Pocket God

Pocket God
File:SpiderIcon512x512.jpg Barking Spider,Crouching Pygmy
Developer(s)	Bolt Creative
Publisher(s)	Bolt Creative
Platform(s)	iPod Touch, iPhone
Genre(s)	God game
Mode(s)	Single-player

Pocket God is a game for the iPhone/iPod Touch developed by Bolt Creative. It was programmed by Dave Castelnuovo and it was designed by Allan Dye. Pocket God was originally released on January 9, 2009, Pocket God has been in the App Store's Top 100 Charts since its release .. The app costs 99 cents.

Pocket God is a smaller version of a god game, meaning that the player takes the role of an omnipotent being who rules over an island and controls everything present. The primitive islanders, known as Pygmies, are subject to the player's god powers. These range from summoning a hurricane to levitating the Pygmies. Some powers are docile, however, such as giving the islanders a rod for catching fish. Built-in features of the iPod touch and iPhone OS are used, such as the accelerometers to simulate gravity and earthquakes. Most of these features can be toggled on the games menu bar. The "March of the Fire Ants" update also added a new feature known as OpenFeint where players can access chat rooms, leaderboards, and announcements during gameplay. The episode "A New Home" added a slightly larger second island to the game. This island contains an outhouse for the Pygmies. Players can toggle between islands from the menu bar. In the update "Dead Pygmy Walking", a new, larger Graveyard Themed island was added, when you bury a pygmy, it becomes a zombie. It eats the brains of the other pygmys, and if you tap the screen, the zombies perform a dance based on Michael Jackson's Thriller.

Pocket God then started to release updates that would feature additional content in the form of mini-games. The Fun n' Games until A Pygmy Gets Hurt update added mini-games for consecutive coconut bounces, consecutive shark snaps, underwater skewer, pygmy bowling, and hurricane zaps. The Flipping the Bird update added a mini-game that involves a dodo bird. In one mini-game, the player pokes the bird to drop bird bombs on the pygmies. There's also a mini-game in which the player has to drop the most feces consecutively without missing as possible. The bird will go after caught fish (but can catch a pgymy if one is holding the fish). The birds can also be cooked and hit by lightning. The Ooga Jump update added the first mini-game which is basically Doodle Jump where the player can drag the Pygmy over the cloud line and tilt the iPod to hit clouds and elavate higher into the sky. In the Bait Master update, there are piranhas which come when the anchor is picked and dropped to the ground. The player can draw a line from the piranha to the pygmy to make the piranha eat the pygmy. When two piranhas collide, the game is over. In the Idle Hands 2: Caught With Your Pants Down update they added more idle features to the Pygmies when they are not in use. Also, Buddy Challenges were implemented with OpenFeint. In the Good Will Haunting update, a DLC store was added with skins for the T-Rex.Dave and Allain say they will continue updating the DLC store, allowing customisation of the Doodler, the Volcano, and the Tree, as well as many others.

Episodes

Pocket God is frequently updated with new 'episodes'. Each update releases a new feature. The episodes as of November 2,2009 are:

Episodes
Episode Number	Version Number	Release	Episode title	Features
1	1.0	01/09/09	Nowhere To Go, Nothin' To Do	Pocket god came out and in this new game you flick and levitate the Pygmies, as well as throwing them into the water.
2	1.1	01/14/09	Does this Megabyte Make My App Look Fat?	Several updates to the game engine.
3	1.2	01/20/09	You Always Hurt the One You Lava	Added a volcano which you can flick Pygmies into. After three hits, the volcano will erupt sending magma onto the island,and the pygmys will go on fire,jump into the water and then they will drown.
4	1.3	01/29/09	Shake That App!	Added gravity features allowing Pygmies to be slid across the screen and into the water. You can also create an earthquake by shaking the device.
5	1.4	02/05/09	A Storm is Coming	Added storm clouds and lightning which can electrocute the Pygmies.
6	1.5	02/14/09	And on the 7th Day, Rest!	Ability to change between Day and Night.
7	1.6	02/20/09	Just Give Us 5 Minutes	Added the ability to make the Pygmies dance by tapping the screen. The boulder was also added.
8	1.7	02/26/09	Jump the Shark	Added a shark to the ocean which can eat the Pygmies.
9	1.8	03/06/09	Idle Hands	Added top menu and more gravity functionality. Added more idle animations to the Pygmies.
10	1.9	03/15/09	Hi, Dracula!	Added the ability to tap the moon and unleash a vampire bat which turns Pygmies into vampires who knock other Pygmies off the island. It is destroyed at daytime. Also added an eclipse with the boulder and sunrise - hold the boulder over the sun.
11	1.10	03/24/09	A Mighty Wind	Added the ability to create a hurricane which can hurl the Pygmies around the island and drop them in the ocean.
12	1.11	04/01/09	Something Fishy...	Added a fishing rod and fish to catch and eat. Also added OpenFeint, an iPhone social network with chat rooms and leader-boards. Dave and Allan released this on April Fool's Day, because they had programmed in a joke saying that the player had purchased the lite version, please go to the app store and buy the proper pocket god for $4.99.
13	1.12	04/08/09	March of the Fire Ants	Added an anthill and magnifying glass to the island. It allows you to burn the Pygmies and release the man-eating ants.
14	1.13	04/17/09	Say my Name!	Added the ability to name the Pygmies and tribe. It also allows you to see exactly how many times you sacrificed a Pygmy and how many gifts you gave them.
15	1.14	04/28/09	A New Home	Added a new island to explore that contains an outhouse, as well as a mysterious dinosaur egg.
16	1.15	05/08/09	The Tyrannosaurus Strikes Back!	When player drops the egg three times, a Tyrannosaurus Rex appears and begins eating the Pygmies. Also, the Moai statue is changed to an octopus god statue and a story about the islands background included that you can read if you press the help button.
17	1.16	05/19/09	Return of the Pygmy	The Pygmies now get to have a spear. You can give the Pygmies a spear to fight off the Tyrannosaurus Rex. There is a health bar at the bottom of the screen and once it is emptied (by hitting the T-Rex with the spear) the T-Rex will fall into the water. There are also buttons for toggling the outhouse functionality and cracking the T-Rex egg. Also, an easter egg was added so that if players press the octopus god statue a few times in rapid succession, the Pygmies that are currently on the island are vaporized and the statue mumbles 'You Know You Like Pocket God'. A god statistic screen is revealed, but doesn't save users changes due to a small glitch. The game is upgraded to iPhone OS 2.2.1
18	1.17	06/01/09	Surf's Up!	Generate a tsunami by pushing the water from side to side. This opens up a new underwater area with a new danger. A mysterious statue protects ancient ruins. Tap the statue and release a deadly spear that skewers the Pygmies. Push the water down to return to any Island. The new god stat screen is fixed and allows users to change their god type and shows user their achievements. Due to complaints the game is downgraded to iPhone OS 2.2
19	1.18	06/17/09	Fun n' Games until A Pygmy Gets Hurt	Pocket God now includes achievements that turn some pocket god activities into mini-games. The achievements are; consecutive coconut bounces, consecutive shark snaps, underwater skewer, pygmy bowling and hurricane zaps. Now, to move water or sky you need to use two fingers. This will avoid accidentally triggering the tsunami or accidentally changing the weather. This was also a cleanup update to correct many glitches and optimize animations.
20	1.19	07/03/09	Stop! My App Is On Fire!	This update gives the pygmies wood to make a fire so they can cook fish and warm themselves. The wood will drop from the sky and the pygmies will carry it over to a bonfire. When all wood pieces are there hit it with lightning and it will catch on fire. You can roast a fish over the fire (so our little buddies can have some dinner) and players can also burn it. Giving the burnt fish to a pygmy will make the pygmy choke and fall into the water. Players can also cook pygmies so that they turn rock-hard. Players can then slap the other pygmies with the marshmallowed pygmy. A new background is added for the area under the sea. The two fingered sky and water movement controls are reverted to one finger controls after technical difficulties arising from the two finger system. ( A lot of people thought that Pocket would stop updating after this. )
21	1.20	07/09/09	Flipping the Bird	The island has a new visitor, a flying Dodo bird. Poke the bird to drop bird bombs on the pygmies. There's also a mini-game in which the player has to drop the most feces consecutively without missing as possible. The bird will go after caught fish (but can catch a pygmy if one is holding the fish). The birds can also be cooked and struck by lightning. Achievements are now recorded in Feint and a whirlpool and more fauna animations are added into the underwater area.
22	1.21	07/24/09	Ooga Jump	This update has the first ever proper game in Pocket God. It is similar to Doodle Jump.(even the name is similar, Ooga jump When you Drag a pygmy over the cloud line and drop him, he bounces off the cloud and is propelled up into the sky. In the sky, there are 4 types of clouds: a normal cloud which bounces the pygmy further into the air, a thundercloud which lights a pygmy on fire and shoots him even higher up, an ice cloud which freezes a pygmy and prevents him from jumping as high, and a fake cloud which disappears when you try to jump on it. If you fail to hit a cloud, the pygmy falls back down to the island and is squished like a pancake. New achievements were also added in this update.
23	1.22	08/05/09	Bait Master	This update is a cross over with Harbor Master and adds a new mini game to the underwater scene. When you pick up and drop the anchor that is on the ocean floor, piranha begin to enter the screen from the left and right to eat floating Pygmies. When the piranha are full from eating, you give them a path to take them back off screen. As Pygmies are eaten, you must keep adding more. The more Piranhas you feed, the faster they arrive. Game play is similar to Flight Control. The goal is to guide the piranhas and keep them away from each other as you lead them to their dinner, and then back off the screen. The twist is that you may move the Pygmies as well as the piranhas. This update also adds two improvements to Ooga Jump: you will no longer end up in a situation where there are no possible jumps, and the doodlers appear sooner, and only one at a time.
24	1.23	08/19/09	Idle Hands 2: Caught With Your Pants Down	This update adds more idle features to the Pygmies when they are not in use. Also they are implementing Buddy Challenges through Feint. The new idle features are as follows The Pygmies' skirts falling down showing underpants, sneezing, a thought bubble with some kind of food in it (cooked fish, cooked bird, coconut, etc.), pulling their bones out of their hair and their hair falling down over their face causing the pygmy to put his hair back up and beating their chest like Tarzan. Due to some coding errors, this version of Pocket God did not work on certain iPod Touches & iPhones running iPhone OS 2.1s and 2.2s, due to this problem Bolt Creative replaced the update with the previous update "Bait Master". The next update was later released as a combination of Ep. 24 and Ep. 25.
25	1.24	09/02/09	Sharks with Frickin' Laser-beams Attached to their Heads	There is a chum bucket underwater and you have to pick it up and pour chum out of it and a shark with a laser beam on its head comes on screen and can shoot pygmies using the accelerometer and can also eat them. There is also the option to have the Bait Master anchor or the chum bucket and a button to go to the underwater area from the menu. The title is a reference to Austin Powers.
26	1.25	09/17/09	Dead Pygmy Walking	Dave said they have an idea of a new location, the new area is located to the right of the t-rex island that contains the Pygmy Graveyard. There is a tree with a spider web and a grave that you can use to take a pygmy and bury him alive. Then the ancient seal on the grave causes the Pygmy to come back as a Zombie who proceeds to eat the brains of the other Pygmies on the island (which turns them into Zombies as well). There are two new sacrifices Brains Eaten and Buried alive, and one new gift Gift of Zombie dance. When you make the zombies dance, they do the "Thriller." If you touch a zombie, they disintegrate into blue ashes.
27	1.26	10/06/09	Good Will Haunting	Good Will Haunting is the title for the second part of the Horror Trilogy of episodes. It beat other titles such as "Pygmiegeist" and "An App Full of Boo" to become the 27th episode title. Now ghosts have arrived to haunt our little islanders. Ghosts are created when any Pygmy dies on the island. The ghosts can possess a pygmy, scare it to death, pick up a Pygmy and carry it away, pull a pygmy into the ghost dimension, and do a banshee scream that will burst the eardrums of the pygmies. To get rid of a ghost, drag him into "the light." Also players can now enjoy extras from new downloadable content that will be added to the game. DLC(Donloadable Content) has been added to help continue the funding for the app which has been downloaded over 1.2 million times. As a result of DLC Pocket God will only be compatible with 3.0 and higher firmware, so users still using 2.XX will be required to update their iDevice firmware before they can continue to use the app. There will be DLC features for the T-Rex, like new skins, tattoos, and hats. One of the skins can be see here.
28	1.27	10/28/09	Barking Spider, Crouching Pygmy	In the graveyard, a giant spider was added. Pygmies can be eaten by the spider, or put in the spiderweb where the mother spider puts the pygmy in a cocoon to be fed to the spider babies. You can also fight the spider with the spear, a different strategy is needed than with the T-Rex. Halloween themed skins for the DLC was added to give a halloween theme to many items around the island,such as the volcano,the dodo bird,the meteor,and even the Doodler from Doodle Jump. They made the name "Barking Spider" very litteral,they made the spider bark like a dog when it is about to eat a Pygmy and whines when it is hit with a spear.
29	1.28	11/22/09	The Pyg Chill	The Pyg Chill is the fist of a trilogy of ice updates as you could tell by the title of this episode, Dave and Allan are giving us "A location a lot of us have been asking for." They are going to add an iceburg island. It is also believed that there will be penguins on this iceberg island and a temperature changing feature. Check the Pocket Blog for more details the website is pocketgod.blogspot.com. (Actual release date may vary).
30	1.29	TBD	TBA	The second of the ice trilogy.
31	1.30	TBD	TBA	The third of the ice trilogy.

Contests

Wallpaper Contest

Bolt Creative ran a contest to design the best Pocket God desktop wallpaper between March 19 and April 5, 2009. They received around 300 entries and picked the top 5. The main prize was a limited edition islander figure with 4 runners up receiving T-shirts. Entries were posted on Pocket Gods Facebook site and on its flickr site. Entries had to be 1680 x 1050 with a Pocket God theme and with a limit of 3 entries per person. Entries also had to include the logo and that Pocket God is for the iPhone and iPod Touch for 99 cents on iTunes, they also had to be saved in png format. The overall winner was Victor Villanueva with a poster depicting an islander as almost human with an iPhone in its hand playing pocket god. On March 19, 2009 the official Pocket God website announced that there will be a new Wallpaper contest. The rules are similar to the first one and the winner will get the first Pocket god toy.

Idle Hands 2 Contest

On July 29, 2009 on the official Pocket God website it was announced that there was going to be another clean-up update but to make it more fun they said that they would run another contest. In this contest people emailed Pocket God creators (up to) 5 suggestions on how the pygmies act when they are idle (when you aren't playing with them). They picked their favorite 5 suggestions and included them in the next update. Also they also picked their favorite and put it on the logo (e.g the icon). The new idle features are as follows The Pygmies' skirts falling down showing underpants (Liam "saintsalive"'s winning idle), sneezing (Seth Horinouchi's idle), a thought bubble with some kind of food in it (cooked fish, cooked bird, coconut, etc. - Brandon and Derek's idle), pulling their bones out of their hair and their hair falling down over their face causing the pygmy to put his hair back up (Sam Greenwood's idle) and beating their chest like Tarzan (Adam Jaffe's idle).

Twitter Yer Picture Contest

The Twitter Yer Picture with Pocket God on Yer iPod Contest (more commonly known as the Twitter Yer Picture Contest) involved contestants taking pictures of themselves playing Pocket God in creative places. The three winners were "FernyTheBomb", "Dylan_Johnson" and "MalcomJudd". They each won a third generation 64GB iPod Touch.

Reception

Pocket God has gotten ratings that ranged from generally positive reviews to universal acclaim. iTune App Reviews gave the game 5 out of 5 stars. AppStruck gave the game 5 out of 5 stars referring to the game as "endlessly amusing and is an easy way to completely lose track of time". iPhone App Reviews gave the updated version of the game 4.8 out of 5 having given the original version 3.92 out of 5 Appvee gave the game 4 out of 5 after episode 11 was released, having originally given the game 1.8 out of 5.

Controversy

The game was subject to controversy when some Pacific islanders and anthropologists protested to Apple Inc. that the game was racist. However the game's creators defended the game saying 'it depicts no specific race or nationality'. Pocket God's programmer Dave Castelnuovo got in touch with one of the original Pacific Islanders and came up with some compromises. The first one being a name change from pygmies/islanders to Oogs and another being the Moai statue being replaced with a statue of an Octopus God. On May 27, 2009, Dave Castelnuovo announced that the characters would no longer be called Oogs, as 'Pygmies' was a more suitable name and didn't cause any friction between Pacific Islanders.

In Other Apps

Doodle Jump

On May 22, 2009, a new version of Doodle Jump was released allowing users to unlock 'Pygmies' from Pocket God. To unlock the secret 'Pygmy' from Pocket God, you must change the high score name to one of the characters from Pocket God. They are: Ooga, Booga, Nooby, Dooby, Klik or Klak. Also see Pocket God episode 22 Ooga Jump for the Pocket God version of the crossover.

The Creeps!

On July 3, 2009, an update was released in the Super Squark Software game The Creeps! that allows pocket god characters. To get the Pocket God Pygmies on "The Creeps!", a player must go to the Credits Page on the Main Page. After 30 settp://pocketgod.blogspot.com/2009/06/pygmies-terrorize-world-of-creeps.html Pocket God in The Creeps!]</ref>

Harbor Master

Imangi studios' Harbor Master episode 'Pocket God Attacks' allowed players to unlock swimming pygmies inplace of the normal boats. To unlock this players must hold down the Harbour Master logo for at least 3 seconds Also see Pocket God episode 23 for the Pocket God version of the crossover.

Relevant App

Pocket Devil

Main article: Pocket Devil

There is now also another application available on the iPhone App Store called Pocket Devil.
Pocket Devil is a similar game to Pocket God, One of the differences is that you control devils (in Pocket God: Pygmy's) in hell (In Pocket God: On an island).
Like Pocket God, Pocket Devil started with some few features, but that will change over time.

Sequels

According to the Pocket God Blog, the developers of Pocket God, have "about ten ideas for standalone Pocket God games". They also noted that even if sequels are developed, Pocket God will still receive updates, but at a slower rate. Also mentioned on the blog was that the developers were in talks to bring Pocket God to other platforms.

External links

• Pocket God App Store
• Pocket God Developers Blog
• Pocket God Twitter
• Pocket God Facebook
• Pocket God Youtube page
• Bolt Creative Homepage
• Pocket God Forums