Circles is a very special game for me. Its idea came from nowhere two weeks ago and in one week the game was ready and submitted to the App Store. But don’t think that it is lame because it was developed so quickly. I consider Circles to be my best application so far. It combines a challenging puzzle with the beauty of simplicity.
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Today I start a series of posts that I announced in the description of fruHarvest – one of my new games. I’m going to buy each fruit that I included to the game, take a picture of it, and then eat it, of course.
Besides pics of fruits, the reader will get a piece of a story or an advice about app development. Today I’d like to talk about the section of fruHarvest called “Fruitopedia”. It’s logical to start with it because it’s essentially a table of all fruits represented in the game in the order they appear after finishing levels. So one may consider it as a built-in achievement board. It also explains why Tomato is #1.
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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.
Filed under Games
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.
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Today I updated my Useful Links post. Please check it now. There are 12 links now.
Today I’m working on sounds, music and fonts for fruHarvest. I’m also thinking about abandoning the idea of Forgotten Games page and change it to a page devoted to chemistry and chemical apps. I’ll wait until my first chemistry quiz is published and then I’ll make a decision.
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After a month-long journeys and travelings across the country, becoming a Utah resident (bye, Pittsburgh!), I’m back to developing games.
I have a strict plan for myself to submit three new apps by the end of September. They are fruHarvest, a quiz about alkanes (a certain class of chemicals), and Push and Match (the names are subject to changing and extending).
Yesterday, I optimized the graphics in fruHarvest for iPad (now all pics are in normal, hd, and ipadhd resolutions), did the introductory screen with a dragon-gardener, and worked on several other minor things like icons, launching screens, fonts, etc. Hope to finish it very soon.
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So my first update has been approved. I wrote about it in the previous post and now Version 1.1 called Monster! What Color is It? Take a Quiz! is ready for sale on the App Store. It’s exactly two months since the 1.0 was released on June 14. There are several points I’d like to emphasize:
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I am currently watching the performance of Greek Letters and Alphabet, updating What Color is This Monster?, and developing fruHarvest. A couple of words about each project.
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After an intense week of the development, waiting for the availability of Apple certificates, and initial rejection due to unchecked IAPs, Greek Letters and Alphabet are finally available on the App Store.
Let me copy the description of the game (game? or an educational app?) here:
From Alpha to Omega. We guarantee that you’ll learn all Greek letters after finishing all 8 training and entertaining game modes. Essential for those:
– Learning Greek and reading Homer in original;
– Joining a Greek fraternity or sorority (ever wondered what those ΦΛΥ stand for?);
– Studying science classes (math, physics, chemistry – there are Greek symbols in every formula!);
– Traveling to Greece or Cyprus (to understand signs and names);
– Wanting to learn more about other cultures and impress buddies by knowing letter ω.
The application features:
– All 24 Greek letters: uppercase and lowercase;
– 8 game modes to learn Greek letters quickly and happily;
– Tutorial with all letters arranged in an alphabetical order;
– Eye-catching design in traditions of the red-figure pottery of Ancient Greece.
Can you distinguish Chi and Xi? Test yourself right now!
Enjoy the game! Learn Greek letters with my app!
I’ll write more about the development, uploading, and first downloads later in this blog.
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Search for the best chemistry-related words brought an interesting discovery. There are still a lot of words with a high user traffic and relatively few apps associated with them. I noticed it accidentally for several Greek letters and an idea of a quiz about Greek alphabet came into my mind.
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