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With the release of the greatly updated but still best game engine in the world, Unity 2.0, we felt we needed to update all of our famous widgets ... so we've done just that! Not only have we updated the widgets, we've optimized some code to make them more stable and faster, and have also reduced their file size by almost one-third.
The updated versions of our widgets including Banana Warehouse, Widget Giraffe, Monkey Marbles, and our world-famous Widget Monkey are now available on the free widgets page. So grab the latest versions today!
Ron and David (aka the chief monkeys) are finally ready to announce that development on the Widget Monkeys' upcoming stand-alone game Banana Warehouse 2 game is well underway!
Banana Warehouse 2 is a complete mini-game based on our popular Banana Warehouse widget, and will feature all the cool things we've been talking about for the past, uh, long time. Three difficulty levels, fabulous music and sound effects, online high scores, updated graphics and high-res 3D models, dynamic lighting, fully functional forklift (yes, the forks will raise/lower and tip!), new camera views (including a driver view), and much more.
Banana Warehouse 2 will be the first of a series of minigames based on the fun gameplay we've established in our well-regarded widgets. Other games in the series will include a forklift racing game, a first-person "gather the bananas" race, and a game featuring ships, cranes and crates of bananas. Future versions of our games may even feature online multiplayer action!
Banana Warehouse 2 will be built using the best game engine in the world, Unity 2.0. Watch for a release of Banana Warehouse 2 in the very late fall of 2007.
Once again, Apple has honoured the Widget Monkeys by selecting (again!) Banana Warehouse as their Featured widget and also Staff Favourite. Banana Warehouse has also climbed to the very top of Apple's Top 50 list, currently sitting at #1 (June 3, 2007).
And if that wasn't exciting enough, we have a total of three widgets in the top 50 ... we were sitting at #1 (Banana Warehouse), #18 (WidgetGiraffe), and #30 (Monkey Marbles) as of early June 2007.
The improved version of Banana Warehouse now lets you choose from a Normal level (80 seconds), or an Easy level (120 seconds) that now offers you more opportunity to push those crates into the right spots and see that elusive Win! screen. We're really excited that we've caught the attention of the really big bananas in Cupertino again, and thank them for taking another look at Banana Warehouse.
You can download the latest version of Banana Warehouse, and all of our other widgets, from the free Widgets page.
The head monkeys have got a crateful of news today ... but the big banana has to be the huge update to our most-downloaded widget, Banana Warehouse. What's new you ask? Two different difficulty levels! That's right, we've had a number of requests over the last 18 months to increase the 75 seconds and/or provide an easier version. So we did!
The Banana Warehouse widget now lets you choose from a Normal level (80 seconds), or an Easy level (120 seconds) that now offers you more opportunity to push those crates into the right spots and see that elusive Win! screen. There are a number of code simplifications you won't see but we've made Banana Warehouse even better for you!
And as mentioned in a previous news item, the Widget Monkeys have updated all four of our world-famous widgets using the latest version of Unity. That's Widget Monkey, Widget Giraffe, Monkey Marbles and Banana Warehouse. The update has improved their stability and added some under-the-hood tweaks. Enjoy!
You can download the latest versions from the free Widgets page.
Ron and David (aka the chief monkeys) are finally ready to announce that we have begun serious work on a full Banana Warehouse game! Really! Ron has created a new forklift model, and has created a model of a warehouse (perhaps level 1?) to allow us to test the full game mechanics and coding we'll need. And those mechanics and coding? Done! (Well, 90% anyway.) That's right Banana Warehouse fans, I have every single line of cocde written, functioning and tested for movement, lifting and tipping forks, crates, conveyors, lighting, online scoring, multiple levels, etc. The whole carton of bananas as it were!
It's taken between 60 and 70 hours to get it to this state and there are a few very minor edits that need to be done but we're finally making good progress towards a Banana Warehouse game. No promises as to date but hopefully later this year.
Additionally, we are heading for the half-million mark for downloads! Wow, and we thought less than two years ago maybe a few dozen of our friends would like these things. Widget Monkey widgets remain popular on Apple's site and are still be downloaded at the rate of between 20-30,000 every month. We passed 450,000 at the end of April and sometime this summer will surpass 500,000. Thanks everyone!
Ron and David are pleased to announce that we were asked to create a custom mini-game for a client in the United Kingdom. Storage Equipment Safety Service (SESS) approached us to create a fun, simply to play game demo for tradeshows and their clients. The game featured three levels of difficulty, realistic physics, full 3D environment, and online scoring using a MySQL database.
In spite of a short deadline, developing the initial structure, and unforseen family commitments that popped up during development, we were able to deliver a functioning demo on the date required and a polished game a few days later. Their response? "Wonderful."
Want us to make a custom game for your or your firm? Looking for a cool way to promote your brand and provide entertainment to business partners, customers and friends? Contact us and ask about our custom game development services.
The chief monkeys are toying with the idea (sorry for the "toying" pun) of creating a new widget in the coming months. Sure to be another popular addition to our line we'll be starting on it as time permits. No details yet though about exactly what it might be ... can't spoil the surprise now can we?
Widget updates are coming! The last time I updated the code and rebuilt our widgets Unity was back almost a full point version (1.5). Now that Unity is up to version 1.62 it's time that we updated the widgets again to ensure maximum stability and performance. The monkeys will get those posted to the usual places (and update the actual linked files) soon now.
While we admit that it's continued to be quiet here on the "new stuff" front, we continue to be amazed at the rate that our humble little widgets get downloaded. At the end of December 2006, we surpassed the 327,000 mark and were stunned to review our site traffic logs and see that from October through the end of December downloads of each of our four widgets (and wallpapers too) actually increased each month!
Our widgets remain really popular; in December alone visitors downloaded Banana Warehouse more than 9,000 times! Many thanks to our supporters and to all of you who find that our widgets bring fun and games to their desktops!
We hope to at least bring you all a new widget or two this year, and perhaps even move forward towards our goal of releasing a full game. To all our families, friends and site visitors, all the best in the coming year! Keep watching this space for more news soon!
You heard right! All of our famous WidgetMonkey widgets have been updated to run on Apple's fancy new Intel-based Macs, as well as on their previous PPC chips. We posted the news in the usual places in the jungle we call the Internet ... Apple, Macupdate, MacGameFiles, Softpedia and lots more so head on over to the Widgets page and download the latest versions off the tree.
You may have noticed nothing much has been happening with our plans to bring a full, standalone game version of Banana Warehouse out. It's true that work and family always take priority for the for two chief monkeys around the site here, but rest assured that we are, indeed, moving forward on bringing out a full game of Banana Warehouse at one point. We may also one or two other ideas that we're not quite ready to announce along those sames lines so stay tuned! Eep!
Is that Steve widget? In answer to the many questions we received about a Steve Jobs widget that was released by Mac Creative magazine, yes that was obviously us. We were approached by the editors to create a fun, custom widget for their readers and, being the Apple fans we are, couldn't resist suggesting a somewhat famous figure be immortalized in digital toy form to the magazine staff. The magazine publisher loved it and readers around the world did too. And then you all sent us email at the same time :-). Thanks! Want your own custom widget or Mac/PC game made? Feel free to drop us a line and we'll be happy to talk!
Finally, we want to thank our fans around the world for continuing to make our WidgetMonkey widgets some of the most popular in the whole jungle (and for writing us to tell us how much fun they have with our widgets)! We continue to download more than 10,000 widgets each and every month, and that includes our most popular and original WidgetMonkey who still gets downloaded more than 5,000 times every 30 days. Wow! We had no idea when we started this little venture that they'd become so popular. We have much more funs and games planned for you so keep dropping back for news and updates on our future releases.
The OTEE guys have recently released the best update to Unity so far, updating our favourite program to version 1.22. Unity can now save out widgets and stndalone games that work on both PPC and Intel-based Macs. Among the other significant improvements in this version are: full-screen graphics effects, render textures on materials, an improved physics engine and ragdoll wizard, professional first-person shooter controller, blob shadows, and dozens of minor updates and bug fixes. Our recent favourite? Mouse input should now work perfectly if users have USB Overdrive enabled or if you use a Wacom tablet. For more info about all the cool new features in Unity 1.22 visit the Unity site.
As of January of 2006, Softpedia has awarded all four of our popular widgets (WidgetMonkey, Monkey Marbles, Banana Warehouse and WidgetGiraffe) their 100% Clean award, assuring all of those who use our widgets that we are 100% free of adware, spyware and viruses. Visit the Softpedia website for a veritable encyclopedia of free software downloads for all platforms! We promise to always keep our widgets and shareware games free of adware, spyware and viruses because we don't like that stuff any more that you do.
The WidgetMonkeys have put out their first press release, due to a great deal of demand from media outlets (seriously). Fortunately, we know a very talented writer/editor who has done this sort of thing before and was kind enough to clean up the monkey scratches we'd made and organise it into something you'd actually want to read. This one was released to media in southern Ontario on August 31, 2005 (and was slightly updated on September 6th) and is available for download as a PDF file by clicking this link or by clicking the image of the release above. Thanks for visiting and making WidgetMonkeys so successful!
Just when we thought things we're going to get quiet in the jungle, we get an email tip that suggests we should take a look at Apple's website today. So we fire up our browsers and holy bananas!!!! Apple has granted the Widget Monkeys the very high honour of making Banana Warehouse their featured widget for four straight days (August 26-29, 2005)! We're basically freaking out here. We know that in the jungle, fame only lasts for a fleeting 15 minutes or so (or until a tiger eats you) but that doesn't mean we're not dancing around here like a bunch of crazy, well, monkeys! We sure hope our fantastic ISP Dreamhost can handle the traffic; more than 22,000 downloads of Banana Warehouse during that time. Thanks OTEE for making the utterly brilliant game creation tool Unity. You guys are the ones who deserve much of the praise.
With our new widget, Banana Warehouse complete, Ron and I were just hanging around this morning, noodling about starting work on our first under $10 shareware version of our much-downloaded WidgetMonkey widget, when we find out that David Helgason (OTEE CEO and co-founder) and Apple have paid us the huge honour of mentioning the monkeys on Apple's website! All we can say is "Eep!" Both Ron and I nearly feel out of our trees when we read the page. The brief mention failed to note what an outstanding animator, artist, 3D modeler, and "seriously simple fun" game idea guy Ron is, so we'll do it here instead. Just wait until you see what we've got coming in the future!
The OTEE guys have this week (August 15, 2005) released a huge update to Unity to version 1.1. The most significant part of the update is that owners of Unity's Pro license can now save their project files to run on (gasp!) Windows machines with no additonal work! That's right, your Unity project file can, without any modifications, be used to create Mac or PC standalone games, widgets for Apple's Dashboard, and web-based versions as well. Other major upgrades include plug-in support, fantastic updates to the shader library, scripting, editor and workflow improvements, the ability to import older Maya formats (4.5 and 5), physics updates, a cool new scripting tutorial, and numerous bug fixes. A very, very worthy update. The OTEE guys never really sleep, apparently. For more info about Unity 1.1 and previous versions, visit the Unity version history page.
Wow! We got our very first donation today (August 8th) and are, needless to say, really happy! After more than 21,000 downloads of our first two widgets we received a very generous donation from Michael J. of Florida for our work so far. We want to extend our very humble thanks to him for taking the time and his generosity, and will be sending him a personalized, free copy of our first under $10 shareware version of WidgetMonkey when it's available. We'll also add his name to the credits and our thanks to him. We're glad that he found our work enjoyable enough to donate -- again, many thanks, Michael.
So we're sitting under a banana tree at lunch the other day, when we came up with what struck us as a great idea (at least we thought so). Why not continue to offer all of our fun little WidgetMonkey widgets for free, but also offer bigger, better versions with more features, cool game-oriented goals, improved graphics, and a whole bunch more fun as standalone, full-screen Mac and PC shareware applications for those WidgetMonkey fans who are asking us for more? So that's what we'll do! We're thinking of a very reasonable less than $20 shareware fee to get your own, personalized copies of the big versions of the widgets we release, at one point in the future.
For example, we were thinking that our original WidgetMonkey application version would be improved to include a full menagerie of animals (monkey, lion, giraffe, zebra); a hidden easter egg creature; menu interface; and the cool WidgetMonkeys theme music and splash screen! Plus they'll be personalized just for you! The standalone versions will allow us to pack a lot more bananas, err, features into our WidgetMonkey toys because we won't be as restricted by download size, widget memory requirements, etc. Do you like the idea? Would you buy an enhanced version of our widgets? Send us some email and let us know!
Yeah, after tossing a number of radical ideas back and forth like so many rotten bananas, we've decided to put this little shrine to the WidgetMonkeys online. Kinda snazzy, huh? All done in CSS of course and with a doctype declaration forcing Microsoft's browser-thingy IE to behave properly. [Note to that Redmond company ... when a CSS border style says "dotted" it doesn't mean make the dots look like "dashes." Silly MS.] As usual, the site looks best in Firefox or Safari because we coded it using W3C standards. There will be frequent design changes and news posting here so bookmark us and visit often! Don't forget to look on the coming soon page for the latest bunch of ideas we are working on!
We'd be silly monkeys not to say hi to some of the smaller monkeys who keep us happy and sane and exploring the world in childlike ways. So, bunches of hellos go out to Cal, Luke, Daniel, Lindsay and Matthew from the big daddy-monkeys. And hello to our wives, Anita and Susan as well!