Amazing how after a few days away from the computer at Xmas can lead to inspiration for a small game, so after I had decided it had been too long since I had made a little fun game and as I wanted to play this myself! I got started, a few days later Know Color was born!
Subsequent posts will show the early stages of this game before there was any artwork and it looked very very different, and some notes on porting this game concept to other platforms.
The app store approval time was truly amazing, with this game being made available for sale 24 hours after submission, so thank you Apple!
For now though here is an app description and some visuals of the game:
Prove you’re smart and know color. Can you beat the Professor and your friends?
A game of speed and skill where you have to select the correct option matching the Professor’s instructions as quickly and accurately as you can. Post your high score to Facebook and Twitter and dare your friends to beat you! Who is the smartest of you all?
In 50 seconds score as high you can, you score one point for each correct answer but will lose 3 points if you answer incorrectly so be careful!
Available on iTunes:
http://bit.ly/knowcolor
View a video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dztAKimT5pI
You can find some images of the game here
http://img192.imageshack.us/i/img0422.png/
http://img97.imageshack.us/i/img0424.png/
http://img200.imageshack.us/i/img0425.png/
Prove you’re smart and know color. Can you beat the Professor and your friends?
A game of speed and skill where you have to select the correct option matching the Professor’s instructions as quickly and accurately as you can. Post your high score to Facebook and Twitter and dare your friends to beat you! Who is the smartest of you all?
In 50 seconds score as high you can, you score one point for each correct answer but will lose 3 points if you answer incorrectly so be careful!
navigate to the directory cocos2d-iphone and run the following
. ./install_template.sh
This will install the cocos2d template into xcode for you, which makes setting up and using this framework even easier!
Great demos are available from within the project itself to learn from as well as the wiki documentation which can be found here
The greatest part for me personally is the heavy lifting that chipmunk can do for you regarding collisions and physics for your game, the best tutorial I have found for using it is available here
With particular note for free applications that need to increase their “stickyness” to achieve reasonable revenues via in application advertisements such as those provided by Admob, adding community features such as a high score boards and messaging between users.
Discovered some fairly interesting behaviour of the iPhone simulator that had me stumped for a little while
When you want to have an application that starts up in Landscape without a status bar
the following code snippit placed into your applicationDidFinishLaunching method of the app delegate will allow you to test in the emulator!
//For your normal application execution on the iPhone, this can also be done in the info.plist
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] setStatusBarOrientation:UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight];
//How to make the simulator behave itself preprocess for just the simulator
#if (TARGET_IPHONE_SIMULATOR)
UIScreen *screen = [UIScreen mainScreen];
tabBarController.view.bounds = CGRectMake(0, 0, screen.bounds.size.height, screen.bounds.size.width);
tabBarController.view.transform = CGAffineTransformConcat(tabBarController.view.transform, CGAffineTransformMakeRotation((M_PI * 90 / 180.0)));
tabBarController.view.center = window.center;
#endif
tabBarController in this case is the first view controller given to the window
One of the pains of getting the feedback from reviews on iTunes is that you would have to login into each country individually AppViz for $30 solves this problem, it also collates or your sales information (daily, weekly, monthly) into one place, far faster than you could possibly achieve using the iTunes connect interface
It has to be said that the current iTunes system for rating apps has a certain element of bias – the current methods means that probably the majority of people who are leaving a rating are doing so when they delete an application. However the code on the following page allows you to remind users from your application at set time intervals to leave you a review. Hopefully encouraging a more positive review bias.
Thanks to Arash for making this available in a simple package for integrating with your project
In app purchases have been enabled for free applications, great move from Apple should relieve the pressure on app store submissions as people will no longer need to submit “lite apps” as well as a “paid for version”. Applications that were designed for in app purchase but required the initial application to be purchased will no longer need to be!
I am still going to use the gmail web app for actually managing email on the iPhone purely because of the labels, which is one area the Android G1 excels at!
Congratulations to Spotify on the launch of their mobile client for iPhone and Android, Videos of which can be seen below
iPhone Video
Android Video
One thing that strikes me as a little odd though is the amount of coverage this application is getting, if I want a DRM music solution for a mobile phone there is another option, Nokia comes with Music which wont cost £120 a year…..
Maybe the catalogue is much better on Spotify this is obviously enough of a draw, I have been pleased with Spotify and even paid for a few day passes, so would be tempted to purchase a subscription to utilize this on my G1 if it had a standard headphone socket (I seem to consume ear buds in my sleep) or if the iPhone if it could play in the background, as the times I am listening to music on my iPhone is usually on the train when I like to clear email etc.
Maybe this has all come down to clever marketing on the part of Spotify compared to a seemingly more complex solution even though it is easier Comes With Music solution
Sonys Walkman phones would be a seemingly obvious addition as well going back to one of my earlier posts!
Be the First to Comment 
