It was but two weeks ago that Dots, the highly addictive connect-the-dots-style betaworks-backed game, migrated the app to the iPad and added multiplayer support. Today, however, the company has a brand new update that may address some of your woes on the iPad.
The update lets users zoom to 1.5X or 3X the game view, so that the gameboard and the dots fill out more, or all, of the screen real estate on the bigger iPad.
“When we first pushed the iPad app, we thought that people would want to play the game at the same size that it was on the iPhone,” said Patrick Moberg, co-founder. “But we soon realized that our users had been playing Dots for iPhone at 2X mode (zoomed) on the iPad, and that they wanted the same blown-up experience with the iPad version of the app.”
Clearly, the Dots/betaworks team is ready to iterate as quickly as possible to keep up momentum.
When the app first launched on May 1st, I called it the most beautiful mobile game I’d ever seen. Matt joined in the chorus, and in a week’s time, a million other people had downloaded the app too.
And just as Paul Murphy explains in the interview, Dots cares much more about engagement than user acquisition, which is good news considering the app has seen well over 300 million games played.
And surely acquisition, as well as engagement, must be growing as the gamemaker introduced multiplayer mode. However, that’s not to say the new multiplayer functionality is without its flaws. As it stands now, users must pass and play from a single device. Both users play the exact same board, as opposed to leaving anything to the luck of the draw.
As Greg points out in his post, this alone makes the game that much more competitive and addictive, but there’s still room to grow. Moberg didn’t go into too much detail, but did explain that the team is thinking more and more about how to improve multiplayer mode in a way that doesn’t just copy other games out there, but does it in an entirely different way.
The update is available now on the App Store.