Chesstris

So, a new post on my favorite iOS boardgaming blog was published today, and it included a link to the second Boardgame Babylon podcast about iOS boardgames. I listened to the episode tonight, and while there were some good descriptions of the gameplay for various iPhone/iPad eurogame implementations, I didn’t feel like it actually said anything new or particularly exciting to me. I had played all of the games mentioned with the exception of Michael Schacht’s Gold, which I knew about, but had passed on for various reasons.

Coincidentally, Gold was on sale yesterday, for $.99, (also mentioned in the iOS Board Games blog post), and if it had still been on sale while I was listening to the podcast, I would have picked it up, but alas, by the time I checked, the price had gone back up to $3. Normally, I would purchase a game I’m interested in for $3, no sweat, but the reasons I passed on Gold the first time I heard about it still remain, and I guess I just feel like there are a lot of games competing for my time… For $.99, I’ll buy almost any app just to try it out and see if I like it. For $3, I feel I have to actually want to play the game before I’ll purchase. It’s not that I don’t want to play Gold, but I just can’t see myself playing it for any real length of time.

But really, here are the reasons I passed on Gold the first time around: 1) Lack of online multiplayer. Would pick it up in a heartbeat if it had asynchronous. For $3 or even $5, for sure. 2) The rules seem really simple to me. Like maybe too simple. 3) The game was made by the same person/folks who did a few other iOS games I already own, namely High Society, and Money. This game looks to be pretty nearly identical (visually) to those games. Sure, it’s a different game, it’s got different rules, but if it doesn’t FEEL like a different game to me, I will still feel somewhere inside (no matter how irrationally) that maybe it’s too similar. This is one reason I’m not a big player of card games played with a standard 52 card deck, to be honest — those games just don’t feel different enough from one another to be interesting to me in anything other than an abstract game-theory type way. (Which is not to say that I don’t find them interesting, or won’t play them, only that once I’ve played them enough to feel like I “get” what’s happening, I lose interest very quickly.)

So after being slightly disappointed that I’d missed the Gold rush (as it were), I somehow ended up on a site that features articles by the game’s developer, Shannon Appelcline. I think I’d read some of these posts by him before, possibly What Makes a Great Mobile EuroGame?, or Making Computers Think Like Auction Players, or Turning Reiner Knizia’s Money into an iPhone Game, all of which were apparently written after a specific game release. His most recent post about iPhone board game dev (written just after releasing Gold) was Sweating the Details for iPhone Card Games: Visuals, AIs, and Player Numbers. These articles are definitely worth reading, but ultimately feel a bit too much like thinly veiled marketing to me. They aren’t technical enough to qualify as howto articles, and yet that’s what it feels to me like they’re pretending to be.

As a nice bonus, I found out today that someone I’m ostensibly working with (but have yet to meet), wrote a nice roundup of Go implementations for OSX and iOS. He mentions Smart Go Kifu as the winner for him on the iPad, and that’s been on my appshopper wishlist for some time now. I have yet to pick it up, mostly because it is $20, but it looks to be well worth it, with a database of 33,000 games, 30 of which are even annotated in english. The developer, Smart Go, inc, also has a universal app with a bunch of Go books as in-app purchases. If I had all the time in the world, I would read a book about go on my iPad right now. Instead, it’s about time I go to bed.

I had the pleasure last week of presenting this talk twice, first for the local meetup.com iPhone developer group, and a second time the following Saturday at MinneBar. Here are the slides from the event, embedded for your pleasure:

For the talk, John Hibshire and I also created a spreadsheet listing all the iPhone game frameworks, libraries and SDKs we could find. I’m going to try and keep this data up-to-date, and add any additional projects as I find out about them.

I think my session was recorded, possibly by folks at the Uptake, but I have no idea if that recording is online (as a few others from the event are). If it was, I’ll definitely update this post to link to it, since these slides are pretty useless without my running commentary. There are some nice links in a “Resources” section in the last few slides, so you can enjoy those if nothing else.

UPDATE: I just posted a link to the sample code for this talk on github in a new blog post. The code shows various examples of how to do really basic things in Cocos2D, including using the schedule method to create a game loop, using the CCMenu class, drawing various particle types, and finally, how to write tetris in Objective-C using a Cocos2D texture atlas for the different piece types.

A couple of quickies here:

• First, I’ve been meaning to post a link to Reiner Knizia’s page of all his mobile games for a while now. I didn’t realize until fairly recently that he is on twitter under his own name (@ReinerKnizia). Apparently he is also looking for android developers.
• Secondly, I’ve discovered a really great blog getting posted on Board Game Geek called simply iOS Board Games. They are MUCH better at writing regularly than I am, and also at finding all the juicy details about stuff that is forthcoming, and recently released. BGG has a nice subscription feature, so I get notified whenever there is a new post. (Of course you can subscribe via RSS as well.) Good stuff, and definitely worth following if you are a publisher/creator in this space.

Disclaimer: I do not generally read programming books from start to finish! Instead, I read them much as I would read a blog that I’ve discovered for the first time, skimming the archives (table of contents), and then taking-in the first few sentences of parts that look interesting to me, and bookmarking posts that I want to read in greater depth (dog-earing pages that deserve a second glance). I almost never go back for those second glances, so basically I have a bunch of programming books laying about that look like they’ve been heavily read, when in fact they’ve hardly been cracked. My excuse is that programming books are so seldom relevant past their publish date that keeping them for reference seems silly. If I’m paging through a book’s contents in search of some solution, it usually means I just don’t know the right search terms. When I find some pages that seem relevant, I then turn to the web with my newfound knowledge, and feel vindicated when I find some piece of web-content that appears (at least at first glance) to be superior and more timely.

I do still tend to keep those books around, however, mostly so I can look through their code examples. I find books that consist of mostly code are almost always more interesting than those that try and teach you some general topic. You can usually find nice code examples on the web, of course, but they are seldom explained in as much detail as you would find in one of these “by example” books. In this case, I have in front of me two books that both attempt to teach some topic, but do so with heavy use of examples. They are hybrids, if you will, of books that teach a general topic, and books that consist of mostly code examples. Maybe all programming books exist on a spectrum with pure thought and abstract theory at one end, and pure code (and more easily out-of-date examples) on the other.

The first of these is Professional iPhone and iPad Database Application Programming, by Patrick Alessi, published by Wiley (Wrox) in 2011. With chapter titles like “Introducing Data-Driven Applications”, “The iPhone and iPad Database: SQLite”, “Displaying Your Data: The UITableView”, and “iPad Interface Elements”, you would definitely not know at first glance that this is an example-driven book. In fact, each of those sections (and all the other sections of the book) run you through the creation of a sample project, each building on knowledge gleaned in the previous chapters. The first chapter includes a very nice introduction to Xcode and shows you how to create a simple UITableView based application.

The following chapter, “The iPhone and iPad Database: SQLite”, goes a bit farther down the UITableView rabbit hole with its sample project, and introduces SQLite besides. This chapter definitely endeared me to the author when it said: “While Core Data is the recommended framework for creating data on the iPhone, you may want to forego Core Data and use the SQLite API directly for several reasons.” The author then lists several compelling reasons! This may be a heretical position to take, but avoiding Core Data has always been my preference, although I do occasionally wonder if there are ever good reasons to use Core Data of which I am simply ignorant.

The author does later dedicate five chapters (about a third of the book) to using Core Data, so he can’t think it’s entirely useless. He does not, IMHO, (at least in the cursory skimming I gave that portion of the book), provide any compelling reasons to use Core Data. The closest he comes is when he says (repeatedly) that using the graphical data modeling tool will dramatically speed up the development time of your data driven app. I fail to see how this is the case! If creating your db schema is taking up a lot of your development time, I think you’re probably doing something wrong, or possibly you just aren’t familiar with SQL in general.

(A decent db abstraction layer to handle your SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE etc. calls is also a must, and I am disappointed to report that Alessi’s book does not cover this topic. There is at least one decent open source wrapper available (called FMDB), although there are things I would change about it — namely the API for retrieving your result sets.)

Unfortunately, the portions of the book dedicated to the Core Data modeling tool fall into the “already obsolete” category of coding examples, because they do not appear to cover the Xcode 4 interface. I created a sample project using Core Data to look at the modeling tool, and like Interface Builder, it has been consumed by the “one window” paradigm prevalent in all things Xcode 4. Reading the first couple of chapters on Core Data will probably give you the base knowledge needed to use it anyway, but as I said earlier, google can probably do a better job.

The last third of the book consists of a couple of chapters about integration with web services. This topic makes a lot of sense to include in a book about data-driven applications, but it’s definitely given less attention than the previous two sections. I really think the book should have been expanded quite a bit, both to go into more detail about the stuff it does cover, and also to cover additional stuff that was notably absent. Off the top of my head, here are headings I would have liked to see: best practices for storing data retrieved from web services, how to deal with syncing issues, common tools for consuming web services, and at least one code example for parsing and consuming JSON. Unfortunately, JSON is given only a cursory mention, and its superiority to XML for the task at hand is not, as I feel it it should have been, firmly established.

In the beginning of chapter 10, “Working with XML on the iPhone”, there is a section called Synchronous Data Retrieval, in which some lip service is given to NSString‘s stringWithContentsOfURL: selector blocking your UI, but then it is not made clear that the subsequent code examples (using NSURL and NSURLRequest) are asynchronous in nature! Also, on the topic of “common tools”, the book pretty much writes everything from scratch in this section. I can understand the impulse that the author may have had to explain all the gory details of xml parsing and NSURLRequests without complicating matters by introducing open source libraries that simplify these processes, but they save far more time than I’m liable to believe you can save by using Core Data. If you are consuming web services from your app, you would be stupid not to use (or at least look at) ASIHTTPRequest. That little project has probably saved me dozens of hours in the last three months. On the subject of XML parsing, the question is not whether you should use an external parser, but rather which XML parser is right for your needs!

Overall, I didn’t expect to read as much of Professional iPhone and iPad Database Application Programming in detail as I ended up reading for this review. I don’t know how much of that was due to wanting to give it a fair read in spite of my bias against using Core Data, and how much was due to the author’s really well written prose. Database applications is about as dry a subject as they come, and yet I never felt lulled to sleep in the way that many programming books have a tendency to do to me. If you are not familiar with SQLite, or programming for UITableView, I would definitely highly recommend the first four chapters of the book. As for whether they are worth the asking price, (currently $30 on amazon), I’ll leave that up to you.

Unfortunately, I think I’m going to have to leave any in-depth review of my second learn-by-example iOS book for another day: Learning iOS Game Programming: A Hands-On Guide to Building your First iPhone Game, by Michael Daley, published by Addison Wesley in 2011. This book takes you through the author’s process of building an iOS game from start to finish. The game you build, Sir Lamorak’s Quest, is available as a free download from the app store, so you could potentially download it and see if it’s got stuff in it you’d like to know about. I haven’t actually looked at the game for more than a minute or two, but I know from personal experience that parsing through the source code of a game, even one I have no interest in ever making, is always fascinating to me, so I’m quite excited to dig into this book.

In the future, the ostensible purpose of this blog (the intersection of board games and computer games) will be a moot point. All board games will have some kind of computer component, and those that don’t will not have one as an aesthetic choice, rather than because it’s prohibitively expensive, or because the interface doesn’t exist, or for the myriad of other reasons today’s board games do not have a computer component. In the mean time, there will be more and more devices that bridge the gap, becoming essentially computers on which you can play board games (the iPad, for example), or board games on which you play video games. I would argue that Sifteo is the first in the latter category of devices.

A brief introduction

If you haven’t heard of sifteo yet, it’s a small company formed by a couple of guys who met at the MIT Media Lab. The term Sifteo refers to both the company and their product, small-ish square tiles (a little over 1.5 inches on a side), which may also be referred to as Sifteo cubes. The cubes (though not technically cubes they are not as tall as they are wide), have a low resolution screen on the top, and contain a bevy of sensors that can detect motion, orientation, and most importantly, their close proximity to the other cubes. Essentially, the important game mechanic here is that you can touch the sides of two cubes together, and the game will “know” that they are touching, and on which sides they are touching. (I believe magnets are used for this.)

I should say up front that Sifteo cubes haven’t even been released to the general public yet. Those of us who have them are essentially part of Sifteo’s beta program. They’re calling it “Early Access”. Essentially, they sold some cubes (probably 1,000 sets of 3) to folks during CES, which was a sort of preview launch. They sold them online, which is how I got a set, even though I didn’t go to CES this year.

My impressions: the short version

Overall, my impression that there is A LOT of potential in these little cubes. Sifteo has a great product on their hands, but unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to be a hit product without some notable modifications. I hope (and it seems probable) that Sifteo will have the chance (and wherewithal) to fix some of these issues in subsequent versions of their product. If they do, this could easily be very big, and Sifteo has the potential to compete with other hand-held gaming systems like the DS or PSP. The cubes themselves are pretty great, but have some notable limitations (see my detailed beefs below). The overall product, unfortunately, requires a computer to be running custom software (called Siftrunner) while you play, and a wifi dongle to communicate with the cubes. The software then pushes out whatever game you’ve chosen to play to the cubes. The game choices are pretty limited right now, and unfortunately, mostly fairly mediocre. I’ll go into more of the software in detail below, but the one game they chose to include in your purchase price is called Chroma Shuffle, and is actually really great. It manages to show off many of the device capabilities really well, and had me sucked-in for hours the night I finally got my cubes up and running.

Summary of my summary: not great, but enormous potential.

My complaints

This is a new technology, so I tend to naturally get more excited about it as a result. That having been said, I found a lot to complain about with these cubes.

Viewing angle. First thing first, the viewing angle on the cube screens is not great. In fact, by not great, I mean downright bad. As with cheap cell phones and other screens of this low resolution, when the angle is off, the colors are off, and in a game like Chroma Shuffle, where you are matching colors, it can get really frustrating. This is “enhanced” by the fact that you’re constantly moving the cubes around, and while you move them around, you might end up moving one farther away than the others (thus changing your viewing angle).

Color consistency. Very closely related to my previous complaint, the color on all my cubes even under the best viewing circumstances is actually not exactly the same. One cube is slightly “dimmer” than the others, and while it wouldn’t normally matter all that much, this type of quality difference is frustrating while playing a game where you’re intensely matching colors.

You have to have Siftrunner running. This was probably a calculated risk on the part of the Sifteo. I have read someone elsewhere say that it takes Sifteo out of the realm of a mass consumer product (suitable for Target and Walmart) and into the realm of a “geek” product (suitable for Think Geek, or maybe Game Stop). It’s definitely something you probably wouldn’t buy unless you are already comfortable with gaming on your computer. Don’t get me wrong, that’s still a giant market, but Sifteo cubes are really aimed (in their marketing so far anyway, but also in the games they’ve produced) at the casual gamer market. I think Siftrunner was designed pretty well, and it’s dead-easy to install, but you still have to have it running to play. Ideally, we would see an iOS version of Siftrunner (and fine, yes, Android also), and we would get rid of the required USB dongle. The iOS version is likely (if I had to guess, which I do), but to get rid of the USB dongle, they’d have to release a second version of the hardware, I think. So that seems a lot less likely, at least in the near future. (It’s also possible the dongle is seen as a “security feature”, as we don’t get a chance to packet sniff their traffic to the cubes when it’s going through their custom USB thingamabob.)

Graphics are old school… really old school. The graphics for all the games I’ve played so far consist of VERY simple animations. I don’t know what we’re going to see in the future, but for now at least, I have to assume that the hardware is simply not capable of very much in the way of animation. It would have been really nice to see some 3D graphics (maybe a bouncing a 3d-looking ball around the cubes or something), just to prove that it can be done. Without a tech demo of that kind, I sort of have to assume we’re limited to simple 2D animations, and that really just seems like a missed opportunity.

The current game selection. This will no doubt change in the very near future (Sifteo has said on their Early Access forums that they intend to release a new game at least one every two weeks.), but the game selection right now seems aimed about 70% at children under 12. Even Chroma Shuffle, the game I most enjoy, is pretty simplistic. (I’ll let this segue into more about all the games below.)

The games

The games are purchasable from right inside Siftrunner. They range in price from free (what they call “lab” games,) to $8 (800 points) for what are presumably the best experiences Sifteo has to offer. You don’t spend money directly on games, you first buy points, and right now you can buy points in $5 increments. There are really only three games in the store at the $8 price range, Chroma Shuffle (although, again, this came with the purchase price for us Early Access folks), Booker the Penguin, and Mount Braniac. I haven’t purchased Mount Brainiac, but the description is as follows:

Mount Brainiac is a suite of games that will help children practice their spelling and math skills. With six different exercises for kids aged 5-8, Mount Brainiac gets more challenging as children get older. Exercise your mental muscles and climb the mountain!

I’ll probably purchase this game sooner or later just to check it out, but it doesn’t exactly sound like something I would play over and over again. I’m not the target audience. (And it’ll be another 5 years before my daughter is the recommended 6 years of age.)

I have already spoken briefly a bit about Chroma Shuffle, but I’ll go into a bit more detail now. Essentially, it’s a matching tile puzzle game similar to a match-3, but more in the vein of the Collapse! series of games. Each tile holds a 4×4 grid of circles. There might be several different colors of circle on each tile. You then have to match tile edges together in order to match colors along the edge of the tiles. When two colors match, those circles are removed, and then subsequently any additional circles matching that color adjacent to the original matching circles. The more circles in the group that is matched, the more points you get for removing them. You can match circles on more than two tiles at once by pushing them together at the same time. It seems like there is some “slop” in this matching, so it’s fairly easy to match a group on all three tiles.

The core game mechanic of looking for matching edges of the tiles is pretty fun, and the logical/thinking aspect of the game is enhanced by allowing you to tilt the tiles and shift all the circles toward the downward facing edge. When you get to the higher levels, there are circles outlined in a square that cannot be shifted in this way, and that’s when things really get interesting.

Chroma Shuffle has two basic game modes, Puzzle and Arcade. You start off only playing puzzle, and it introduces you to the game concepts by spoon feeding you them in a few tutorial puzzles. You never really feel spoon fed, however, and the game’s pace increases until the puzzles do actually get pretty decently difficult. Unfortunately, that’s probably not until around puzzle number 20, and there are only 26 puzzles in total. There is also a random puzzle mode, and that actually generates random puzzles.

Arcade mode consists of either Timer or Flips mode. In Arcade, you essentially match all the circles in a tile, and then flip it over to refill it with more colors. The longer you play, the more colors appear and the harder it is to not get “stuck” with a square piece in the middle of the tile (away from the edges where you could match it easily). Timed ends when you haven’t made a match after a certain length of time, and Flips ends when you’ve flipped each of the tiles three times (without clearing them first). I’ve only played Flips once, and my game took probably an hour to finish. I didn’t want to stop playing because I didn’t know if my game would be saved when I did. I should experiment with that to find out what happens when you “stop” Siftrunner when you have a game in progress.

The third game at the $8 price range is called Booker the Penguin. This is a very simple action game where you’re in control of a penguin character that is essentially running through a 2D maze made of roads. Each of the tiles that doesn’t have the penguin on it shows the shape of a road. When one of those tiles is placed next to the tile with Booker on it, Booker will run toward that tile, and it becomes the new tile to put your other tiles up against. There is an Adventure mode here that gets progressively harder, where in the first few levels you are just running around collecting eggs, and then eventually they introduce an owlbear that is trying to eat you. The hardest part about the owlbear is not so much that you have a shorter time in which to make decisions about which tile to play, but actually that you are limited in the direction in which you can move. If you accidentally go back, the owlbear is there waiting to eat you. It really limits your options, which is good, because the game definitely feels “too easy” in the beginning. I probably haven’t played it enough yet, because I haven’t played through the purported 11 levels of Adventure Mode. There is also an Endless mode, which I have yet to try, and a mode where you play as the owlbear, trying to eat all the little penguins.

As I said, I still need to give a bit more time to Booker before I make a final judgement, but my initial impressions were just that it was too simple to be that much fun. Later levels add some complexity, but I’m not feeling it yet.

The next pricing tier of games consists of a single kid’s story game for $4 called Oogor’s day. I haven’t picked it up yet, but here’s the (intriguing) description:

Oogor’s Day is a storytelling game that lets you do more than just choose the course of the adventure – it lets you control it directly. Use your Sifteo cubes to bring characters to life and have them interact with each other. Your actions will influence the flow of the story. How will Oogor’s day go? It’s all up to you.

After Oogor’s day, there are a few games/apps for a dollar. A tile shuffling game called No Evil Monkeys, (think of the picture puzzles where you have to re-arrange a puzzle by sliding tiles into the empty spot on the board), a simon-says style speed/reaction game called Do the Sift, and a word game called Word Play. No Evil Monkeys is made more difficult because you can easily get frustratingly lost with all three tiles involved. Orientation is also a factor, and some of the quadrants of the images are actually ambiguous as to which orientation is the right one.

Do the Sift runs you through ten repetitions/turns where it tells you what you need to do to advance to the next turn. It might be flipping the tile over, or just tilting it a bit, shaking it, making sure all the tiles are touching, or any number of other things. I think this is another fun game that shows off the device capabilities pretty well. I’m fairly certain it was designed to do just that. My main complaint is that it (again) doesn’t really get difficult fast enough. The first 10 levels are fairly slow, and each subsequent 10 levels speeds the game up slightly, although it doesn’t appear to get more difficult in terms of what actions you’re asked to perform or anything like that.

Finally, I haven’t purchased Word Play, so I can’t really speak to it, but the description doesn’t really inspire me:

Word Play is the definitive word game for Sifteo cubes. Arrange your cubes to spell as many words as possible in the time given. Play Explore mode to practice, or Score mode to go after the high score. Challenge your friends and expand your vocabulary!

I play a lot of word games, and yet another one where you’re just seeing what words you can make with a combination of letters doesn’t seem all that innovative or appealing. Just because it’s a new platform doesn’t mean you should re-write a game that’s been done to death already.

Conclusion

The jury is still out! I absolutely love the concept, and really want Sifteo cubes to be successful, but as you have just read, I think the current implementation has a lot of problems. None of these are overwhelming problems, but when summed together, the product doesn’t feel ready yet. A few more games of Chroma Shuffle’s caliber, and it might feel “good enough” to launch, but I’m glad this is an “Early Access”, and not the final product.

When I first heard about Sifteo, just before the CES pre-order, I read on some forum somewhere about another company with a very similar product in Europe. After trying various google searches for the last hour, I haven’t been able to find reference to that other company in the avalanche of Sifteo press. This is both a good thing (yay Sifteo!) but also a bad thing, because I’d like to see some competition in this space to liven things up. I do believe this is one of those “this is the future” moments. If Sifteo plays their cards right, they could be the next big tabletop gaming phenomena.

The idea of Tetris as a physical board game is not a new idea. (I have a small collection of them.) While visiting Kotaku tonight, I found an intriguing post about two new Tetris board games showcased at the Toy Fair 2011 in New York City.

First I’ll mention Tetris Link, a stand-up version of Tetris for up to four players. The gameplay here is not about breaking lines. You get one color, (and presumably all the shapes), and you try and connect up your pieces while preventing your opponents from doing the same. I’m not exactly blown away by the originality here, although I suppose none of the other Tetris board games have been all that ground breaking either, but at least this could have had a hint of strategy in it, if they hadn’t introduced a die that you use to determine which piece you get to drop. I mean, sure, I’d buy it just for the die with Tetris shapes on it, but do I want to play a game with that mechanic in it? Not really. Fortunately, I’m sure it won’t be too hard to make up some slightly more thought-provoking rules about when you get to drop what pieces.

Tetris Link won’t be hitting stores until sometime later this year, and it sounds like it’ll be exclusive to B&N before it hits shelves everywhere. I don’t know if I’ll even remember to look for it at B&N, so it could be quite a while before I get this one. Also, I pilfered the photo above from Tetris Link’s facebook page, where it looks like they had some giant Tetris pieces to play with, as illustrated by these Tetris booth babes. (There were a lot more photos like that one on Facebook. Shameless, or fun? You decide.) You can also register to win a copy from the Facebook page (at least for the next day or two).

This is the one I feel is a MUST HAVE (although, lets be honest here, I’m obviously a collector, and I’ll be getting them both). The game, which may or may not be called simply “Tetris the Card Game“, is apparently getting made by Fundex, the same folks who made five billion versions of Phase 10. Apologies for the bad video still, but I simply wasn’t able to find out much of anything about this game! I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy, and the video says they’re available now!!! Chances are that it’ll be in Target (based on the Phase 10 connection) and all over the place, but I’ll be damned if I can find it anywhere online tonight. When I get access to some actual product information, I’ll have to post it here (as well as at boardgamegeek, which is still unaware this product exists). This is appealing to me for a lot of reasons, but mainly because it looks kind of like a multiplayer puzzle mode for Tetris.

In my scouring the internet for the above card game, I eventually remembered to try the official Tetris site, where I’d forgotten they do occasionally post some pretty interesting Tetris related news items. Some quick links to things I missed in the last year or so since I’d been on there:

• I’m very, very tempted to buy some of these awesome giant Tetris wall stickers for my daughter’s bedroom.
• The Escapist (though not Yahtzee, unfortunately), wrote a nice long article about Tetris that I have yet to fully absorb/enjoy.
• Something not linked by tetris.com, a video trying to raise awareness about takedown notices being issued against videos of “fan-made tetromino games”. This makes me wonder if there are any videos floating around out there of Go Tetris. Someday I’ll finish Action Go (the mobile version of Go Tetris), and make a promo video. Someday.
• Another Kotaku video, this one of Tetris Giant, a $10,000 arcade cabinet made by Sega, with giant control sticks and a few (new to me) Tetris variants using a six-column-wide gameboard. This post is from November 2009, so I’m a bit disappointed we haven’t seen Tetris Giant released to consumers on some other platform by now.

Visit the Kotaku post for videos of both of the new board/card games in action.

I found out this morning that I missed this cool google logo last year for the 25th anniversary of Tetris.

It’s not quite as cool as when you could actually play pac man in their logo, but still, pretty cool.

As far as I can tell, they’ve never had a chess themed google logo.

As extra incentive for myself (and possibly to drum up some pre-release interest in the next version), I’ve changed the price of ActionChess in the app store to free.

The next version will have Game Center support, as well as retina display graphics and iOS 4 multitasking.

It’s really very close to complete. I just need to copy over all the achievements (there are over 50 of them) from OpenFeint to Game Center. I’m hoping to get to that this weekend.

Thanks for downloading!

Here are some pictures and links to the iPhone compatible game controller projects that I was able to find while searching today.

iControlPad

Of all the potential products listed here, the iControlPad seems most likely to actually be purchasable in the near future. (The creator is tweeting about his progress, and there is some amount of manual assembly required. He’s going for an initial run of 2000, and he’s at least partially completed with 500 of them.) In addition to the photo below, there is also a nice video of an iControlPad prototype in action.

Unfortunately, there are two main drawbacks to this device as I see it. Firstly, it’s jailbreak only. Now it may turn out that all of these devices are jailbreak only, but this one is very up-front about it. Second is the design itself. I don’t really like the form factor, and even in the demo video linked above, it looks like the user has his thumbs scrunched too close together to get at those analog sticks. I’m guessing the d-pad will feel more natural to use. Of course I reserve final judgment until I’ve actually played with one. ;)

GameBone

The GameBone also seems like they’re poised to release. The website says it’ll be available for purchase in Q4 2010. So far, the only photos are “artist renderings”, but the company have many other iPhone accessories for sale, so it seems likely that they’re the real deal. I also have some frustrations with their design, namely the lack of any analog controls whatsoever. Still, they are the only one of these projects that even mentions attempting to get the “Made for iPhone” seal of approval from Apple. That would go a long way toward making it a viable commercial product.

Controller or Bust

I recently saw the Controller or Bust Project featured on TouchArcade, (that’s actually what prompted this blog post) and after checking it out some, I do like some elements of their latest design more than the competition. For instance, the form factor is not that much bigger than the iPhone is already. The dual analog sticks are symmetrically placed (as they should be, IMHO), and you can potentially flip it upside down for the analog sticks on the bottom or the top of the controller. I also like how they’ve tackled enclosing the phone quite a bit. Unfortunately, this project is probably the farthest from an actual product at this point. They’re talking about using kickstarter, but I’d really want to see a prototype (at least!) before I committed to giving them any money.

iPhone Game Pad

Finally, It looks like the iPhone Game Pad is little more than a prototype at this point (but that’s more than the Controller or Bust project!), but as you can see, their demo video is pretty sweet looking:

Let us know if you have information about any additional iPhone game controller accessories, either in the comments, or by emailing us at info@chesstris.com.

I’ve been brainstorming ways to overcome the visibility problem in the App store. When releasing an iPhone application, visibility in the app store is your biggest problem. It is very easy for an app to get “buried” in the store. There are literally hundreds of applications that are launched on a daily basis. How to get the potential customer to “discover” your application is the key question that must be answered after (or when considering) development for the iOS platform. It’s worth noting, however, that the vast majority of the applications released daily are really awful, so the sheer number alone should not be a deterrent. (Yet, those crap apps are often what pushes down the visibility threshold for the rest of us.)

I am not claiming that I came up with the following solutions and/or techniques, just documenting them here for my own brainstorming purposes.

Solution 1: Marketing a recognizable name. Having a title that people recognize is certainly key. In fact, that’s the basis for any marketing effort. Get more people to recognize your product, and they will be more likely to purchase it. If you start with an existing product, it’s possible you could leverage the community that is familiar with said product (for instance, fans of a board game, if that’s what you’re making). These fans would help generate “buzz” before the game’s release, as well as ensure you have some target market upon the game’s release. This also opens up an important secondary channel for application discovery, through traditional marketing to those existing fans, whether it’s in print advertising, or online targeted marketing. (Second to discovery in the app store itself, which is by far the most effective at selling your application.) Traditional board game marketing avenues, for instance, would include Board Game Geek, (of course) traditional board game review sites or blogs, (banner ads, or better yet, actually getting reviews). Even if only a fraction of your audience have iPhones, that visibility would not be wasted.

Solution 2: Getting reviews. Another important marketing strategy is to email and otherwise contact the large number of iPhone app review sites out there. (I personally maintain a spreadsheet with a list of over 100 iOS review sites.) The most important of these by far is Touch Arcade, who also maintain a fairly influential online forum with discussion threads on almost every game for the iPhone that is released. (I think this is probably the most well known and documented of my solutions, but I’m including it here for consistency. Even though I maintain that list, I still have never sent out the press releases required for this step for ActionChess. I keep saying I’ll do it after the next major update… and maybe I will!)

Solution 3: Visual affluence. Having a very “nice looking” game will have a couple of possible effects: 1) iPhone owners (as well as Apple computer owners in general) are probably biased toward excellent design. It is certainly how Apple have continued to differentiate themselves in the desktop market, and one of the key reasons oft cited for the iPhone’s runaway success. Simply put, Apple customers are more apt to purchase a game because of how pretty it looks. It’s obvious that Apple knows this, and that it contributes to the following secondary effect: 2) Apple is more likely to “feature” a good looking app than one with the same functionality that does not look as great. There is quite a bit of precedent for this, but essentially, if your app looks good enough, it is much more likely to make it onto the front pages of the App store. (See next solution.)

Solution 4: Getting featured by apple. This is the equivalent of getting your physical product into one of the major retailers. (Target or Wallmart, for example.) You will sell hundreds, or even thousands of copies per day. In fact, getting reviews onto as many review sites as possible is not so much to get customers aware of your product, although that certainly helps, but to get the folks at Apple more aware of your product, and thus, more likely to feature it.

There are probably a lot more solutions out there. Noel of Snappy Touch has had a lot of success with in-app purchases and setting the price of his app to free. He and some other indie developers do a lot of cross-promotion that has proven successful for them as well. (I’ve read someplace that having more than one app in the app store, and cross-promoting them has a very noticeable effect on sales. Wish I could remember where.) Anyway, this isn’t comprehensive. Feel free to post your suggestions in the comments here.