Soon, You Will Fly: a Leap Motion 3D Jam game

Thanks to a soft deadline this morning, I've posted an alpha build (for Windows and OSX) of a weird little game I've been working on for the Leap Motion 3D Jam presented by IndieCade. It's called "Soon, You Will Fly", and -- perhaps unexpectedly -- it's about crawling.

I'm still working on a few things. Among them: tentacles, a heart/eye, the touch of darkness, and more sound design. Oh, and a way to quit without resorting to ALT-F4.

Anyway, please do check it out and let me know what you think. At present, I'm thinking that this probably doesn't extend beyond a simple jam game; but feedback can change that.

Fragments: a Ludum Dare Jam Game

A few weeks ago, I worked with my friend Aaron Vonderhaar on a bold experiment: to develop a single-page html game framework and then build a game in it for Ludum Dare.

The result is Fragments [Ludum Dare Page] [Source Code]. It's a put-together puzzle in isometric 3d, telling a somewhat fragmented story of mangled memories.

I'm not entirely happy with how the game came out, but as my first Ludum Dare Jam (as opposed to compo) experience, it was a decent one. It was fun working with Aaron on a project, and I think we did some interesting things in the game framework -- though it wasn't nearly complete enough going into the competition.

Two interesting points of trivia about Fragments:

• There is no lighting in the game. Everything is baked to vertex colors in Blender during export. This is a trick I also used in Rainbow for the landscape.
• For some reason, 30% of the CPU time in the game is used by 4x4 matrix multiplies. We probably should have been looking at profiling data earlier. It appears that the construction of Mat4's is very expensive.

Seven Skills of Highly Effective Rainbow Players

It has been a long time in coming, but I finally created a promotional video for Rainbow. Promotional and educational, I should say.

Take a gander:

Iterating on Promo Art for Rainbow

Rainbow for iOS (and for Android!) will be out tomorrow, and as part of the assets for the Google Play store, I needed to design a large (1024x500) promotional image for the game.

As you can see above, I arrived at an pretty good image. I think it captures the essence of Rainbow's art style and gameplay, while striking a balance between cleanliness and boredom.

Arriving at this image required a few iterations. My first mockups had a hand-drawn rainbow that just didn't seem lively enough:

I tried patching in some spirals, but they still didn't look right to me. Perhaps this is because I'm over-familiar with the way cubic splines look (and/or the way rainbows actually move in the game):

So I ended up hacking in a special game mode that uses a white background and hides the level while taking screenshots; and repeatedly played through a simple (splitter-only) level to come up with some rainbow patterns. This turns out to be somewhat difficult.

This was good as a first cut, but too busy. After trimming a few of the characters from the bottom of the image, and playing through my empty level several more times, I arrived at the final version:

I also needed a smaller version of the image with a slightly different aspect ratio (180x120). For this I re-arranged the TCHOW logo to above the word "Rainbow" and strengthened the halo to make the letters more readable:

The final promo and small promo images -- along with high-res versions of other game assets -- can be obtained from the Rainbow Press Kit.

Rainbow for iOS out on January 15th

It's been a while, but Rainbow is finally ready to go on sale in the iOS App store. The game will be out on the 15th of this month, and will sell for $2.

More information about Rainbow can be found on the game's web page and press kit.