Here’s a proof of concept for Greater Gator, a game that could measure basic mastery of ‘greater than’ and ‘less than’.
From the Blog
I just bought an iPad app called Multiponk.
First, an observation: The gameplay hardly changes at all. Once you’ve played it for a minute, you pretty much have played it for an hour. But in spite of this it’s pretty fun, and it’s getting downloaded a ton. A couple of potential factors and just some general observations, particularly about the single player mode:
Gorgeous Graphics
Visually it’s beyond beautiful. Just really good looking. It’s the type of visual polish that makes me want to buy the app without even investigating it that much (which is exactly what I did).
Changing graphics and sound to extend gameplay
They are able to spread a few basic interactions over multiple levels by changing little more than the graphics and sound. It allows them to slow down the player’s progression through the game and wait longer before introducing new objects. From the perspective of a developer, that is huge. It’s precisely what I struggle with in designing a game: How do you build a game that gives rich, deep gameplay without having to be constantly coming up with and building new interactions? New game mechanics are complex to create and implement successfully. Once the mechanic has been established, you move to level-building, which is a little easier. Time consuming, to be sure, but not nearly as technically complex. And finally, on the other end of the spectrum, art and sound assets. Once the aesthetic has been established, art and sound is simple in that it doesn’t typically require changing the technical architecture of the game in order to create and amend. This isn’t to say they aren’t time-consuming or important. Like I said, good art is half the reason I paid money for the app in spite of having done zero research.
Linear progression as a design choice
The level progression here is on rails, in other words, it progresses in a linear fashion instead of allowing the user to branch out, go back and choose and replay different levels a la Angry Birds. Once you’ve passed it you can’t go back, you just go to the next level. Which kind of makes sense for this type of game – It’s more about moving forward and seeing what challenge is next than it is about replaying (or skipping to) a particularly good level. Moreover, when the actual layout of the arena doesn’t change from level to level, this linear level progression is what you’d expect.
For some reason I found that playing this game resolved a few issues I had struggled with when trying to work out the progression in Factor Samurai, which we released at the end of last summer. If we were to make a run at deepening Factor Samurai’s gameplay in a future update, I feel better equipped having thought about the design decisions the went into Multiponk.
Thanks, Fingerlab, for producing such a polished and enjoyable game!
A good friend of mine, @JNWhiting, who follows the Ed Tech space pretty closely just emailed me a link to last night’s 60 Minutes, which was all about how iPads are changing the way kids with autism are able to learn and communicate. Featured prominently, at about minute 6 and again at about minute 12:15, is our dear little Alphabet Zoo, the experiment that started it all.
Jake Gundersen, one of our programmers, contributed to a new book that came out today. iOS5 by Tutorials. It’s the latest project from the popular game development blog, raywenderlich.com.
We use Corona here at Third Rail Games. It makes our lives easier. One way it makes things easier is the community. The Corona community provides code, feedback, and forums. If you spend some time with all the resources that are available you can quickly become a proficient game developer.
We first started looking at using Corona maybe six or so months ago. I (Jake) was working heavily on another of our titles, Alphabet Zoo. I needed a small project that I could use to get into Corona, learn how to use it, and have something to show for it.
The devs at Ansca were consistently putting out sample code in the form of clones of popular game mechanics. They have an angry birds style game, a flight control game, side scrolling games, and then, fruit ninja style game. When I saw the fruit ninja game, I thought, is there a way to quickly turn that into something educational. Factor Samurai was born.
Because the sample code did a bunch of the work for me, I spent about a week coming up with a prototype. Most of that week was spent learning Corona, I had no prior experience with it. The initial game was about prototype was only about 500 lines of code, pretty small really. Here’s what I came up with:
I got the game to this point and I had been talking with a company that I had collaborated in the past with, Apprepro. I engaged them to do the art for the app. This video was sent to them for an idea of how the game would function.
When the art came back it looked great.
Here’s what the final looks like:
We added some features, tweaked the slash mechanic and further refined the gameplay. At this point it took about another six weeks to finalize the design and coding work.
We added bitmap fonts that gave the numbers the look they currently have. We used a tool called Glyph Designer for this. If anyone needs a really easy way to make text look great, I’d recommend looking at it.
We used some community code for the multiple layered scrolling in the background and to import the bitmap font files created by Glyph Designer.
However, most of that time was spent play testing and playing with the design. The actual coding of this project was made pretty easy by the availability of the sample code we used from Ansca and the great tools available.
You can get Factor Samurai here.
Yesterday was a great day at TRG. Our latest release, Factor Samurai is currently in the top 30 of the iTunes charts, both on the iPhone and iPad platform in the education category. We’re glad that so many have had a chance to check out our game. We’ve put together a quick video for those of you who’d like to see the game in action.
I love using Corona SDK. It’s fast and simple, and it’s easy to learn. Within a couple hours of opening it up for the first time, I had coded a basic educational game from scratch with no prior knowledge of the Corona libraries or of the Lua language. And so I dedicate this quick post to any fellow aspiring iOS developer getting ready to leave the station. When I first started I referred to these resources constantly, and I still find myself using many of them on a daily basis.
Ansca’a App Programming Guide. One big long webpage – I spent a ton of time on this when I started. You can work it top to bottom and by the end you’ll know which way is up.
Ansca’s compilation of starter documents. Rather than exhaustively touch on every single piece of the Corona API, these documents are organized thematically. So, for example, the starter doc on the Physics Engine gives an excellent high-level introduction to Corona’s physics engine, and then gives a few examples.
The Corona SDK API Reference. A comprehensive list of Corona libraries and instructions on how to use each one. More detail and function than the basic intro documents above.
The Lua Users Wiki Tutorial. I’ve referred back to this countless times, especially when initially familiarizing myself with control structures (if, then, else, for, do, until, while, etc.) and tables (the core Lua data type).
Learning Corona. A vast and ever-growing collection of Corona-related tutorial pages and videos, many of them extremely helpful. The ones by Rafael Hernandez are SUPER.
I’ve always thought that any decent idea almost always ends in world domination. But sometimes when I’m in the middle of building a game I start to wonder whether the exact opposite isn’t actually true. Great beauty and innovation can arise from the constraints under which creative work takes place. What’s difficult about this is that once you get a great idea, you immediately want to remove the constraints and take the idea straight to its most full and complete manifestation. I don’t know what the balance is, but perhaps attempting to articulate the struggle will help me strike that balance in some small way.