ActionChess & Go Tetris!

I just completed the long and rather arduous task of submitting ActionChess to apple. I think everything went well. The hard part was generating a new development “code signing certificate”, and getting that all hooked into xcode and building the game again using the new certificate. This seemed to go off without a hitch. I guess gathering all the “stuff” necessary for submission was also a chore, particularly the 512×512 pixel “large version” of the icon. Since I was working from tiny icons when I built the icon for the game, scaling it up looked mostly awful. I just have to hope that the only place it’s used is in the game description page in iTunes, where it appears to be scaled down quite a bit.

I also gathered a bunch of screenshots, and took the 5 that I thought were the best to include with the game. I didn’t spend terribly long on that portion, so I don’t know that the screenshots are really all that great. (Read more to see all the ones I chose.)

I also created a new page on this website withe the current game description.

Read the rest of this entry »

For ActionChess, I’ve licensed Peter Wong’s awesome Chess icons available over at http://www.virtualpieces.net/. The icons are available for download for “personal use” as icons on your computer in a variety of formats. Hopefully ActionChess puts them to good use!

The game formerly known as Chesstris is finally nearing completion! ActionChess is a cross between Tetris Attack (Panel de Pon), Tetris, and the classic board game Chess. It turns out to really make your brain work in interesting ways. It will be released for the iPhone sometime in the coming weeks, and if it does really well, I may think about porting a limited version to flash.

Please comment below (or send me an email) if you’d like to put on the ActionChess announce list, where I’ll be letting everyone know when the game finally hits the app store.

I’m continually surprised by the great games that are being released for the iPhone. I thought I’d do some quick reviews of two that I feel have made real innovative enhancements to the match-3 genre of puzzle games.

MixADot
This is a game I downloaded only just today. I noticed it because it just changed to free, and I’ve been watching the apps that come down in price regularly over at 148 Apps. But enough about how I discovered it. It adds several new game mechanics to the match-3 paradigm. Most notable, in my opinion, is the ability to merge pieces that are different colors to form a new color. This can only be done with the yellow, blue and red pieces, to form any of the other three colors, green, orange or purple. It’s a brilliant addition, and really does make you think quite a bit about the additional possibilities. There are at least two different shapes of piece, circles and squares. The game is played in a series of levels, and each one has a different objective, for example, an objective might be something like “5 Orange Sequences of 3 or more (blocks only)”. Each level is a sort of mini-match-3 game, some with infinite pieces (like bejeweled), and some where you just make matches until the pieces run out. At free, this game is well worth a download.

…and…

Gem Spinner
In contrast, I discovered Gem Spinner over a month ago. This game is thematically a lot more like bejeweled (obviously, there are gems in it), but the big innovation here is that the board is divided up into areas, and double clicking on a piece in one of those areas causes all the gems in that area to rotate 180 degrees in relation to one another. Gems can only be swapped to match 3 within an area, they cannot cross over into other areas. Also, each square in an area will change color slightly once a match has been made in it. This is a lot like another popular match-3 franchise, Jewel Quest, only in this game, when a whole area of gems has changed color, it is removed from the game, and you can then drag and drop the remaining areas all over the game board. It felt overly complicated for all of about two minutes, but it didn’t take long for it to really become intuitive, and the added complexity makes for some really brain-burning puzzle game fun.

In conclusion, neither of these games are probably going to “hit it big” with the masses. They both suffer from pretty mediocre graphics and are probably a little too complicated for the average (read “beginner”) casual gamer. I guess what I mean is that you have to already be familiar with match-3 games before you can start to wrap your head around the concepts in these games. But it’s precisely this additional complexity and added strategy that has, against all odds, gotten me excited about a match-3 game once again.

For the record, I feel I should throw a shout out to my Wife’s favorite match-3 game on the iPhone, (and probably the only one she’s ever played, ChocChocPop. There’s nothing terribly innovative about it, but it’s got a great theme (you’re matching chocolate candies), and has the best design of any simple match-3 game I’ve seen yet for the iPhone. I think it may actually be the only game she has on her phone.

Yesterday I thought up a new phrase to describe the kinds of puzzle games I’m referring to when I say “action puzzle games”: recursive puzzle games. Read on for a lengthy discussion about puzzle games, naming conventions, and board game inspirations.

Read the rest of this entry »

Very minor release today (1.1). I just fixed the bug where you couldn’t press “M” when entering your name at the end of the game. (Because it took you to the main menu instead. Oops.)

I also registered Go-Tetris.com, which simply redirects to the game page for now. I’m thinking I’ll probably offload go-tetris onto it’s domain when I get some free cycles. I was going to do this today, but I forgot that I’m using chesstris’s database for the high scores, and I’m not sure if flash will transmit the high scores correctly across domains, so I’ll want to do some testing before I make that plunge.

A lot has changed in this new version, and it feels to me like a whole new Go Tetris!

The new features include two new Game Modes (“Fast” and “One Color”), multi-space eyes, keyboard menu navigation, in-flash tutorial (that still needs a bit of work), and a bunch of bugs fixed behind the scenes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is the latest version of Go Tetris! (1.1), created by Martin Grider. This page will be update periodically with new versions. Thanks for playing!

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello Everyone! I’m very close to releasing a new version. I’ve got eyes larger than one space working, but I want to make some progress on the phantom bug I’ve written about earlier before I post this new release.

I’m really just writing to let you all know that I haven’t disappeared completely off the face of the planet. Most of my free time lately has been taken up with wedding preparations. Those are coming along great, but unfortunately, that doesn’t leave a lot of free time for game development.

I’m curious if anyone reading this would be interested in helping with Go Tetris!? I’m considering releasing most of the code as open source, and wonder if there is interest. If that is you, let me know, thanks!

Thanks for your patience!

Here’s what “alpha” means to me: Not yet “feature complete”. Also, buggy.

I’ve spent nearly all afternoon trying to reproduce the “phantom stones” issue. Stones that appear, after a Living group is removed from the board, hanging in the middle of nowhere. When you try and set something down on them, it’s as if they’re not even there. Great fun.

I did finally reproduce it, and have some small amount of further information, but no idea why it happened in this particular instance and not the dozens of times I had captured living stones in the same game before.

Long story short, if you experience this particular bug, and you think you might know why, or how to reproduce it reliably, please leave a comment below.

Thanks!