October | 2013 | Andrey Solovyev's Molecular Games

Monthly Archives: October 2013

October 31, 2013 · 12:48 pm

fruHarvest: Gather Fruits, Berries, and Vegetables while the Sun is Shining

Greet fruHarvest, my first non-quiz game with 49 different fruits (well, more correctly 49 fruits, berries, and vegetables) to harvest by simple tapping the screen. There are 4 kinds of fruits in the level, and each level brings a new fruit. Your goal is to collect the desired amount of fruits in a limited number of moves (taps). One type of fruits is pulsating and only pulsating fruits in the same row and column that you’ve tapped, are removed.

I started working on this game in July by drawing fruits. The app looked almost ready by the middle of August, but this time I wanted to implement several technologies that I hadn’t touched before: the Game Center, music, consumable in-app-purchases, the Flurry Analytics, layouts, and dozens of smaller things. Meanwhile, the new iOS 7 system appeared, and it required a couple of days of additional tuning.

The Game Center was especially tough one, but eventually it works: there are one leaderboard for the highest level and 14 achievements ranging from opening and removing a certain amount of fruits to even loosing in the very first level. The game is so intuitive and so simple (in the beginning) that the last achievement constitutes a formidable challenge.

The music credits go to two 19th century composers: Mikhail Glinka and Franz Schubert. An acoustic guitar performs the vocal part of two songs: Glinka’s Travelling Song (“Попутная песня” in Russian; 1840) and Schubert’s Farewell (“Abschied” in German; 1828). Unable to find good and free music files, I had to create them myself from sheet music in MuseScore. It was also a fun thing to do.

To celebrate the launch of fruHarvest, in the next 49 days, I’m going to buy and eat the fruits (and berries, and vegetables) in a real life in the order they appear in the game. Hopefully, I can find all of them in the neighborhood’s grocery store. These fruits will be a great starting point for the future blog posts.

I hope that you enjoy this game. Thank you for downloading it. Please don’t hesitate to ask questions and send suggestions.

ChemTemplate – fruHarvest is almost ready

I don’t write to the blog, because I work on new apps and old apps are doing just fine without my reminds about their existence. After all, their download number is at least 2 orders of magnitude higher than the number of visits of this website. So what are major news?

– fruHarvest is almost ready and I’ll be surprised if it’s not submitted for the revision this week (though I still have to update my OS X and Xcode). Today I plan to test it on an iPad and complete all levels. I’m in the 28th (of totally 46) now.

– A lot of work has been done on creating a template for future apps. It’s called ChemTemplate for now, because chemistry-related applications is the major direction I’m going to take in the next couple of weeks. The template is the first necessary step to my idea of “a thousand apps”. It incorporates the code for ads, IAPs, game center, and many other useful features.

– I had some doubts about the potential of chemistry apps on the App Store. But now I have a lot of doubts about any of my app. Let’s see how fruHarvest will start. If it’s on the par with Greek Letters, then I’ll focus on small and simple apps rather than on big games. Keeping this in mind, I started to revise the outline of asmolgam.com. Some pages can be still under construction. For example, I combined my CV with the contact form and changed the “Forgotten Games” page to “Chemistry Apps” page.