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)....
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....
3x 2″ binders full of documents. Looks like I have some reading to do. PS: Happy new year. 🙂...
At first glance you wouldn’t think a matching game like Smiles would feature physics, but it does. In several places actually. The most obvious example is the particle effects. Particles were used when ice and rocks break, and also for the tile clearing effect. The tile would be erased instantly from the board, and a particle would be created in it’s place. The particle would zoom in, slow down, then zoom out with a twist....
Rather spontaneously, I decided to put Smiles Drop on sale for New Years. So for a limited time (i.e. some time early Jan 2nd morning) you can grab Smiles Drop for the extremely reasonable price of $1.99 (save $1). That puts it in check, so you can buy Smiles Zen after that, and have paid the same price as buying full on Smiles. Well… you might save a penny buying separately, but still....
Final version of the Smiles video. It’s the short one again, but with me talking. Here’s your chance to hear and mock Mike. I’ve been getting a number of positive and amusing comments from the video. Such fun things as that I sound like an Infomercial host, and music sounds like “corporate training music”. Finishing this video has been an incredible hassle. Hard drives dying, frequent reboots, loss of WAV file playback in Windows, and YouTube difficulties....
One of two promotional videos I’m making. This one is the “hands on” one, requiring a silly looking “camera on tripod hugging thing” to collect all the footage. Viddler Long Version: http://www.viddler.com/…/19/ Youtube Short Version: http://www.youtube.com/E4sUK241aRA Youtube Long Version: http://www.youtube.com/nEO1-zybCU4 In this video, I’m unfortunately assuming the player will pick up on all the nice things why this isn’t a Bejeweled clone. But to be sure, I’m going to spell it out next video, and briefly mention some of things not covered here....
A press pack is now available for Smiles. Hit the website, it’s currently linked from the front page. Refresh if you don’t see it. http://www.smiles-game.com Screen shots and high-res logo and promo artwork. Video is in progress. Hopefully by the end of the day Friday....
Just got back from the grocery store, and got the word. “Ready for Sale“. http://appshopper.com/games/smiles Search for “Smiles” and scroll down a bit, or browse the puzzle or strategy categories in iTunes. Contrary to the description, it’s an Action Puzzler. Lumines/Metoes ‘esc, or Bejeweled on crack. Thanks to some fancy design kung fu, it’s also what the description says. But that’s a topic all in itself. – – – –...
I’d love to say the wait is over, but now we start the next wait. Waiting for approval. As of 7:45 AM this Tuesday October 28th morning, the game is now sent. – – – – – – – Digging through my SVN logs for some stats. Repository was created on June 22nd, 2008. That’s a total of 4 months and 6 days. All code, art (except the original TTF font, though I did design and make the logo text), and audio created by me....