ActionChess & Go Tetris!

Just downloaded a few juggling related iPhone apps.

Kevin Bertman pointed out his recently released iJuggling application in the comments on my last juggling related post. It’s available in the app store now, and I checked it out. My first complaint is that there are no instructions whatsoever. I started playing the game by selecting the “challenge” menu item (the menu was also confusing, but cool once I played with it a bit–all the menu items are placed on one face of a ball with four faces, so you have to rotate it to see all the menu items). Once in the game, 3 balls fell from the top of the screen into two hands awaiting below. Underneath the hands are a couple of circles that I intuitively (and correctly) assumed were to control the hands.

Then I played around for a while, and accidentally threw a ball or two, but I really had no idea what I was doing. The act of throwing a ball seemed so simple, just flick the hand upwards, right? But that’s not how you do it. I went back to the menu thinking maybe if I rotated the ball enough there would be an “instructions” menu item (but there’s not). The closest is a “Setup” that took me to a confusing screen with the same hands as before, but also with some bars above them and Xes that I could move around. I’ll spare you another description of my frustration here, but eventually I figured out that the Xes are a “target area” where you drag the hands in order to throw a ball. The throwing motion is automatic. You just have to take your finger (or thumb) off the target area and the hand will automatically throw. I spent a good ten minutes figuring this out. (Note that the target area isn’t indicated at all on the playing screen, just the setup screen.)

Once I’d established more or less how to throw a ball, getting three of them in the air at once was fairly easy. Catching them and keeping them aloft was a bit more difficult, but I still got the hang of it pretty quick. When I made enough throws, an arrow indicating I could move on to the next level became available. I had A LOT more difficulty with the second level, and now I think I know why. Remember those bars above the hands on the setup screen? They indicate how high the balls will get thrown. On the second level, the bars are much lower, making the throws faster with less time between them. How do I know this? Only because I finally navigated to the “Stats” menu item, which shows you your high scores for each level you’ve played. The level itself is indicated by a small graphic representing the setup screen for that level. The bars are lower on the second level than the first. The third level was 5 balls. Definitely a lot harder than the first or second, but I’ll admit that I only played with it for a few minutes before putting it down to write this review.

iJuggling looks very slick. The graphics aren’t amazing, but they’re good, and there are some nice touches that indicate to me that there was a lot of thought put into them. The hand grab points fade out once you touch them, for example, and the arrow pointing to the next level fills up as you get close to achieving the next level. There is some sound, indicating when a throw and/or catch has been made. It’s simple, but again, doesn’t detract from the experience. The most frustrating thing was in figuring out how to play, and after that the difficulty. I like a good challenge though, and I will definitely play with this again.

One additional note/downer: In iTunes, and on its website iJuggling is billed as the first realistic juggling simulator on the iPhone. While it’s fun, and definitely a juggling game, (a unique one, at that, I think), it definitely wasn’t the first. I thought about also debating whether it’s a simulator, but that’s… well, debatable.

After playing with iJuggling, I searched the app store for juggle, as I indicated in that last post I was going to eventually do. I’ll mention the highlights of what I found here:

JuggleFit Tracker is a free utility that allows you to track your progress (a number and a date) associated with a juggling pattern. You can then allow it to tweet your progress if you like. There are quite a few arbitrary limitations (it only stores 5 progress rows for each pattern–it would have been much cooler to store them all, and maybe graph them over time, for example). But if you’re interested in tracking your juggling, this might be a good place to start. Another nice feature are the “tips” for beginning jugglers. I imagine those are quite useful. And hell, it’s free, so this is probably worth checking out if you’re a regular juggler.

Cat Juggling, while the name and idea are enticing, is not so much a juggling game at all. It’s more one of those games where you have to bounce things in the air. You have two hands to bounce with. So it’s juggling themed. The graphics are really “cute” (I’m sure that’s what they were going for), and I was surprisingly “into” the silly (and repetitive) music track. Also, you get 9 lives, which is funny. There’s not a lot of depth, though it does save some high scores. Probably worth getting for the idea alone, but if you’re not into that, don’t bother.

iCircus – the Juggler actually uses a control scheme the closest (of all these apps) to the juggling game I originally intended to create. The unfortunate thing is that it’s way too hard to control. Like iJuggling, the “catch point” is represented by a hand and offset from the “touch point”, or point your finger touches to control the hand. Unlike iJuggling, the touch point is not shown, and this is a much smaller hand, (the graphic also includes an arm, but it’s not clear how much of the arm can be used to catch, so that’s a hindrance rather than useful).

iCircus – the Juggler also adds breakout-style “stars” that you are trying to throw your balls into while “juggling”. This is actually its saving grace, and the only thing that (probably) makes it worth your $.99. As your ball (you start with only one) passes through the stars, they are collected, and when you get them all, the level is complete. The second level adds a second ball of a second color, and stars are only collected by balls of the same color.

All in all, this makes for some very interesting possibilities, but I found the game almost unplayable with the existing control scheme. I only got to the third level, and only then because the game appeared to take pity on me and allow me to progress without collecting all the stars for the second level.

Polyball also comes up in the app store when you search for juggling. It’s a space themed game similar in gameplay to Cat Juggling, but it has a bit more depth to it (including Open Feint achievements and particle effects). I actually already had this game on my phone because it went down to free back in December, and I had yet to play it. It’s okay if you like that sort of game. A lot like Uggles, which has similar gameplay and depth. (Note that Uggles also comes up when you search for juggling, and it’s about as much juggling as this is. That is to say… kinda sorta maybe to someone who has never juggled before. It’s been widely reviewed, and is probably way more successful than any of these other games, so I’m not giving it its own section.)

There were some other apps in the app store that had juggling in their titles, Cannonball Juggling, Juggle Gears, Juggle Pong, GolfBall Juggle, Picsaw Juggle, but none of them were really juggling. (Or they were that other soccer meaning of the word juggle.) This concludes my informal survey of the state of juggling apps in the app store. Enjoy!

ActionChess was featured yesterday in a list of apps made in MN — in the Star Tribune.

UPDATE: Here is the entirety of the mention (for posterity):

Cross the line-clearing aspects of Tetris with the moves of chess pieces, and you get this fun puzzle game.

It was featured in the upper left-hand corner of a page with an iPhone in the middle and all the local app icons on it. It ran with another much larger and longer article about MN made apps in general titled Land of 10,000+ apps. (That article also briefly features Clockwork, where I am gainfully employed.) Both were written by Randy Salas, who I do not know and have never communicated with. Thanks Randy!

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 »