For GDC, I decided to make a special version of Smiles. On the surface it would look like the Lite version (Free Smiles), except I re-enabled statistic tracking and high scores. Here is how the visitors at my IGF kiosk did. General Statistics Total Time Played: 7 hours, 39 minutes Games Played: 131 Zen Statistics Total Time Playing: 4 hour, 12 minutes Games Played: 78 Games Won: 33 Total Moves: 2640...
Just a few hours ago I could barely move. Nearly crawling my way out of bed to attack the day (ahem… night), after the long flight home. I’ve since returned to my regular routine of pacing around my studio (i.e. basement), between moments of awe e-mailing and ranting everywhere it seems appropriate (forums, twitter). As I exhausted all those wonderful forms of communication, it seemed to be right time to start the required retrospective post....
Friday was the short day. Wednesday and Thursday we exhibited 10-6, where Friday was 10-3. Went back to the hotel and vegged that day, before heading back out to hang with the Fantastic Contraption guys. My neighbors were the Secret Exit guys. I ended up spending a bulk of the show goofing off with Tuukka, an artist on Zen Bound. The Secret Exit guys refer to him as the “prankster” of the bunch....
First day of exhibiting. I have to say, I’m exhausted. Feet ached, and limped a bit throughout the day, but I loved it. Here’s a few photos of the completed setup. And a little closer. I’m sharing a hotel with Phil Hassey of Galcon fame, and he had an amusing idea about creating some cheap signage. Hilighers and posterboard. At his booth he has a nicely done caracture of his goat Cuzco with a very supermarket-like sign advertising his sale....
Live from San Fransisco, it’s… me. As you may or may not have heard, I didn’t win. But that’s alright, I’m still here to exhibit. We’re sharing booth space with the IGF main competition entrants, which is great. That way, when people come to see the cool IGF games, they’ll find us too. Here’s my slice. Other cool stuff, Apple put up a page of us IGF Mobile entries. Very awesome....
The first step with Smiles was to up the art resolution. That way, I could cleanly resize to any resolution below 4x the iPhone (1920×1280). Unfortunately, double and quadruple iPhone res are not practical resolutions. Double iPhone will work windowed on most desktop LCD and 720p screens (960×640), and quadruple in a window fits on a 30″ Dell or Apple Cinema display, but we could do better. Also, not all screens are the same shape, but the solution isn’t too difficult....
Alright, I don’t see a reason not to talk about this publicly. So if I’m a good boy, I’ll be walking through my process of up-scaling, converting, and porting Smiles as it happens. Ideally, I’d like to have the game available for all 3 desktop platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux). Quickly, Smiles is an IGF Mobile nominated collection of puzzle games for iPhone. You can learn more about the game at smiles-game....
Totally a tease. Click it if you dare! 🙂 (400k JPEG Version, 1 MB Lossless PNG Version) Rebuilt the texture atlas’ for the weather and vegetables tilesets, and resized the majority of the in game assets. 3x’d the iPhone res instead of 4x’d, as that would be far too huge. Art is large enough for 1080p, but the game needs numerous changes to properly support the new aspect ratio(s)....
Alright, so the clock says it’s Friday now. According to my whiteboard, that’s 29 days before I leave for the Game Developers Conference. Between now and then, I have a few commitments to take care of. Possibly a 2nd draft for my writing engagement, jury (selection?) duty, in addition to IGF preparations. It’s also an important turning point for Smiles as a product and a brand. Lets talk about that....
I know my track record for completing a blog series is pretty lousy, but this one should be easier. I kept a personal log with pictures during the development of Smiles, so most of the work is done for me. I just need need to go through it and regurgitate my notes. To start, I’m going to give a bit of insight in to what happened when I stopped writing my Engines, Names and Evolution blog series last year....