Dream Chronicles

My first game is out.
Dream Chronicles is out on the iPhone/iTouch, available on iTunes App Store for £2.99.

Yay!

It was a port from a PC, as I've mentioned, but we changed it to have zooming in features and touch, plus some heavy changes to the diary and some levels.
Not bad for 8 weeks work, even though the game existed, it was still a tough time frame to complete by.

For those of you who haven't got an iPhone/iPod touch, check out the PC version here.

It's a hidden object game, quite nice. It works well on the iPhone for a lazy game, the sort of thing that draws you in and keeps you exploring.

Not Gears Of War 3 or Quake 2010, but these are the sort of games we do at Other Ocean, and I'm happy to continue doing it. It's still a very tough challenge, technically, but more so from a playability standpoint - it's more difficult than you'd think porting something that people play with a mouse to a touch screen that's only 480x320 pixels.

I mean one of the features is that when you hover your mouse over something, it tells you what that object is... a tool tip, just like you're used to seeing within Windows. But how do you do that on a touch screen - the player would have to drag their finger about on the screen. Their massive fat finger then covers the tool tip! To top that off, when they release the screen, it registers as a click!

There are gems in the game to discover, and are very small, even on the PC screen. Even if you can see them on the tiny iPhone screen you fat finger tends to press all other object nearby and you can't click on the thing you want - so we expanded all the touchable regions of objects (this was not in the original code of the game) and added the ability to zoom in by pinching the screen a pan about by flicking, just like other iPhone apps. None of this was coded so we had to implement all of this, whilst keeping it compatible with the existing stuff.

As I said in an earlier post, when you add features like this, it can often break the game in other areas :(

So there are lots of challenges to overcome, from design to implementation and a short time frame to keep us very busy.

We went out to celebrate my first game at a very nice restaurant, 'Sims', that everyone has been telling me is very expensive - for what we got, the quality etc. by British standards it wasn't overly expensive at all and was well worth it, but it will be a place we visit only on special occasions.

We were able to take Hayden in, and Kath really needed to get out - she enjoyed it :)