music | Andrey Solovyev's Molecular Games

Tag Archives: music

July 4, 2014 · 2:32 am

Famous Operas

I continue create apps on the topics I like and know relatively well. Please, ladies and gentlemen, welcome Famous Operas.

The English description of the game is the following:

For all opera fans! Demonstrate your knowledge of the 50 most performed operas by the most important opera composers. The app has 3 game modes:
* guessing the opera from its poster
* guessing the composer from the portrait
* find the correspondence between the title of an opera, the name of a composer, an opera poster, and a composer’s portrait

Please contact me at asmolgam@gmail.com if you want to see your favorite opera in the updated version of this app.

*****
It was surprisingly time-consuming to find good-looking posters for all operas. In case of “Wozzeck”, for example, I just dropped it, but how can I miss “Il Trovatore” in the app called “Famous Operas”? On the other hand, portraits of composers are easy to find.

Acknowledgements:
icons for buttons were downloaded from iconmonstr or were created with Font Awesome.

Thanks!

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.