ActionChess & Go Tetris!

I spend a lot of time sitting around a table with friends, playing board games. I can easily imagine a future where those same friends and I all sit around a touchscreen table, playing games on that table. After all, it wasn’t that long ago when those same friends and I used to all sit facing the TV with controllers in our hands. (Hell, it’s rare, but we sometimes still do!)

Sure, there is something to be said for moving little pieces around, and handing some physical representation of money or resources back and forth, but that physical interaction can also slow the game down quite a bit. (It’s no surprise to any avid board gamer that you can finish an “electronic” version of board games in often much less time than the “real” thing, and only some of that time is spent waiting for your opponents to take their moves.)

I have now had a bit over 24 hours to “digest” Apple’s big iPad announcement, and while there are any number of other compelling touchscreen platforms out there, I have already worked in Apple’s platform, so I am am going to start working on a multiplayer game for the iPad ASAP. I think there is a real opportunity for board games to begin the migration to the iPad en masse, and I want to be part of that!

One big open question on my mind is… will the iPad lay flat? The pictures they’re providing seem to imply that it will (especially the side-on ones), but in the video, we never see it laying on a table or used on a flat surface. And the rotating 3D view they have on their website shows a (no doubt faked) reflection as you rotate it that doesn’t appear to have any flat parts. If it won’t lay flat, (or maybe even if it will) there’s probably an easy hardware opportunity out there for someone.

Lots of folks have already made a big stink about all the things missing from the iPad, camera being the one I’ve heard most frequently, so I’m not going to say anything about any of that other than to predict the next iteration will have a camera, (assuming this one doesn’t flop). I still think there is lots of stuff missing from the iPhone, frankly, and plenty of that stuff would translate nicely to the iPad as well. (Over-the-air syncing and bluetooth keyboard support are still my favorite ones to rant about.)

So yeah, I will be buying an iPad right away when they’re released, and I really can’t wait to play some board games on it.

A ridiculous number of news sources are reporting that EA and Blue Planet Software held a press conference a couple of days ago announcing that Tetris has reached the 100,000,000 paid downloads mark. EA’s iPhone Tetris has a near-permanent place on the app store’s list of “Top Grossing” apps, so it didn’t surprise me to hear that the iPhone port is doing well, but Tetris is apparently also available for 64 thousand other models of mobile device. I didn’t even know there were that many mobile devices out there!

Here’s the official press release over at Tetris.com, where they are also featuring (advertising) the iPhone app, as well as Tetris Gems — a site where you can buy officially licensed Tetris jewelry of all things. (I would definitely wear one of these rings, but I’m not entirely sure it’s worth the $329.00 asking price.)

While poking through Tetris related news articles, I read a wired article from last year about some study that found playing Tetris improves your brain. And tangentially related is a very fascinating article I read even earlier this evening by Garry Kasparov titled The Chess Master and the Computer. It’s mostly about the state of computer chess AI, but more interestingly how those programs are having an effect on human players.

Finally, did you know there is a Church of Tetris!? Neither did I.

First Person Tetris has clearly been making the rounds. (I’ve had three separate people tell me about it in the last week.) Basically, the whole screen rotates and moves while the current piece remains stationary in the center of the screen. I was actually surprised at how easy this was to play, intuitive even. Ultimately though, it’s still Tetris, with nothing terribly different about it, so it’s probably got a fairly limited replay value.

Tuper Tario Tros is tetris meets mario bros. You can also find it on Kongregate. From the developer’s description:

We were playing some Xbox Live games during lunchtime. Guillaume was really excited about “Lucidity” and the idea of playing a “Tetris platform” game… but he finally felt disapointed by the concept.

So, Guillaume decided to create a little Tetris plateformer for fun. William came with the idea to mix up Tetris with another well know game: Super Mario Bros.

This is interesting to me, because I also tried out (and was a tad bit disappointed with) the much hyped Lucidity. It’s definitely very pretty, but the gameplay just felt a bit lacking. Anyway, Tuper Tario Tros is a novel idea. You are basically just playing standard Mario Bros, but then a popup tells you you can switch into tetris mode by hitting the space bar. Then it’s up to you to build the 2d platforms for Mario to traverse using Tetris pieces. Eventually you reach the end of the level, and the gameplay switches to another mode entirely. Those folks at SwingSwing Submarine did a great job of creating not one but two new and interesting gameplay types out of it. The first part is relatively short, so I’d recommend sticking with it until you finish it so you see the second one. Good stuff.

3D Stereogram Tetris has probably been around the longest of these three. When I sent it out at work, one of my coworkers said she’d been playing it for years. It’s exactly like a Stereogram image, where you have to cross your eyes correctly to see the game, and I found out that gives me a headache after a very short amount of time. I only recently discovered this painful Tetris variant a few months back, and it deserves a place on any list of Tetris variants, for novelty alone.

It bears mentioning that Wikipedia has a nice page listing many official Tetris Variants, (I may have linked to this before) but the page doesn’t seem to have any flash games on it, and is most useful when trying to remember which version of tetris existed for which console system. I briefly toyed with adding these, and possibly Go-Tetris to the page, but I think adding my game would be against Wikipedia’s TOS.

I wrote a post for the Clockwork blog about how iTunes app store pages have changed. Just cross linking here cause I think it’s relevant and interesting. (Note that I did write this immediately after I noticed the redesign, but (unlike this blog) we space out the clockwork blog posts so there’s some publishing plan to them… unfortunately that means some posts can get pushed out for up to — in this case — a couple of weeks.)

The iPhone Developer’s Library App (appstore link) contains an great set of e-books that any cocoa developer would be proud to have on their phone: Programming in Objective-C 2.0, by Stephen Kochan, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, by Aaron Hillegass, and The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK, by Erica Sadun. There can be no question that this is a great selection of books, so I focused my review on the e-book reader itself, which contains some bonus features for developers that make it really shine.

Unfortunately, some of those features can be a bit difficult to figure out at first. When I launched the app, I expected to see a menu or a help button. I think this reader in particular could even have given me a brief tutorial when I first launched the app. Regardless, there is a help screen, but you have to get all the way into reading a book before you can get to it. Click into the book you want to read, then click past the table of contents, and only then you can tap the center of the screen to bring up the menu. From here the Q&A style help screen is accessible by touching the question mark icon in the upper right. I know I wanted to read this first.

Once I got started actually reading one of the books, things were pretty much as I’d expect from any e-book reader. The main exception to this is that clicking on an image, a link or a bit of code requires a touch-and-hold method. This is indicated nicely with a sort of shrinking border around the item you are selecting. I think this was probably implemented to avoid accidentally opening something when you meant to page forward through the book, but I found myself avoiding those types of things instinctively when touching to turn a page, so I think it would be nice if that was configurable someday. I also found the length you have to hold before one of these opens (two, maybe three seconds) seems a bit on the long side.

Speaking of configuration, the settings screen has three different tabs full of configurable items, but still somehow felt bare to me. Most of the settings were on the “Appearance” tab, which consisted entirely of color options, but I missed the ability (common in e-book readers) to simply reverse all the colors to view white text on black instead of the default black on white.

I was pleasantly surprised to note that clicking a link opens a browser page without leaving the app, but still gives you the ability to open the link in safari. Clicking an image opens the image in what might also be Safari for all intents and purposes, allowing you to scroll and zoom in a recognizable fashion. Clicking on a bit of code opens the much-touted “code view”, which I found to be a very nice addition. Essentially this allows you to scroll and zoom (via a text-size slider) a given piece of code. You can copy and paste the text here, but more practical is the ability to email it to yourself for use on your mac.

Now I’ve got a lot of reading to do.

Been meaning to post a link to this waffle tetris image for a while now, and just hadn’t gotten around to it:

Then I just saw a geeky video game tattoo (on twitter, of course) it just occurred to me to search for tetris tattoos. I found a nice collection of them over at Geekologie, and ended up doing my own googling as well. Here are the ones I found not on that link:
and

This is not news, but I watched this lego tetris vid for the first time tonight:

I discovered this iPhone game BoXiKoN only just yesterday. I don’t think this one was out when I did my roundup of games that use tetris pieces before. The game description says it has been a successful PC game for years, but this is the first I’d heard/seen of it. It’s not limited to tetris pieces, but it’s a very solid action puzzle game nonetheless. I’m now following the dev’s twitter account.

Finally, there are some really great tetris webcomics over on Geek’s World. I didn’t discover these until late in my tetris tattoo searching, so I have no idea if there are other Tetris comics out there. I’ll put that on my todo.

A few weeks back, I upgraded to Snow Leopard, and noticed I no longer had the option of choosing 2.0 through 2.2.1 as my active SDK. I was starting a new project, and didn’t worry about it, thinking I’d figure it out later.

Well, now it’s later, and I spent the last hour or so figuring this out, so I thought I’d post it here in case someone else finds this helpful.

In the apple dev forums, I found a couple of people suggesting you need to re-install the old versions of the dev tools, then move my Developer directory, and re-install the latest tools. This seems silly, since I still have the “/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS2.2.1.sdk” directory. It’s possible this suggestion is in order to get the old version of the simulator, although I’m not entirely sure why you’d want to have that.

Another helpful commenter said “Base SDK does not set compatibility. It sets your available feature set. The iPhone OS Deployment Target build setting controls compatibility. Set it to 2.0 or 2.2.1 to allow your app to launch on earlier OS versions.” That made much more sense to me, but I couldn’t immediately find the “iPhone OS Deployment Target” setting in my project settings. I did have it though, it just wasn’t showing up for some reason. When I finally searched for IPHONEOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET it showed up, and with a handy dropdown full of old SDK versions.

As anyone who knows me well can tell you, I’ve been a prolific juggler at various stages in my life. I was president of the Juggling Club at the University of MN for about 2 and 1/2 years, and I’ve juggled on and off for at least 17 years now. That’s the main reason that I tend to pick up any new juggling and/or circus related games that appear on the market. They’re usually terrible, but I have a small collection, for various ancient consoles mostly, and now, increasingly, for the iPhone.

Read on for some mii juggling in Wii Fit Plus, and some iPhone mini-reviews. Read the rest of this entry »

I just want to rant about this for a second, as I did in the comments over at toucharcade’s excellent article about Imangi’s talk at GDC Austin.

Now, I wasn’t there, and I haven’t seen Imangi’s talk, so I don’t know whether this sentiment was present there, or whether this came out in the article only, but in the article, it’s suggested that Imangi’s first game, called Imangi, was somehow less successful because it was “difficult to understand how to play”. This gives me a stomach ache for several reasons. My comment was as follows:

It’s important to remember that Imangi was a successful game, and one that totally launched their name into any sort of publicity or limelight. Sure, maybe it took some reading to understand, but at least it was an original idea (at least, I think it was at the time), and I think suggesting a game needs to be super simple in order to succeed is actively ignoring one of the contributors to their own success!

I actually read a similar sentiment in the latest copy of Casual Connect last night, and it really pissed me off. Many complex games are extremely popular and successful. I’d also argue that just because something takes more than a few seconds to understand that does not (nor should it) exclude it from being a casual game.

Maybe tonight I’ll follow up by going back and finding the stuff in the Summer 2009 Casual Connect Magazine that upset me, or even add some examples of of casual games that are not simple or immediately obvious how to play. (But of course examples of successful non-casual games that are difficult to understand are incredibly easy to find. Think Civilization, even the dumbed down iPhone version took me at least 20 minutes to figure out.)

I do remember that one article said adding keyboard commands was enough to relegate any casual game to failure. (What idiocy. Think Tetris, morons.)

Of course there are lots of contributors to success, and reaching a large demographic is easily one of them. I guess I’d just like to give the blithering masses the benefit of the doubt in the IQ department. Certainly there are some interesting games that require little-to-no explanation… but one of the reasons Harbor Master is one of them is that almost everybody and their mother had already played Flight Control, which came out first and uses almost exactly the same game mechanic! (I give Imangi a pass on originality on that one because Harbor Master is a better game for other reasons, I think, reasons that contribute to make it just original enough.)

I guess my point is less that simplicity does not equate success, and more that games that require more explanation are not inherently worse (or less successful). That makes for a less elegant blog post title. (And also less simple, but that’s not why I chose it.)

A new ActionChess update (1.1.5) is in review. Here are the changes in the update:
- Minor changes to help text across the board.
- New scheme for saved games. One save per game mode is allowed. You can return to the menu to save your game, so when you unlock a new game mode, go try it out right away!

If you’ve been paying attention, (and I don’t know why you would be), you’ll notice that the version numbers should all match now also. There was a discrepancy between all the various versions because I wanted to number things 0.1.x, but I’d launched with 1.0 (by default, I just hadn’t changed the string in my plist project file), and since apple only allows upward version number changes, I had been trying to mirror the “real” version number, but with one instead of zero. This is a silly little discrepancy, but I’ve given up and moved everything to 1.1.x to avoid confusion.

As I mentioned in an update to a previous post, I wanted to get “global high scores” and a new “Puzzle Mode” into this update, but both features are proving to be fairly time consuming endeavors. I do have some progress into both tasks. So far, I’ve finished most of the shell for puzzle mode (still needs some UI love, and there are a couple of bugs). I’ve also programmed enough puzzles in to figure out that this mode is totally worth the effort. It is harder to make puzzles than it is to solve them, but I should have some more progress made by this weekend. I’d like to launch the feature with 100 puzzles. I don’t know how realistic that is, but that’s my goal for now.