Itemania - iPhone/iTouch game
Hope no one minds me posting this here, but I just wanted to share Itemania, an iPhone/iTouch game a few friends and I have been working on, with everyone. The game actually just went live on the appStore today.
Itemania is a Hidden Object game targeted at Casual gamers. It's pretty straightforward, but we've also created a few 3d levels where players can rotate and zoom around.
Some screenies:
Trailer:
[ame]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJfzSu0sHS0[/ame]
Gameplay Footage:
[ame]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TcfKtFb52M[/ame]
Anyway, it's going for $0.99, and I hope some of you guys can enjoy a game like this. One of our big goals in making this was on the art!
AniCombo Website
Itemania is a Hidden Object game targeted at Casual gamers. It's pretty straightforward, but we've also created a few 3d levels where players can rotate and zoom around.
Some screenies:
Trailer:
[ame]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJfzSu0sHS0[/ame]Gameplay Footage:
[ame]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TcfKtFb52M[/ame]Anyway, it's going for $0.99, and I hope some of you guys can enjoy a game like this. One of our big goals in making this was on the art!
AniCombo Website
Replies
Dunno if you want crits (I know it's a little late) but some sort of hint system would be fantastic. i.e. I hit "Need a hint" and it draws a big circle over an area including one of the things I still need. I found that about 15 of the 20 minutes I played, were stuck on just a couple items.
I thought the biggest problem I had was just accuracy. I would often click on something, and my circle would show up just off of it, so I'd click again. Some things took several tries and sometimes I got penalized for it.
It would also be nice if the "That's not what you're looking for" and the "You missed anything" were differentiated somehow, and it acknowledge when I clicked on "something" vs nothing. i.e. I'm looking for 4 fruit. I find something I THINK is a fruit, and click on it. It does the same "bloop" action, whether it IS something but not what I'm lookign for, OR if I just missed it (see above) I guess that wouldn't work if EVERYTHING is something that CAN be clicked on. But I feel like most of the scene is ambient, with a large number of "items" scattered around.
Cool idea, and a fun timewaster. Nice job!
Crits are always welcome! We're hoping to polish the game and implement more features that we weren't able to quite figure out how to do the first time around through updates, but this is kind of dependent on how well the game does...I mean, if it doesn't sell well, we might just move on to a different project. *Crosses fingers*
The game was made with no real programming support (only one of us has some programming knowledge), so a lot of what you mentioned has been discussed (especially the need for a "Hints" system) before, but we weren't quite capable of implementing these ideas very well. Hopefully we can add Hints later!
I'll look into messing around with the collision objects a little more, especially with the smaller items.
Regarding the sound differentiation...we actually talked about that before and decided that if we gave the player more feedback, it might make the game too easy? Like maybe it would tell the player for sure that there is a valid Item in the mis-clicked location. But now that you mention it, we'll have to give it some more thought and see if we can come up with a solution. Last thing we need are frustrated players!
Thanks again for the crits! Always open to feedback!
Davision3D: Thanks man!
How hard was it to program Itemania? You guys did a really good job btw!
If it wasn't for the Unity engine, we probably would have never finished this :P Unity is easy enough to use that our programmer/artist was able to implement everything himself. Thanks!
Tumerboy: Yeah, we thought about doing that too, but we ended up not going that route because at the time, we weren't sure what the performance cost of backfacing/extra textures were (none of us had ever worked with these kinds of specs before). I think we might have been a little too paranoid as the game runs pretty well right now even on the first generation iPod Touch. The other reason was that we thought that seeing "through" the backs of each of the planes would make the viewport feel a little less cluttered? At any rate, thanks for bringing this up, because it's an idea that I think is definitely worth re-investigating!
We'd be extremely happy if you, or anyone else, was willing to write a review for us on iTunes? Straight, honest answers are more than welcome!
Currently I'm tracking down our concept art, as a fair bit went into the game. Hopefully I'll get everything sorted out soon!