Just a quick bump. Create & Play is now free and will remain that way for a while now.

Just a quick bump as I released an update for this app at the end of last week. There's another load of face pieces, all with a Halloween/Monster theme, a new Halloween animated background for the games and a new share feature so you can save your faces to your device's photo album or email them (ideal for making avatars etc.)

I can't say anything about the game itself, but I really like the art. Nice work.

Just realised you're responsible for Helsing's Fire! Had a lot of fun with that game, crackingly well done.

I can't say anything about the game itself, but I really like the art. Nice work.

Many thanks. The artwork took the longest time in development, especially for all the pieces for the face creator (there are currently 178 of them).

It's been a while since I last posted here but I've been busy. I've just released a game in the Apple App Store called Arthur & Charles Present Create & Play. It's aimed at children and families (I found during beta testing that a lot of parents, especially mothers, liked playing it as well).

The game basically consists of two main parts. The face creator lets you create unique faces from over 170 different parts, colouring them as you want to, to create your finished masterpieces. These faces are then used in the 3 games in the app - card matching, a match 3 variant and a patterns game where you have to trace a matching line of faces on a board.







I produced pretty much everything for the app - design, coding, illustrations and music. The only part I didn't produce myself were the sound effects which I licensed. It's meant as an introduction to some characters I've been working on for a number of years, called Arthur & Charles, and I'll be following this game up with an interactive book for the iPad later this year (or very early next).

For those interested, the app took around 4 months to develop and I used the cocos2d-iphone library in the development.

YouTube Trailer link is



More information about the app is at http://www.arthurandcharles.com/

iTunes link is http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/arthur-charles-present-create/id454675579?mt=8

It's $0.99 and it's a universal app so it works with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

Been a while since I've posted at TIGSource. Anyway, I've just made available on my site all my old ambient/electronica that I wrote in the early 2000's under the name Pamplemousse. Feel free to give it a listen and download here:

http://www.moopf.com/article/78

There's about 7 hours worth there. Getting back into writing some new music for an iPad project I'm working on (an interactive book for kids) and so took this opportunity to dig out all my old stuff to take a listen to.

Comments welcome, or just enjoy.

This was written too recently for me to have enjoyed it as a kid, but it's amazing and should become mandatory bedtime reading. I just bought my second copy this weekend, having lent my first copy to a friend to read to his kids a couple of years ago - I don't expect to see it back.

That's an absolutely fantastic book. I brought it for myself to read a couple of years ago after seeing it in a book store. Now I'm reading it to my kids as they're a bit older and will get it more. It's mad as a box of frogs from start to finish.

Other books we've read recently include all the Mr Gum books by Andy Stanton. Again barmy, and quite gross in places, but funny. My son really enjoys them. Anybody who can create a character who's a gingerbread man with electric muscles is not of this world :D

OK, I struggled for hours over this walk cycle animation (it's new to me and thinking in individual pixels isn't natural for me at the moment!) So, I'd love some feedback. I haven't really done anything expressive with the arms, I know that, just moved them in conjunction with the body turning slightly and there are definite problems with the walk itself but I'm really finding it a head-scratcher to figure out exactly what. All feedback welcome, please tear it to shreds so I know what to work on.



Many thanks.

Sat down last night for a first attempt at spriting. The characters are existing ones of mine that I decided to try to turn into sprites to play around with in Construct at some point.



The 'double-pixel' size is something I've gone for for these first tests and I'm quite pleased with them, I think.

Comments, crit, things I should be changing or looking out for etc. welcome. I might try to do a walk cycle for the first one tonight for practice if I get time, although not having done any animating before (apart from in Poser) it might end up looking a bit odd :D

Sheesh!

Anyway, moopf, did it never occur to you to release a free demo of the game?

Yeah, as JoeHonkie says it's the lite version. There is a reason why it's called 'lite' as well - Apple forbid you from releasing demos, so you have to release something that's fully functioning but cut down, e.g. I only included a few levels. It's semantics really, and infuriating, but thems the rules you have to play by

Only 2 search hits could be a problem, not a blessing. You should have called it "Beer Lipstick"

iBeer Lipstick would probably have been better :D

BTW, was playing about with Dyson a little while ago - really impressive, love the overall 'feel' of it.

EDIT2: At least "hiqup" is unique enough to only generate 2 hits (game and demo).  So you have that going for you!

Yes, true. For me it wasn't really about making a load of money. The game was really me putting my toes in the water, getting used to XCode and Objective-C and Mac-based dev generally. I knew the game wasn't something truly unique but I did try to make it as professional and polished as I could because I don't really know how to do things any other way (at least, I try). It was amazing, however, how quickly what you thought was a reasonable price for the length of play and experience you gave was blown out of the water The iPhone is an indie dev's dream, the app store however is not. But, it's been so successful, I don't imagine that changing soon.

Anyway, hope this isn't all off-topic, it all does come back to the basic thrust of this thread I think, if limited to a particular marketplace.

Wow. That convinced me: I'm never ever going to try developing anything for the iPhone. It sounds like they have a horrible marketplace.

The biggest problem with it is the biggest reason it's been a huge success - it's just there for the consumer, they need go nowhere else. They can access it, purchase and install directly from their device. That's why there has been something like a billion downloads of apps, but that also makes it a nightmare to actually get something seen because you're lost in a single sea and Apple hold all the cards and can pick and choose what they want to push. And that isn't always the best and, increasingly, it's the apps from commercial development houses that get that exposure and so the indies lose out. The hype led to a lot of "developers" jumping on-board, rushing something poor out and the market gets swamped with rubbish, a double-whammy for those indies that take the time to develop something more polished and worthwhile. Look at it now, there are something like 6,500 games I believe. In less that a year since the launch! Expecting visibility on the app store is like doing something in the wind

There has been a growing number of review sites (there were few when the app store was first released) which may make getting some exposure easier but when the marketplace itself is just there, complete with recommendations and highlights from Apple, the majority of consumers probably won't look elsewhere.

So it's a strange situation and for indies I think it's fairly bleak, especially now a greater number of commercial developers are on-board. And that's a real shame as I really enjoyed developing for it and it's got an awesome amount of power for something in your pocket.

The iPhone market is a little disturbing with all the 99 cent games, discounted or not.

Only joined here today, but thought I'd wade right in I started developing a puzzler for the iPhone back in July last year, and released it in September, priced $1.99. I treated the whole thing as a learning experience, having never developed in Objective-C before, but with plenty of other programming experience. I hadn't written a game before, however.

It fairly quickly became obvious during the first couple of months after the app store's launch that there was a race to lowest cost, the $0.99 level, by developers because of visibility. There was a massive number of shoddy games released, but there were some real gems as well and there were few ways you could try to get higher visibility on the app store (unless Apple 'picked' you). It got to the point that the only way you could get some visibility was by dropping your price - in part this was an expectation from the consumer who had, and really still do have, a different way of looking at mobile games, especially from indie developers, and also because the developers were competing for visibility. I ended up putting my price to $0.99 (which is where it's stayed) and even did a 'lite' version to see if that made any difference (I still think that for something priced at $0.99, a lite version seems to make no sense at all, but you try anything).

In particular I feel that the shoddy nature of the vast majority of the games really impacted on the willingness on behalf of the consumer to plump over another $0.99 for something they thought they'd probably play for 30 seconds and then think 'what a waste' - that individual purchase may only have been $0.99, but they'd probably purchased 20 of them and found nothing they really liked, so the real gems also suffer. That really led to the influx of lite versions, even for $0.99 apps, as a way to combat that.

But overall I've made a little and did it mainly just because I fancied a challenge, and enjoyed it a heck of a lot.

Some of the same consumer beliefs hold true for the overall topic of this thread - there is a kind of expectation from the consumer that indie games should be dirt cheap, whether because they feel they aren't purchasing something professional or polished or because there is a misguided belief that it couldn't possibly have the depth of a commercial release. I know that's nonsense, as I'm sure do many people here. But that's something that will take time to erode and I see the real widespread success of games such as World of Goo and Braid as really helping to push that erosion along. Like it or not, however, the vast majority of indie titles will be pretty poor and that's why some consumers can end up tainting all indie releases with the same brush, expecting less and expecting to pay less for it. But again, those titles I've mentioned can help to change the consumer's view towards indie titles.

Anyway, that rambling nonsense probably made no sense, just thought I'd put in my couple of pence worth.

I joined the iPhone dev program back in August last year (subsequently released a puzzler). It didn't take a long time to get accepted, a few weeks maybe, and this was applying as an individual. If you apply as a company, the process seems much longer from what I've heard.

As for how easy it is, when I developed my puzzler there weren't really any things like Unity or iTorque available yet (I mean, they were available but there was no iPhone publishing for them), so I learnt Objective-C (I have plenty of previously programming experience) and built as I learnt. I have to say it's actually a really elegant language and if I had cause to I wouldn't be adverse to developing again for either the Mac/iPhone with Objective-C. You tend to mix in a lot of C and C++ but overall it's nicely structured and the libraries provided are fairly well documented by Apple and provide some fairly high level functionality quickly and easily.

There's also a nice library now called Cocos2d (http://code.google.com/p/cocos2d-iphone/) for 2D game development which I've played with a bit (didn't actually use it for my puzzler, again it wasn't really in any state to use it when I was developing) and seems very useful, so that might be worth investigating as well.

Hope that helps.

Moopf, your Deviant Art makes me smile. Especially this.

Ah, many thanks, that's what I try to do (make people smile, that is)

Just thought I'd pop in and say 'Hi'. Only joined today but have been lurking around the forums for a couple of weeks now. I'm a developer by trade (PHP these days mainly) but have a long history of C, C++ etc.

I guess I'm a kind of jack of all trades really - programmer, artist, writer, musician - and seem to wobble between them all over time. I wrote a puzzler for the iPhone back in September (called Hiqup) just for the challenge of getting to grips with Objective-C. Previously was an avid user of Second Life where I spent a lot of time developing virtual roller skates and bubble-gum (don't ask, long story!)

What brings me here now is a wish to, probably slowly, develop a new game (not for the iPhone at first, sticking to PC for now). Even though I'm a programmer I'm concentrating at the moment on learning Construct, mainly because I like where that's going and I want to maximize the use of the little time I have available to fit everything in, rather than getting bogged down with code at the moment.

So erm, yeah, that's me. Links to art and stuff are on my web site. Looking forward to participating here as much as I can.