There’s a bunch of news on the ports and DLC front, so I thought I’d combine them all here in one big blog post.

Future iPad Updates: Starting May 1st, Apple will require all apps to support retina displays. They will not allow any more updates to games w/o retina support unless said update adds retina graphics. This won’t affect my new games going forward, however it definitely affects CSD. While the text/font support allows for sharp displays on retina, the other graphics are in the standard HD versions made for the PC. I don’t know if Apple considers this retina supported or not, but it’s a weird position to be in as a lot of devs don’t know what exactly constitutes retina compatible. So I’ll be releasing one more patch for the iPad this month, and afterwards I honestly don’t know if I’ll be allowed to do any more updates. I can’t add retina support to CSD as it would be very expensive and time consuming, and I’m ready to move on to new games. So we’ll see if Apple clarifies this in the weeks ahead.

PC and Mac ports of new DLC foods: Currently underway with a May target. This will be combined into Cook, Serve, Delicious! as something like a Special Edition, but it’ll be a free patch for all those who have already bought the game.

Linux: Once the DLC has been ported to PC/Mac, it should literally take five minutes to do a Linux port! I’ll need some beta testers who would like a free copy of the game to try on their machine and see how it runs, and more info will be available in May.

iPhone: After several weeks of trying, I’ve decided to cancel the iPhone version of Cook, Serve, Delicious. I can’t get it to run within the 256mb of memory without sacrificing a lot of game play elements, such as only allowing four foods a day instead of six, and so on.

CSD would actually work nicely on iPhone 5/iPod 5, and I considered releasing a version just for those systems with a warning in the description that it doesn’t work on 4G devices (Apple doesn’t allow you to manually restrict 4G users from buying an incompatible game). But just this last week, Little Inferno released on the iPod/iPhone with the caveat that it only works on 5G devices. The result? A ton of angry customers who didn’t read the description, drove down the rating for the HD version, and has probably made the devs lives a living hell right now. So yeah, I don’t think I’ll be doing that kind of release.

Android: The Android version was tied to the iPhone version, but I don’t want to cancel this version of the game. I’ve had a few devs warn me that there’s very little money in making an Android version of the game, but I’d still like to try and make a version for this OS. I need to get a proper Android device to test on so I’ll likely give it a shot after the PC/Mac/Linux content ports.

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So there you go, the status of CSD! Over the last few weeks I’ve been planning my next game, and I’m so excited about it that I’d love to announce it tomorrow if I had some actual screenshots of the game and not a 30 page design document. But it’s going to be another game in a genre that I feel has been woefully underserved, and it won’t be like anything else I’ve made. Should be quite fun/terrifying to make. More updates soon!