New Art!
I submitted Castle Tiles for initial review on Saturday and I thought that would be it until the iPad launched. But then I got an email to resubmit with the latest SDK for final review. This actually turned out to be quite fortunate because I got intense criticism strong encouragement from friends and commentators to completely redo revisit my horrible programmer art initial art pass.
The additional time also gave me some time to review some of my original thinking about the art. For example, I thought that for a puzzle game, the most important priority would be clarity. So choosing pure red, pure green, and pure blue seemed like a logical choice. It turns out that an even higher priority is picking colors that don’t actively assault the eyes with their hideousness are aesthetically pleasing as well.
(For the record, I was originally trying to go for a Keith Haring kind of look but I think the new look works better.)
March 31st, 2010 at 7:22 am
That’s better indeed =). Now how is this played?
March 31st, 2010 at 11:00 am
Thanks! As for the game play, I’m going to see if I can put together a demo video. Of course, it’s going to be a little tricky with a new baby in the house…
March 31st, 2010 at 12:49 pm
Ahh, much nicer 🙂 I do understand you were going for clarity.
Now I see those red arcs in the corners are different lengths. I did wonder if they were health bars.
March 31st, 2010 at 2:49 pm
Awesome! Reminds me of the card game “Set”. Is gameplay similar?
btw there is a free iPhone app called “Saturation” that is very helpful in picking color schemes. I use that or http://www.colourlovers.com as a starting point for any designy stuff I do. Nothing says programmer art like 0xf00, 0x00f, 0x0f0, 0xf0f, 0x0xff
Is there going to be a Castles Mini for those of us without an iPad?
March 31st, 2010 at 6:19 pm
It is indeed similar to “Set”! The big difference is the larger number of tiles and that collecting matching tiles attacks the highest scoring opponent, which evens out the playing field quite a bit. The person who collects the most matches doesn’t necessarily win but they do have an advantage. Also, more complicated triples (ie, the more categories that you have that are different instead of the same) do more damage or build up your armies.
I’m not planning on a iPhone version, but I know that there are a number of Set-type games (including Set) already out there for the iPhone. My goal was to create a game that could only be done on an iPad so I designed it with the iPad’s features in mind: the larger screen and multitouch.