Glitch HQ just received some substantial updates on iPhone, and Android release is in progress now. For this new version (1.3), we’ve revamped the interface, added mail and achievements, and added support for imagination and snaps.

Revamped interface: The latest version of Glitch HQ uses a card-style interface, which gives you more room to interact with the core bits of the app. The button in the top left will always take you back to the previous screen and you can slide everything over to the right to reveal the main menu underneath at any time.

Mail: Send and receive mail to and from your Glitch friends from inside Glitch HQ (just like on the website, sending basic mail costs a measly 2 currants and you still need to go into the game to send and receive attachments).

Imagination & Profiles: Your profile now shows how much iMG you have left to spend, and all profiles show how many achievements, skills, and upgrades players have.

Achievements: Completionists, rejoice. Ever wondered how close you were to earning all the achievements in Glitch? We’ve added support for achievements, filterable by category.

Snaps: Introduced recently on the site, snaps allow you to save and share images from inside the game. Viewing and commenting on snaps is now 100% supported in Glitch HQ.

Download the latest version of Glitch HQ for iPhone and Android.

Hour-for-hour, the last week and the few days prior was probably the most dense set of releases we’ve ever done. It started with a preview of the new Snaps feature for saving and sharing images from inside the game (20 second demo video) and led into R2, the second release of the housing system. This was a major release and included:

• The ability to expand your land via yard and home street expansions and the ability to extend and add floors to your house
• The ability to change the visual style of your yard and home street
• Selecting and customizing a house exterior
• The cultivation of resources like tree patches, rocks, gardens and more

We also threw in a significant chunk of new furniture customizations and wallpapers, so this is a pretty good time to test things out. If you haven’t yet tried it yet, you can get to your tester house by typing “/home” into local chat. Here’s a video summary of the latest:

Other than that, the pace of rollouts has continued to be good since the last progress report:

• Storage/display boxes (“SDBs“) made their way into the game earlier this month as the first piece of interactive furniture (expect more, later)
• Maps now distinguish between places you visited and places you’ve not yet been, making exploration much easier to track
• New machines were added to the game to go with some the new skills added earlier
• Wine of the Dead finally made its way into the game properly (useful for clearing land, this wine can only be obtained by first having another player mourn or celebrate at your headstone)

And, of course, hundreds of bug fixes and tweaks in response to all the testing of the new stuff — the feedback is very much appreciated!

For now we’re still in full sprint mode, working on the transition to Imagination (which won’t be out till closer to the end of the month; a bit longer after R2 than we originally thought). That will be a very complicated release and the transition to the new housing system will follow shortly after it. Betwixt and between, there’ll be all kinds of other new additions. And then lots and lots and lots of testing and polish … phew.

Back when we announced that Katamari-creator Keita Takahashi was joining the team to work on Glitch, there was a little shout out to the game designer/producer Robin Hunicke at the end of the post — Robin was the one who introduced us to Keita.

Now we’re lightheaded-and-behaving-erratically to announce that Robin herself is joining the team! (You can read her post here.)

Robin’s just settling in after wrapping up her work on the online game Journey which just launched to lavish critical praise (and which quickly became the fastest selling game on PlayStation Network). If you take a look at her history you’ll find that she’s also worked on games that celebrate player expression and creativity — namely the Boom Blox and MySims games for Nintendo Wii.

Robin will be joining the Tiny Speck team in the San Francisco office, where she’ll be providing leadership in game design and working alongside her former colleague, Justin Quimby, who joined us last month to lead game development (Justin and Robin worked together back at Electronic Arts, where Justin was a development leader on Spore; prior to that he worked on MMOs aplenty, all the way back to Asheron’s Call and Dungeons and Dragons Online). Together we expect them to contribute great things to Glitch.

So, welcome Robin! And, now: work really, really hard so we can make the best game that any Giant could ever imagine ;)

We are working so hard! And it is all coming together! These are exciting times at Tiny Speck offices.

Over the next month we’ll be making some major updates. The biggest sets of new features will come in two waves:

First, we’ll have “R2″, the second release of houses. This release will include the ability to expand & add floors to your house, enlarge and change the style of your yard and exterior street, cultivate your land to add resources and customize & change the style of your house exterior.

Then, once initial testing is done on that first batch of R2 features, will do the Big Transition to Imagination: XP will be converted, the new system of character upgrades will be introduced and we’ll launch an overhauled and simplified UI for the game. This will mean some fairly major changes to everyone’s character (some skills are being converted to upgrades and some skills will work in slightly different ways; your level will be transposed to the corresponding level in the new system; and more, which we’ll explain at that time).

With imagination in the game, we’ll be able to do the housing reset and introduce a second batch of R2 features centered around furniture crafting, including new skills, new items, new resource types and new areas of the world. You will be able to to grow your property, expand your house, add furniture and cultivate resources “for keeps”.

In addition to the those two big updates — the second housing release and the introduction of Imagination — there is a lot more awesome stuff slated for introduction in the next six weeks:

• new quests, puzzles & games
• a new way to share snapshots made in the game
• an assistant who can greet visitors on your behalf on your home street
• more swatches and furniture upgrades
• a new type of storage furniture which can hold a near-infinite amount of a single type of item
• a servant who can do your crafting for you, even when you’re not in the game world (!)

… it’s kind of crazy how much.

OK. Back to work.

Glitch HQ has received a big update and it’s also now available for Android! We’ve added support for Friends, Unlearning, and push notifications on both platforms. Download it for Android or iOS.

Friends: The latest version of Glitch HQ includes a new Friends tab with a searchable list of all your Glitch friends. You now have quick and easy access to their profiles on the go.

Unlearning: It’s now possible to unlearn skills from the app. Once you have learned the Unlearning skill, you can toggle between learning and unlearning.

Push notifications: Want to know when you’ve finished learning a new skill?  We’ve added push notification support to the app (notifications will begin in the next few weeks).

Finally, we’ve made tweaks to make the app more beautiful and squashed some bugs at the same time. Androidians can get the latest version on Google Play, and iOSites in the App Store! So: hurry!