Turf insider February 2013

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First round of 2013

Turf Wiki, the 5 million man, two million takeovers and more!

As usual we have great news, both ingame and around it! Also I'm very happy to present an interview with Mr Turf himself, Drassen :-)

Results of round 31[edit]

Round 31 came to an end today and yet again we have a winner from the city of Västerås: Fiskelasse, who stubbornly battled the snow, ice and cold to lay hands on the Gold medal. In the hunt he managed to make around 4 000 takeovers and the final score added up to over 700 000 points. Impressive indeed, congratulations! In second place, a former winner makes another great performance in Linköping probably taking his own zone MazarinCastle a few times :-) Bronze goes to another well known turfer, Toubkal, who yet again showed us how the Turf in Jönköping still goes strong, finishing at just above 400 000 points. A big congratulation to all the medalists!:-)

Misc news[edit]

In all the snow and darkness of winter another great Turf milestone came and passed, the two millionth takeover! At 8:19:44 in the morning of January 16th Trysse wrote him/herself into the history books by taking it. Exciting indeed, do we make it to 5 million this year? Who knows :-)

For the first time in Turf history a turfer has reached 5 million points! Of course this was achieved by thunell, who also managed to get the medal for 25 000 takeovers in the process. I take my hat off :-)

Turf was yet again mentioned in an article, this time in one of Sweden largest newspapers Göteborgsposten. Great fun!

If you go and have a look at turfgame.com you will find a brand new Turf wiki being created! Here we will gather all relevant information about everything regarding Turf. The best thing is that anyone can help, so if you feel like contributing dont be shy :-)

Finally we are proud to present the last nordic country to get Turf status: Iceland! As of now Turf is live in this fantastic island and I promise you many nice experiences if you are planning a trip there! With Iceland on the Turf map, we now can focus on some of the larger countries in Europe. Exciting times ahead of us indeed :-)

An interview with a developer[edit]

Name Andreas (Drassen) Age 29 City Stockholm/Karlskrona

First obvious question: How did you guys come up with the idea of Turf and how did it all start?

  • Back in 2005-2006, before the smartphone-boom, we had an idea about triangulating phone signals to get a position. And then use that position to make some sort of king of the hill game. Later on when the technology took a huge leap forward, it was time to start the process.

When you first came up with the idea for the game, how did that idea look?

  • Not at all like today. We tried some concepts that differed a lot from what we can see today. One idea was to divide the entire world into a grid of zones, so that zones were everywhere. A very interesting process that has given us a lot of guidance when new problems has arisen. Here is an old concept image that i just found btw: old image
Turf-concept01.jpg

Did you expect that lots of people would use Turf as an exercise tool?

  • No. The most insane thing i've heard was that one person lost 28 kilos in 2 months of turfing. Would be nice if developing the game had the same effect on us:)

Could you even imagine that turfers after a couple of years would grind up to 5 000 zones in a round in order to win?

  • Definitely not. But we started to see the potential of the game quite early after the first release, when Eddyueue roamed the streets at night using inlines.

What's the most rewarding thing about developing Turf?

  • Seeing users actually want to play your game was an unbelievable kick in the beginning. Nowadays it’s pretty awesome to hear stories from users playing the game. Solving issues and making the community happy is also quite awesome.

How much time do you spend on developing?

  • Nowadays the job on my behalf is more organizing, marketing and planning. But i'd say pure development still average 1hour/day for myself. (For those of you who didn’t already know, Turf is made by volunteers on our spare time.)

If you look into the past, what feature and/or bug fix etc was your favorite?

  • Making the game cope with much bigger amounts of users is something i believe has been of huge importance to the game. I can’t take any credit, but it was sure needed when new users flooded the game:)

If you look into the future, what is the most exciting new thing to come?

  • I strongly believe that getting a limited iphone version to app-store is very important to the game. Saying “only on android” has proven to close lots of doors and opportunities through the years. Concerning features, we are looking at some interesting ideas on how to play co-op.

How do you think Turf will continue to grow and evolve over the next couple of years?

  • I believe the newborn “competition” from google will help lift the entire genre to a new level which will benefit us all. More generally speaking, we aim towards making the concept of Turf time-proof. Even if android and iOS cease to exist, we believe that the specific zones and the Turf-gameplay can continue onto other platforms. Adapting to AR-glasses and such will be very interesting indeed.

What's your best turf memory?

  • Seeing someone we didn’t know take the first zone ever via the app. Quite a feeling.

What's your favorite ingame medal?

What's your favorite zone?

Aswesome, thanks Drassen :-)


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As always, I will remind us all to go check out our forum forum.turfgame.com and our stats avaiable at warded.se/turf! And of course the brand new Turf Wiki wiki.turfgame.com :-)

Happy turfing and don't forget to make a small detour for that extra zone!

Blabert, Sweden