Dots and Boxes 2013
https://itunes.apple.com/app/dots-and-boxes-2013/id625311640?ls=1&mt=8
we are becoming real ‘pro’ on shooting videos ^__^
TOP OF ALL THE APPS FOR IPAD IN UK !!! ^__^
Happy Easter everyone and thanks a lot!!!!
https://itunes.apple.com/app/four-in-a-row-2013/id604921715
Watch our video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urm-RsWhBC8
Four In A Row on top of charts
When we were seated together to decide what game to do next, we wanted something to be in between our latest Checkers and the classic Tic Tac Toe. A new board game with a bit more strategy and yet easy and straightforward. Four In A Row seemed a sensible choice. It would have been Pierre’s first game at OutOfTheBit.
It started with the right foot, as we were ahead of every schedule and released on time a well tested game which we liked a lot! (not that we EVER release anything that we don’t personally enjoy ^__-).
After less than 24 hours we were top in the Italian charts and really high in so many other Countries! France took us by surprise! In 4 days we had more download there than we had in our top market.
Was it the clean graphic? The simple user interface? The Global High-Score and the chance to play multiplayer online? Or maybe that the game was designed all around the touch interface. We try to never adapt gameplay from other kind of devices. The touch interface is so unique compared to the PCs’ or other consoles’ ones that the best results come when you rethink the whole thing.
We don’t have the chance to thank all the people who gave us a 5 star review, but we can promise them that we always welcome and listen to every complain, suggestion and critic and that we are working hard as usual to make our games better, faster, cleverer and new ones are coming :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urm-RsWhBC8
Tradition themed our Christmas Party this year! Lunch in a traditional English pub with a little pool tournament to spice it up. And the prize: tickets for theatre.
Never mind who won the competition (red wine was quite a winner, though… :)
It was 1 lucky shot at the end that assigned the prize ^_^
Looking forward to next year… Looking for ideas….. :)
A dead Mouse in a square house part 1/2
I’m currently spending the most part of my life in the Project Netsuke along with Ali Motisi (blog link).
We started working on a new game engine 6 months ago, during which I have been dreaming and thinking with Ali Motisi ( @alimotisi) a new way to “sculpt” a video game, to pull vertices, and to go through the looking glass.
The main technical constraint were to use vectors, without any gradient or drawing any line, in order to create the universe of our game.
At first, I felt like a dead mouse in a square house!
Then, I started to explain Ali, the developer, what my dreaming tool for drawing vertices was.
My first aim was to have in mind not the actual drawing task, but the tool itself, to try and imagine to use it, instead. To actually draw with that, in the end (trying to forget the usual Adobe way of thinking…)
I really thought that, in order to create a new tool to make a new kind of video game, it was really important to forget about video games, at all.
The drawing editor of my dreams had to be:
- a tool which would allow me to draw the more natural way possible, ideally using all of my fingers;
- a tool without anything that wasn’t useful;
- a tool which would allow me to see the result of my drawing, live;
- a tool which would use The Cloud so that I would have been able to work and share from everywhere;
- a tool which would use the same device than the one the final game would be run on (in this case, the iPad);
- a clever tool which would automatically make my drawings better;
- a tool which would allow me to do what I wanted with my creations.
We worked on different versions of the engine, going back and forth, trying to make it the closest possible to my dreams’ one.
At the beginning, drawing with this tactile vectorial tool was like trying to paint with my feet…
Working with a developer is not an easy task. The mental schemes are quite different, and it’s hard to explain art through functionalities.
But after 6 months of development, I must say that the drawing engine we have created is really amazing, and… it really fit with my expectations!
Using your fingers to draw vertices is kind of surprising and open up for you a new way of drawing! It was hard to manage, at the beginning. Using pure color polygons and pulling them and making them all fit well together is not an easy task.
But after spending hours with it, I learned to model them instead of drawing them.
I am able to use both the iPad and Dropbox and this is allowing me to work wherever I want!
Also, creating the whole graphic with an iPad allows me to feel exactly what the player will feel.
This tool is really amazing and organic. Now we put our best on the gameplay so that the final game will be as amazing as the tool is!
Follow me (@sectordub) and Ali (@alimotisi) on Twitter!
New office plant! :)
How the Stork Vector Engine came to be
I wanted to take “the world made of polygons” vision even further than Eric Chahi could in 1989.
How? By not using even a single bitmap image, texture or even gradient to draw the game world. And, thanks to the advances of the latest mobile devices, by using more polygons and much better screen resolutions.
Such constraints (no curves, textures, gradients and shape outlines) were going to pose a true challenge to the graphic designer.
