iPhone game their Platinum award.
Soon after, IGN awarded Rolando a score of 9.5/10.
And to top it off I’ve had the huge honour of being given a place on Edge’s Industry Heroes List for 2008. Sitting on a list with so many personal heroes is just amazing.
So a huge thanks to everyone for your patience and support! Time for a little bit of rest over the holidays, but HandCircus will return in the new year.
Update: We’ve also been featured on Brandon Boyer’s awesome Offworld, the gaming-focussed sister site to Boing Boing. After the great write-up over the weekend, there’s a wonderful end-of-year article – focussing on 20 of 2008’s Best Indie and overlooked titles, and we’re thrilled to have Rolando sit at the table with such refined guests as Braid and World of Goo.
Whew! Well it may have taken a while longer than expected, but I’m overjoyed to be able to say that Rolando is now available! Huge thanks to Mikko Walamies for bringing Rolandoland to life with his wonderful, charming illustrations, to all the guys at ngmoco for all of their input and amazing support, and to awesome talents of Mr Scruff for sculpting Rolando’s musical landscape.
The video above is from the guys at TouchArcade, and shows a nice playthrough of one of the shorter levels in World 2.
I can hardly contain my own excitement, as there’s less than 24 hours before Rolando is released! The launch trailer above shows off a few new mechanics – check out the light beams.
As always, the latest info, screenshots and all the movies can be found on the ngmoco Rolando page.
As we build up to Rolando’s imminent, pre-xmas release, I’ve been doing a little spring cleaning with the HandCircus site. All of the old portfolio (pre-Rolando) has been moved over to my personal/contracting blog, so be sure to head over there if you are looking for something that is no longer here.
From now on this site will be 100% HandCircus! Expect news and updates on Rolando and all future games. I do apologise on the lack of updates over the past few weeks, but things have been so very busy getting Rolando as good as it possibly can be. We’ve had a chance to get Rolando into the hands of more people and feedback has been so positive – we really can’t wait to get it out there and its really not going to be long now!
As soon as I have any more definite details to share I will post them up on here ASAP.
The site has also undergone a little bit of prettifying to celebrate. Hope you like the new lick-of-paint 
I missed posting this while I was out in the US, but here’s the most recent trailer for Rolando, showing a longer play session and puzzle elements as well as the pop-up map!
This months Edge Magazine has a great article on the current state of iPhone gaming, talking to developers about their opinions of the gaming potential of the device and the current state of the App Store. Several Rolandos have sneaked their way onto the page too!
Well the entire HandCircus East-London studio has migrated temporarily to the sunny shores of San Francisco to spend some quality time with Rolando’s publisher, ngmoco. Progress this week has been amazing, seeing so much refinement and polish being applied to the game, and ironing out of some of the few remaining issues and bugs. We had two-days of focus groups on Monday and Tuesday, which were hugely valuable in getting last minute feedback.
We also now have a localised version of Rolando, and as Chris mentioned over at the ngmoco blog, the little Rolandos look even cuter speaking Japanese
Hopefully we will have more details over the coming week or so, but we are still very much on course for a holiday 2008 release.
(If you can’t see the trailer above, click here).
I’m very happy to announce that Rolando has found a friend in the form of ngmoco, a publisher focussed on bringing fresh, original and most of all fun games to the iPhone. They have a huge wealth of games industry experience and will help take Rolando to new heights.
The trailer above shows a ton of new and exciting features from the current version of Rolando, and all four of the playable worlds. All of the 36 levels are now at alpha stage and we’re now entering the final stretch of polishing, tweaking, bug-fixing and making it as fun as possible. Thanks for your continued patience – I know this was going to be a Summer release and its certainly not summer any more, but I hope the extra time we are taking will result in a better game 
You can find regular updates, screenshots and trailers, at the ngmoco Rolando site.
I’m going to be talking at this years Creative Quarter at the V&A in London, an event for 13-19 year olds to find out a bit more about a variety of creative industries. I’ll be talking a little bit about Rolando, showing some background on how it got started, and talking about the indie game development process (well at least my own version of it!).
If you’re at school and want to find out more about everything from architecture to fashion design, it looks like its going to be a great event. Theres more information here.
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