Well, I woke up yesterday to a surprise. MZR had been in review for the last six days and got approved by Apple yesterday morning.

As I hadn’t put a release date, it automatically got released on the App Store.

You can find it here: MZR on the App Store

You can download it and play it for FREE! Seriously, do it now.

If you are a journalist and want to talk to us about it. Checkout out the MZR press-kit

Why free?

Before today Funky Circuit had four games on the App Store, some of them (the ones I didn’t design) are really damn good games. They are games that matter. Games that teach something, games that have something to give to the world.

Those games before MZR were also games that tried to make money in some way. It’s only fair. We [the Funky Circuit people] put our work and resources into it and we wanted to get something back. Each game followed a different business model – one would be free with content in-app-purchases, another one would be paid, another free-with-ads, etc. We wanted to try things.

As some of you know, MZR was a solo project. I wanted to make something that’s completely me. Something simple, cool, fun. In many ways MZR is a lot more pure time-waster-entertainment than any of the other Funky Circuit games. It’s just cool, nothing else. I could argue that it teaches you how to find the shortest route in a maze but that’s just an afterthought.

Finally, getting downloads on the App Store is really difficult. Especially without a dedicated marketing effort or the indie equivalent of extreme networking at events and social media.

So, having that in mind I wanted to make it really simple to download and play this game. I want as many players to try it. No barriers to entry, no payment, nothing. At this point people playing MZR is more important than MZR making me any money whatsoever. If numbers grow big that may change – there are server costs involved. But for now it’s all free.

What happens to this blog now?

I will continue posting here. Technical stuff and occasional design post. I have several posts half written, but it is very difficult to both develop a game and write a blog in the same spare time… maybe now I’ll have more time.

I see this as the MZR supplement that is contributing something to the world, other than just being cool 🙂

So watch this space.

And download MZR at: http://bit.ly/MZR_Game

See you next time.