ActionChess & Go Tetris!

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.

Here is an extremely belated note to let everyone who reads this website know about my twitter account. I’m username livingtech over there.

In related social networking news, I also started a page for ActionChess on Facebook. You can become a fan! (At present, this serves no purpose, but I may do contests or something with it in the future.)

I made this short presentation for my 15 minutes of fame at the local IGDA meeting last night. Enjoy.

I’ve finally gotten around to creating a gameplay video for ActionChess. It stars the finger (and iPhone) of my lovely wife Florence.

ActionChess Demo from Martin Grider on Vimeo.

Just thought I’d write a quick note to let you all know that the bug-fix-only release has hit both ActionChess and ActionChess Lite today. (Yesterday now.) I don’t think I’ll have the next update submitted until at least this weekend. I’m planning on at least one of the following features (but hopefully all of them) in the next update:

• A new game mode: Puzzle Mode
• Global High Scores (working with GeoCade)
• Multiple Game Saves (one per game mode)

Realistically, if I shoot for all of them (and I am), it might not be until the following weekend. But we’ll see. I’ll keep you posted.

Update (5-10): I may have been a bit ambitious guestimating two weeks for these three features. It’s been two weeks now, and I’m partway through all of them. I should finish the multiple saves tonight. Maybe I’ll push that to apple for approval before the other two, but I’m not sure yet. So far, I’ve got about a half-dozen puzzles for puzzle mode. It’s harder to make puzzles than it is to solve them, but I’m far enough along that I’m now confident it’s worth the effort. My only worry is that it may be difficult for me to make mid-level difficulty puzzles. So far all of them have been really easy, or really pretty hard. We’ll see. I’d like to launch the feature with 100 puzzles. I don’t know how realistic that is, but it’s my goal for now.

I still haven’t sent out the ActionChess press release to any of the iPhone app review sites I’ve been cataloging, but my list is a lot more complete thanks to some additions and suggestions made by Ben over at Spigot Games.

Anyway, onto the numbers (after the link).

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m guessing this will be big news soon if it’s true, but the new iPhone game Mad Cow Fury (app store link) claims to have been written by a 13 year old boy, Nicholas Weintraut.

That’s right, all this stuff it’s taken me months to learn… yeah, a 13 year old kid can also do it.

In other news, John Bauer and myself are starting a Minnesota iPhone Users’ Group. He registered iphone.mn, and we’re going to make it the source for news about where and when we’ll meet when we figure that out. Right now we’re thinking about getting together every other week or so. We’ll probably just sit in a coffee shop and code. Let us know if you’d like to join.

Maybe Nicholas is from MN, and he’ll come hang out with us.

So I’ve been working on a list of Match-3 games for the iPhone for a few weeks now. So far the list is up to 52 entries. And this is without including any “falling blocks” games, (columns or dr. mario style games would qualify as match-3 by some definitions), or any Zuma style “shooting match” games, both of which there are many. I’m also not counting the Fuzzle style make 5 by moving 1 piece at a time games.

This is my first link to a “published” google spreadsheet, and I think it looks rather nice. In that vein, I think I’ll also publish the list I’m working on of iPhone review sites.

Please let me know if you have any additions or suggestions for either list!

ActionChess 0.1.1 was released last Thursday (along with ActionChess Lite). I submitted another update to ActionChess tonight that fixes a bunch of bugs (see below). I think ActionChess Lite will probably lag a day or two behind it, since I just need to port these changes to it. I wanted to get a lot more into the second ActionChess update, (how about a new game mode or two?!?), but alas it was just not to be. I had too much going on this weekend, and too many bugs to squash.

Here’s the changelog:

* fixed bug with saving multiple high scores after a game
* fixed can click start game from the info screen (and possibly config)
* fixed can click “(opens in safari)” text to open a text input box
* fixed game didn’t save when sleep button is pressed
* replaced Icon.png with better render

Special thanks go out to my friend and co-worker Justin (Dez) for finding a lot of these bugs the day the update was released. Thanks Dez!