I have a shocking confession to make, I am coding Freeman on a Mac!

There, I said it. Problem is I am the only one in the team that even has a Mac which means I have to bite the bullet and make a PC build for the other guys so that they can work with it too. Good thing about this is that it means straight from day one we have a Mac and PC version of the game so no conversion step at the end and we can have a multiple-sku release. I hate it that I usually have to wait for the Mac version of a game gets made so this is not going to happen to Freeman. In fact chances are if you are a Mac user then Mac demo versions of the game will be ready quicker than a PC version

The downside of cross-platform development is that there is always some small issue of the game that just damn refuses to build on the PC. At the moment it's some of the file system stuff. Grrrrrrr.

I finished off the Power Move code and submitted a new build to Apple to be put on sale on iTunes. Hopefully they won't take long to review it and it will be on sale to new people soon and available as an upgrade to those who have already bought it.

The next milestone for Koan is to integrate OpenFeint so that you can tell all your friends about your newest high-score.

At the back of my mind when making Koan was this idea of introducing 'Power Moves' at some point but at the time I hadn't fully figured out how they should work so they didn't make it into the initial release. However, I've figured it out now and coming soon to a free update of Koan are POWER MOVES!

So how do Power Moves work?

Inside the 5x5 grid of beads hide special bonus points that can only be unlocked by moving through the grid in a special way and once you do it you unlock the bonus points. Some of them are small and others are huge. Of course the trade off is the loss of territory to the number of points gained. I've been testing them out for a little while now and it adds a whole new dimension of fun of the game. So watch this space, Power Moves coming soon!