StickWars to get new challenge mode with push notification

Continuing our focus on the new Push Notification features enabled in the 3.0 OS release, we got in touch with StickWars' John Hartzog to find out what his plans are for the siege-based defence game.

"I'm creating a brand new set of challenges, which are short games (1-5 minutes long) based on the basic StickWars gameplay," he explains.

"Each one will require different strategies and sets of skills. An example is the Toss Challenge, where 100 stick figures charge your castle and you are awarded points based on how high you manage to throw them. There will be at least 5-10 challenges in the first release and I'll probably continue to keep adding more challenges as I think of them or get suggestions."

To bring extra excitement to these challenges, Hartzog is using push notification so you can compete against your friends to see who is the StickWars master. Again, as with Pocket God, he's using the OpenFeint social networking technology to enable this.

"After playing a challenge, you can chose to send a challenge to one of your friends in the Feint social network," Hartzog says.

"Because the Feint social network integrates with your Facebook and Twitter accounts, any friends who uses Feint will show up in your list, ready to battle. Also, your Feint account is tied to your device, so even if some friends don't have StickWars but do have another Feint-powered game (Pocket God, for example), they will be able to see your challenge and decide if they want to respond."

"After sending your challenge to your friend, Feint will use its push notification feature to let your buddy know that you want to fight. In this way, push notification will allow these 'turn-based' challenges to happen in real-time."

Of course, to meet your challenge, any friend who doesn't already have a copy of StickWars will have to buy one. The stats of the encounter will be saved to your Feint gamer profiles for all your friends to see.

Significantly though Hartzog says the full features of this new challenge mode will only be available as a paid-for micro-transaction pack.

"All these new features take a lot of time and money, and we all have bills to pay," he notes. "While I can't give the pricing yet, understand that I have always charged a low $0.99 for StickWars, and have no desire to try to fleece my customers."

At least, the challenges themselves will be available as a free update to the game. Only the ability to push challenges to your friends will require the micro-transaction.

The 3.0 OS update to StickWars is expected within a couple of weeks.