iZurvive released

Last week, we finally finished the development of our first App, iZurvive, and submitted it to the AppStore for review.

On last wednesday, it passed the review process and is now live on the AppStore! We can’t tell you how excited we currently are.

In the last post, we promised to provide a more detailed write-up about our motivation and the development process, so here here it is, enjoy:

The idea behind iZurvive

The idea of developing iZurvive occured to us in summer, when DayZ increasingly gained popularity. Playing DayZ and watching ‘Let’s Play DayZ’- videos on YouTube was huge fun, but soon we realized that it was cumbersome to coordinate several players. When one of us spawned on a random position on the map and wanted to meet up with the rest of the group, he had to find out where he was and where the group was, and how to get there. And each time when only some people of the group were playing together, we had to meet up again when the rest of us came back online.

What we needed was a way to post our positions on the map to all the other people in the group.

So we decided to build an app for that :)

Get iZurvive

iZurvive is available for iOS & Android. It’s free, give it a try! ;-)

Future plans for iZurvive

In the first sentence of this post I wrote that we’ve finished the development, but actually this is not true. We have received lots of feedback from our users already and we are really glad to hear how you feel about the app. Some great features have been suggested and we are currently figuring out which of these can be included in future updates.

Support for the Standalone

We plan to support the standalone version of DayZ, but are waiting for news from rocket, just as we all do.

Ad-Free Paid Version

The ad-free, paid version was recently realized by creating the in app purchase “Remove Ads” to that goal. This feature will be available with version 1.1., which is currently in review. Of course, if you buy the Ad Removal Package once, ads will be removed on all your devices (use the “restore” button!).

(offline) Loot Map

This is a feature that we really wanted to implement! We wanted to focus on the group aspect first and didn’t want to delay the release. We are happy to see that there is demand for that feature and will try to include it in a future update, maybe even together with the release of the standalone version of DayZ.

Android Version

A big portion of the feedback was about an android version. We are aware of the fact that android has a huge userbase, but were forced to make a decision which platform to support for our first release due to being only 3 people. We still have to figure out how to distribute our ressources and can’t tell you as of now if we are able to port iZurvive to Android and if so, when it will be released.

About the Development

In August, we started working on the app. We met up for crunching sessions several times and soon had a solid idea of the app and started to implement it. We made good progress, but then an important project cropped up and we had to slow down with the development of iZurvive. We came back to focus on iZurvive in October and soon had a working prototype that was used in gaming sessions with friends.

But when the app was nearing completion we had to face a whole new challenge, which delayed the release of iZurvive again: founding our company. Founding a company in Austria means having to deal with several different administration bodies, where each one of them needs time until everything is done and you can move on the the next one. It was in the beginning of December, that finally everything was done and we were founded. It was an exhausting, but important experience.

We want to add more features in the future and are eager to hear about your experience with iZurvive. Feel free to contact us with your feedback and tell us what features you want to see implemented in the future. We really want iZurvive to be a valuable tool for improving your experience when playing DayZ!