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San Francisco is hosting a “Worldwide Developers Conference” for people who make Mac software or iPhone apps.  I went to a party this evening, my first time attending a party since I started working on iPhone apps.  It’s fun to mingle with people in this business – there are a lot of hardworking creative minds working to make the best of these magical devices.

I tell people “I work on Touch Pets” and many folks know what I’m talking about!  Some of them tell me, “I play that game with my kids” and that just warms my heart.  Trans-generational gaming fulfills some of the greatest potential for human media, bringing people together on a common play field!

Today we did some press interviews.  I wore a suit and tie to give our Cats the respect they deserve.  Many of the journalists we spoke to were fans of Touch Pets Dogs!  It was fun to show them the progress we’ve made on Cats.  It was also fun to know how much more we’ll be able to improve the game before it goes live.  Just a few months to make the game, so each month counts!

Too bad I still can’t talk about Touch Pets Cats with anyone – we’re keeping the game a secret until later in June, so we don’t announce ourselves too soon before we’re ready to go live on the App store.

Yesterday we visited Stumptown Game Machine.  Wake up at 4.30am, and hit my bed at midnight.  One day, there and back, from San Francisco to Portland.  It’s strange to commute to another city.  Fortunately the Stumptown Game Machine team is extremely mellow, friendly, and motivated.  And we all have Touch Pets Cats in common!  Sitting there, I could hear game “meows” coming out of every computer in the office.

There’s a demo of our games at Apple Thursday, so I had to replace the old game loading screen with something featuring less dogs.  Andrew Stern from Stumptown Game Machine made the old loading screen when we first started making the new game; I saved a copy of it here: it represents the punk Cats takeover spirit we started the project with :-)

We release games that aren’t finished.  No online social game is ever finished.  A big part of releasing games-in-progress is getting good stats integrated with the game.  So when people start playing Touch Pets Cats, we want to know which furniture people are buying, how many cats people want to adopt, what time of day they play – all things that will help us understand how to deepen and improve the game experience.

Today is a deep dive on stats.  We’re sitting down with the stats experts at ngmoco and the engineers working on Touch Pets Cats to make sure that our game will report back the right information in a timely fashion.

We’re approaching Alpha here on Touch Pets Cats, which means we get to see the game take huge leaps in a short amount of time. Major features and improvements are coming online, the result of weeks of work and processes we set in motion months ago.

Stumptown Game Machine now has a Lead Artist, Shaun Pendergast, who is helping give Cats a fresh look. Cats is built on top of some Touch Pets Dogs technology, and now with Shaun’s help, we’ve been able to evolve the look of pet simulators on the iPhone.

The Stumptown engineering team has been working with Rough Cookie in the Netherlands to build some social obligation between players.

We’ve been working hard on the personalization side of Touch Pets Cats, so players can decorate and customize their homes. We want players to visit eachother’s homes, to see the cat playlands their friends have built. But we don’t just want a tour, we want some gameplay in there.

At the heart of Touch Pets Cats is a light physical play with your cat. Touching your screen, you can pet, pick up and groom your cat. You can also tilt your phone to fly birds or roll around mice. Toss a ball by flicking your finger.

Those are all fun things to do, and you can earn XP for doing them. In addition we wanted to include gameplay tied to the contents of your house. So we made each piece of furniture store tokens. Tap on the things in your rooms, and you reveal their treasures. Then, team up with your cat to harvest the results!