Awesome, this is looking great and you are moving fast!

I'm also working on a (startup) simulator type game and I'm finding it an interesting challenge to put in just enough UI and pieces in place to be able to test the game-play, without wasting too much time on visuals which will likely get replaced later.

Curious: are you using any frameworks for dealing with Unity UI more easily (e.g. MVVM pattern or the like)? Or do you update the UI values directly?

Spending too much time reading up about how other people are building their game, approaching business / marketing, etc etc. It's definitely informative but at some point it has diminishing returns. I guess it does help with motivation.

[Your app status is Ready for Sale]

This morning I woke up to a very pleasant email: Your app status is Ready for Sale

Yes, Connectorium is finally up on the Apple app store! Actually the submission process seemed fairly quick and luckily no rejection which is always a good start! Here is the link:

http://itunes.apple.com/app/connectorium/id559780664?mt=8

And if you haven't already, check out the trailer here:

http://gamesforsoul.com/connectorium/



The next step is promoting it as much as I can, and trying to get some reviews on the many many "App for Kids" sites out there. I knew there was a possibility to try and align the release with reviews, but most of these sites take many months to do a review (if at all), and I figured I didn't really want to wait that long. This game has really been more about going through the process of a finishing a game from start to finish. Now that I know I can manage it, with future games I'll definitely pay a little more attention to the marketing aspect.

Anyway, beyond that I have to see if there is enough interest to do a PC/Mac version. If there is a good user a base, I also would really like to do a level editor which would give a lot of value to a game like this.

Thanks everybody for your feedback thus far!!

Bump. Still looking for beta testers

The game is finally in Beta phase!!

is a trailer you can check out. I'm very much looking for beta testers (only testing iPad for the initial release). Extra bonus points if you know children that you can test it with.

Trailer:


Blog Post: http://gamesforsoul.com/2012/08/connectorium-beta-is-here
Beta Sign up: http://tflig.ht/GPJ2xL

Thanks to those who replied with ideas. I ended up putting something together myself (you can see it in the post linked above). This job is now closed.

Decided to put together something myself. Not the best, but it'll have to do:

I had already posted about this on the Collaboration forum, so I won't duplicate the information. I'm just adding that I am offering $50 for the icon. I know it's not much... I'm just hoping someone is willing to help me out with a game that's a bit different, and hopefully educational:

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=27204.0


Thanks!

DustyDrake: Wow that demo is pretty old. The farm level trips up any adult who has tried it. I even simplified it a bit by removing the "weed".

James: Hey! Small world (or internet). I bet there are at least a few people frequent both forums

About the music: it's not the best loop I admit, but it kind of works. The pause between the end and the beginning of the next loop fit the rhythm of the music (4 beats). There is actually more to this piece (I wrote it on the piano), but don't have the time to do all the instrumentation.

Hello,

I'm currently in the process of finishing a children's educational game, titled Connectorium, to be released for iPad (and hopefully for PC/Mac at some point). I'm looking for someone who can make a catchy icon for the App Store. I'm kind of open to suggestions as to what the icon should be, but my current thinking is that it would feature the main character of the game (little girl called Nina) and the theme of "connection" somehow. Keep in mind that I have already done all the in-game art, and I'm not really an artist so it all looks fairly amateur. The icon needs to resemble the in-game art, but look...well...better.

You can find out more details about the game, and see some of the art work in my dev log:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25732

[Update #5:]

Update #5:

It's been weeks since I updated here... and in that time I've been pretty busy. For the most part I have been finishing all the drawings that were needed for the cut-scenes. While I hadn't planned to, I ended up spending more time on the cut scenes than on the game itself, mostly because I can program fast, but drawing is slow. Nevertheless lots of improvements and tweaks have been made to the game too. I also improved my camera dolly system in Unity 3D, to allow more control over the way points, and the speed of the camera (as it turns out, moving at a constant speed along a bezier curve is a non-trivial problem).

Right now I'm putting the final pieces of the puzzle together before releasing a Beta. The main outstanding item is getting the story narrated. I found an excellent resource for this:

http://voiceactingalliance.com/

Even though many people on this forum are not professionals, you can still find some good talent.

So yeah, look out for the beta in the coming weeks. Kind of excited about the prospect of having a completed game on the App Store. Just as a way of sharing something, here is the more-or-less finalized track that is used during the levels:

http://soundcloud.com/gamesforsoul/connectorium-pat-knows

Not to repeat what's already been talked about, but I found the example about an artist (a painter) interesting.

I am in no way underestimating the value of studying and leaning from others. You're right, because otherwise we would still be in caves, re-inventing the wheel. Having said that, there is no way, in my opinion (especially when it comes to arts, which I think programming is in many ways) to internalize that information without doing, and making mistakes.

It's like saying da Vinci studied and studied and learnt about drawing techniques, and one day he sat down and as his first work of art, produced the Mona Lisa. Even the most "talented" person in the world can't do that. You get there by practicing, by doing, and making mistakes, again and again. But yes, in order to even get to that point, you need to read up on the existing knowledge generated by others.

Completely agreeing with some of the comments above.

Writing the perfectly designed architecture is an illusion. It doesn't exist. What happens is that you'll start writing code, and as soon as it starts looking a bit funny and not perfect, you abandon the project and try doing stuff from scratch so it's perfect. I have done that many times in the past. I think the best programmers are those who a) are Ok with crap code b) Continually work to improve it.

My suggestion is, start with the simplest possible game you can think of, then make it a bit simpler, then start coding. I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't read up about design and ask question. But the best way to learn is the action/reflection cycle. Once you finish a game *from start to finish* you can look at the spaghetti mess and really think about how you could've improved the design and architecture. And it'll be fairly obvious!

Good luck!

Nice! I've already told you how much I like the original theme (I'm Ronin Narasu on Soundcloud), the cheeky variation sounds great too! Totally different mood, yet the melody is almost the same.

Thanks Yoshimitsu, I appreciate the comments! I am also following you on soundcloud!

BLARG.  IT'S ME AGAIN. 

Just wrote this for a mock game soundtrack that was called "Project VGM" but recently changed to "A'deo Chronicle".  Anyway, enjoy...

http://soundcloud.com/zack-parrish/projectvgm-airship-ii

Indeed very epic! I really like the brass instruments in this. The leading string line is not as convincing, but I admit it can be nearly impossible to make string samples sound good especially with fast lines.

[Update #4:]

Update #4:

Time for another update. I have been working on this game full time for just under 3 months now, and this week for the first time I had trouble staying motivated. Nevertheless I managed to make some progress. I'm kind of at that point where I see the end, but I'm also experiencing how the last little bit can take a long time.

Here I wrote in more detail what has been happening and what I need to do next. In short I have been focusing on drawings for the cut scenes. I love games that have an involved story and as such this is the direction I've taken then game in, but in retrospect it has meant that I'm doing more drawing and less programming. This is something I definitely need to learn from for my next game: how can I tell more story with less art, so that I can focus more on the gameplay. I think it is partially also due to the fact that Connectorium is a children's game and I can't be too reliant on text.

I have also been thinking about my options with regards to voice-acting. Recording it myself is one option, and I definitely have access to equipment and people with interesting voices. What I don't have is experience, the right space, and most importantly time. So I have been thinking about places like voices.com. If I can get the whole story recorded by someone for under $200, I think it'll be worth it. It does mean that I have to have the story completely finalized before recording it, as re-recording is probably not an option.

Here is a new music track which is a simple variation of the main theme (also on my soundcloud page)

http://soundcloud.com/gamesforsoul/connectorium-theme-cheeky


As usual here are a few pieces of art and also a couple of screenshots (larger versions on my blog). The school level has a lot of connections (not all shown here). The white item is the "teacher" which I haven't got around to drawing yet.

Just uploaded a variation on the main theme for my game Connectorium:

http://soundcloud.com/gamesforsoul/connectorium-theme-cheeky

The original theme is this:

http://soundcloud.com/gamesforsoul/connectorium-theme


The recording is not compressed and it shows...it's just kind of too quiet. But I have never been able to use compression without it sounding awful so I think I'll leave it out, especially because the music is for background anyway.

Writing them down is a good idea... I need to get used to doing that.

This is a little off topic but I'm wondering if anyone has experienced it:

Lately I've been actually trying not to get inspired and come up with new game ideas. I almost try to stop myself from exploring an idea (usually triggered by an existing game, but music is also a good one). The main reason is that I don't want it to distract me from finishing my current project, or make it seem less interesting...

Is this weird or illadvised?

One thing to keep in mind is that proper unit testing is more about design than about correctness. Hence the term Test Driven Design or TDD. If you ever try writing tests before the code, or at least alongside it, you'll find that your solution naturally becomes more decoupled, with object/methods becoming much more self contained and less in need of global state, etc.

I guess what I've understood over the years is that you get the most benefit if you try and write code for the tests, rather than writing tests for the code. Granted, in some situations you really can't write tests (e.g. UI code)...

Sometimes having a lot of detail and background about the game world can give a lot of depth to the game, even if the player never actually reads/hears the stuff. The example I remember was playing the original Alone in the Dark game. In the library, there must've been a dozen books that told various tales of dark magic, history of the mansion, etc. etc. which did not necessarily have any direct connection to the story of the game. And I didn't read much of it (didn't speak English back then), but it still made the whole place seem more old/spooky/intriguing.

But yeah I think to get the full effect of it, it needs to be somewhere discoverable within the game and delivered at the right pace, not just some separate menu/website that lists the background story(s)