Category Archives: iPhone, iPad apps

Everything about iPhone and iPad

Toy Factory for iPhone in-depth guide

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Toy Factory for iPhone guide and tips.

You have come to the right place for the unofficial scoop on how to play this game. Well lets not let your imagination run wild with what this page will tell you. Quickly I will cover the following points.

Tips – how to succeed in quickly advancing in Toy Factory –with-out- purchasing rubies. Applying real world business into maximizing your profits.

Cost performance- a list of top toys to maximize your profit with the least amount of time spent.

Toy list – a list of toys in toy factory, their materials, price, cost and duration.

Material list – a list of materials in toy factory, their price, time needed and machine.

Machine list – a list of machines in toy factory and what do they make.

Toy Factory is a game build by Noritown released by Chillingo for the iPhone or iPad devices. This website is an unofficial guide to the game. All graphics belongs to Noritown and Chillingo.

Toy Factory is a very dangerous game to play. The game is extremely addictive. If you love playing sims, this is the ultimate time waster. Be prepared to waste a gazillion amount of time on it. The game is a Freenium game. It is free to buy and play. But to purchase certain ingame items you would need to use Ruby. Ruby can be purchased with real cash. Ruby can also speed up the game by making certain tasks faster. So for thoes with some spare cash, make your itunes account ready.

 

General game play

Well the game is quite easy to grasp. You are the master mind behind the toys. You are building toys with materials such as wool, wood, buttons, springs etc. You then turn around and sell those toys to people.

 

To build the toys, you first must build the materials. Each material is produced with different machines. Each material takes different amount of time and cost to make. Each player is allowed to place a limited amount of machines on the floor dictated by your level. As you level up, you will be granted more ‘space’ to place your machines.

 

After you have accumulated enough materials, you then can build your toy. The building process is instant. After the toy is built, you will then display the toy in your toy shop. Each toy shop has a limited amount of ‘space’ that you can use to display your toy. The space is also, dictated by your level. As you level up, you will be allowed to display more items.

 

Toys are not sold instantly. They take time to sell. For example, A doll is priced at $1000. The doll has a duration of 10 minutes. That means, the shop will generate $1000 over the period of 10 minutes. When the time is depleted, the doll is sold out. You then can place another doll on the empty space.

 

As you place your dolls and begin to decorate your store, customers will walk in on a constant basis. The customers upon entering will have a Happy face or a Sad face. Apparently, if they see a lot of toys, they are happy. If they see a lot of empty space with less toys, they are sad.

I still do not know if the customers being happy or sad affects your store performance. But if you are completely sold out of all toys, then your store will stop generating revenue completely.

As you level up, you will be able to build better toys, build better machines to make better materials and expand the overall size of your store.

 

Tip

Do not spend your ruby to speed up material building or to save expired material. Save your ruby to buy machines. Every level up grants you one ruby. So I would suggest to invest into a Twister or Cutter. Machines purchased with ruby builds 5 items at the same amount of time spent. It is the ultimate investment.

 

Do not leave your material constructions unattended. They will expire. Especially the materials that takes a long time and high cost to produce. Set up a timer on your phone to remind you that the production is amount to complete.

 

You can move stuff around after you purchase them. Bring up the BUILD menu, tap on the item you want to move, drag it to its new place.

 

You can store items that you do not want to sell, but want it out of your shop. Bring up the BUILD menu, tap on the item, tap on store. You can bring the item out anytime you want using the build menu. Items in storage has an EA symbol.

 

Game saves/Player profile

Many of you might have wondered how to restart/reset your game saves, well the simple answer is, there isn’t a way. Once you have created your profile/save, you can not delete, reset or restart. It is a done deal.

 

The reason behind it is quite simple. Chillingo is on a full blast implementation of the Crystal ID system. Crystal ID system is similar to Apple’s Game Center. When you start Toy Factory for the first time, it gives you the option of playing with Game Center or without Game Center.

If you choose WITH game center, it will then create an account based on your Game Center login on Crystal. Then every time you start Toy Factory with Game Center Login, you will login to that saved file.

 

If you choose to start the game WITHOUT Game Center, then it will create an account based on your deviceID ( most likely UDID )  on Crystal. You will then, load that saved file every time you start your game.

 

There is, absolutely no way to –delete- the game save once it has been created. Even if you use the in-game Crystal menu to delete the account, your game save will remain, persistent. Removing of the game does not help. Save games are stored on server.

Virtually, each device has 2 save profile. One with Game Center, and the other with UDID. So using this knowledge, it has been confirmed that if you sign up a new Game Center account, you will then be able start a new game of Toy Factory. However, signing up for a new Crystal account, does not grant you a new game.

 

Generating revenue- Toys that make a lot of money.

Generally, the more expensive the toy, the more money it will make, right? Not quite. We have to look at several factors here. Since each toy has a duration, you can pretty much factor how the toy generates over a period of time, lets say minutes. So, to see how profitable a toy is, you would calculate Revenue / Time or Revenue over Time (ROT).

 

Lets take Airforce One for example. It sells for $6400 but has a duration of 960 minutes. It’s ROT is 6400/960 or $6.6/minute. Lets compare that to Belle Ballerina priced at $2400 over 240 giving us $10/minute. That means on the market, Belle Ballerina has a better ROT than Airforce one. But ROT isn’t everything. We also have to look at the Cost and time it takes to produce factor.

 

List of Toys with high ROT. List of Toys with high profit.

Each toy is composed of materials. Each material takes time to make. Cost is the entire cost associated by adding all materials together. Time is how long would it take to make all of the materials on a one by one basis. You can take a look at the following lists.

List of Toys with low production time. List of Toys with low production cost.

Now with that said, you can make your own choices on what toy to make. For those with a lot of free time, you can focus on high ROT toys which require more store control and production. Those with less time, should stick with high revenue dolls.

 

At level 22, the best toy to make is Snakes and Ladders. Its easy to make, only 4 wood and 4 stickers. It is cheap. It only costs 1088 to make. Its fairly fast to make. And it has a profit of 5662. Its crazy. If you want to make money, build this!

A note on leveling up.

Some of you might feel that you are leveling up too slow. Here are a few tips

  • DO THOES QUESTS! yes, the quests given helps. Do those quests.
  • Building materials AND toys gives you lots of exp. If you have time, build some high exp materials. You will use them later in the game. I would recommend building tons of the _same_ material at the sometime to be simple. That way, all of your materials finish at the same time.
  • Buying decorations gives you experience, also. Those expensive decorations, wall paper and titles award lots of experience.

 

Quests
The quest system is not perfect. After a while, you will notice that its on a loop. Very often you will get quests such as Visit your friends shop, pull the lucky draw or collect materials from friends. So before you visit your friends shop, lets see if you can hop on that quest to make some exp points.

Toy Factory for iPhone by Chillingo and Noritown

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So since last night, I have been completely preoccupied with this ultimately addictive game released by Chillingo developed by Noritown.

Noritown is a popular Korean internet game maker. The game however was published by Chillingo, the very popular game maker behind multiple successful games for the iPhone.

Toy Factory, is a freenium, business/shop simulation game. The game is free, but certain items costs ‘ruby’ to purchase. Ruby can be acquired slowly over time as you level up. But with the help of real hard-earned money, you can acquire ruby and purchase those items without the need to wait.

I have written a little in-depth guide with loads of data to help you get started. Take a look. Check it out.

The game is well designed, planed, built and made. The goal is simple, to build a kick ass Toy Factory. You as the player, manages a toy factory building an assortment of toys, and also manage a toy shop selling the toys that you are making. The game requires little skills in both toy making or business skills.

You start the game with a barrage of tutorials to get you started. Learning the interface was a breeze. The interface is very well-built but felt a little crammed on the iPhone screen. Game play is smooth and continuous.

How to play.
You start by building a few machines used to create the materials needed to build the toy. After you build the machines and make a few material, you can use the toy maker to assemble the toy. Then take the toy and place them on the display tables in the Shop. Each doll has a time limit. Once the item runs out of time, it will disappear. The each doll will generate revenue as it sits in the shop. The more dolls the better. The better dolls the better. After you get going and make some spare cash, you can decorate your shop and factory.

But wait, that’s not all. You can also add friends and visit their shops and factories. Once you have added them into your friends list, you can exchange gifts.

Any who, take a look at some of my Tips.

Tips!
Save your ruby to buy special machinery used to make items. Do not use your ruby to speed up building. Every time you level up, you will receive one ruby. Save them until you have 10 or 15 and then get yourself a nice little machine. The machine purchased with Ruby can build 5 items at one time instead of 1. In the long run it is hellafast!

You can reposition items once you buys them. Bring up the BUILD menu. Tap on the item that you want to move. Drag them to the place where you want to place them.

You can store items in storage, if you run out of space. Bring up the build menu. Tap on the item you want to store, and select STORE. In the future you can always bring the item out of storage by going back to the BUILD menu. Items being stored has an EA # label.

Do not leave your machines unattended. If you let your machines build material and do not pick them up when they are done, the material will expire and become useless. If you are going to call it a night, just leave the machines unused.

The game can be played with or without login to Game center. But regardless, the game is stored online on the Chillingo Crystal servers. Once you have started your game, there is no way to UNDO or DELETE your game. Once you start, there is no resetting. However, if you chooses Game center when the game starts, you -can- always create another Game center account.

A word on how Crystal controls your game save. 
I believe the game uses a unique UDID to create the first player save on the Crystal servers. This profile can not be deleted. Even if you delete the Crystal profile from the game, your save file is not deleted from the servers. Uninstalling and reinstalling does not change your save file.

When you use your game center to login, you are also saving your save file on the Crystal servers, but however, you are no longer using your UDID as your Crystal save file. You are now using your game center ID as your save file. If you ever choose the need to start from scratch, you would create a new game center ID, and go wild.

 

SimpleUpdates for Facebook

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Working on the same principle of TweetFire, I have pushed out my own customized version of a Facebook Feed Update application called SimpleUpdatesFB. This application is also, a stripped down app that is used to only send rapid updates to your Facebook Feed page.

Picture you wanting to share a piece of information with all your Facebook friends. But it is just plain rude to sling out your phone and starts mashing the keys. What will your date think? So you decide to head to the nearest restroom. As you walk you can hardly contain your excitement with the impending update. You want to share those juicy details!

So here you are in the restroom, and it takes forever for the Facebook app to launch and load all that graphics along with everyone update. As you wait you start sweating profoundly and perspiration wets your only good T-Shirt. Damn when will Facebook load…

Well that’s all in the past now. WIth Simple Updates you can bust out your iPhone and mash those keys, press send and done. No need to wait for the Facebook graphics to load. All you have to worry about, is making sure not to reach Facebook’s ridiculously high character count. Ha!

Top features of Simple Updates

  • Easy to use. Even an Ape can use it. No pun intended.
  • Does not load any graphics from the internet, making load speed very fast.
  • No distractions, lets update that Facebook page and move on.

 

Updated TweetFire 1.0.4

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Many of you know the update to TweetFire 1.0.4 was released yesterday. The new version had the version indicator removed from the settings preference page and incorporated into the application background.

But the most significant update was the actual tweet window launch codes. On 1.0.3 the tweet window essentially was allocated when the application starts so it does not need to be allocated again when you send or cancel tweets. In 1.0.4 the entire sequence was cleaned up and allocation for the window was moved back to the function. This allowed for better memory management but apparently caused the tweet window to flicker when you cancel or send. The delay is only a fraction of a second but still noticable. I am thinking of reworking the code so the tweet window does not move, disappear or get destroyed.

At the same time I have been wanting to implement support for ios4x. But All I can do is to emulate the beautiful ios5 tweet UI. On the same note, I implemented a look-a-like on SimpleUpdates FB and Apple app store didn’t seem to mind, so it might be a go. All I would need to do is, sign up for a dev account and get O=Auth working. Which will be a mess. I am wondering if this will impact the performance of the application.