Code Pilot 2.0 was just released. This version includes support for Xcode 4.0.2 (on Snow Leopard) as well as Xcode 4.1 (on Lion). We also have a sparkling new UI design this time:
Code Pilot 2.0
Please see Code Pilot’s new website to get the new version!
We are happy to say that we have just released new versions of Nozbe Apps for iPhone, iPod and iPad. In versions 1.2 and 2.2 you will find Dropbox integration, local notifications for scheduled tasks and push notifications for project sharing and task delegation, application badge icon will remind you about the number of overdue tasks (it’s not to depress you!) and auto-sync will perform in background every time you exit Nozbe Apps. Moreover, now iPhone version has all functionalities from iPad version including unread comments and delegated tasks sections.
But the thing we are really excited about is Dropbox integration. Many of you use this service to share documents and files connected to your projects, so the whole team may instantly and from everywhere get access to all the uploads. We also use Dropbox to share stuff in Macoscope and we couldn’t imagine better way to keep the flow, than to magically and instantly get access to our files through Nozbe – without the need to copy or (God forbid!) rewrite all the files. So, with our comfort in mind, we added super fast and automatic Dropbox integration to Nozbe, to make your life easier as well. Here’s how this feature works.
1. When you open Nozbe, go to your projects list and tap on any project. In it’s view you will see a new tab with the dropbox icon. Tap on it and you will see login screen.
2. After logging in, you may see no Dropbox files. This means that there are no files or folders matching your project. How to change that? Name folders exactly like your project or context. Thanks to that, in project view, you will see every file which is in this folder. You can also name individual files just like your project or context or just include project’s or context’s name in your file’s name. Of course you don’t have to do this for files which are in above mentioned folders.
3. Named your files and folders? Go to the dropbox view in Nozbe and pull to refresh. All your files should be there – ready to download and view!
Do you have any questions or comments? Do it here or catch us on Facebook and Twitter.
We’re working hard to bring Code Pilot to Xcode 4, but unfortunately it seems that we’ve missed “end of March” kind of deadline already. We are testing our internal alpha version right now and hope to have a beta ready in 7-10 days from now. Anyone who would like to help us test upcoming beta builds, please drop me a line at zbigniew@macoscope.net. And keep your fingers crossed :-)
Introduction
Being a graphic designer quickly led my to few simple conclusions.
First thing I learned is that design is almost always connected to a certain level of frustration. When you’re like me, there’s always something that can be done better. The most difficult part is to let it go at the right moment and move to the next step. Fortunately, the feeling of satisfaction when your job finally begins to take shape, fully compensates all the pain. This is the moment when I usually remember why I love this job so much.
Second lesson is that you always have to stay put. You never know what challenge awaits you round the corner.
This part reminds me of a videogame :). You encounter numerous enemies and gain experience with each victory. Finally, when you start to feel invincible, something big emerges and takes the challenge up to a whole new level.
My skills were recently put to a test by very similar battle – and brother, it was a tricky one!
The job was to design a graphics for an iPad game – “Circuloid”. In this blogpost, I’ll try to guide you through the process of designing one of the game’s crucial elements – the bricks.
The job
At this stage, most of the game graphics were already made.
We had the menus ready as well as some of the interactive elements and a default level background. The assumption now was to create a set of dozen bricks divided to three major groups: rectangular, round and static.
Rectangular and round groups are the standard destroyable elements, while the static ones are indestructible, stationary blocks designed to interfere with the ball’s trajectory.
We established the default size of each element and I could start sketching.
The process
As you can see, the sketches are quite messy and ugly. Don’t worry, their job is to depict the overall feel of the elements – they don’t have to be pretty. For me, sketching is a crucial phase of each design process. At this point, I don’t have to limit myself. It’s time for my imagination to go crazy for a while ;).
After sketching a few bricks, I’ve finally started to get the hang of things. It was time to move the work to Photoshop.
Based on the sketches I started creating some random bricks.
The default size of rectangular blocks was 52×34px and round – 52px52px. I decided to make my canvas bigger so I could focus more on the details.
After a few hours, I had the first set of bricks ready:
To help the blocks stand out more against the background, I made them very vivid and colorful. It helped to create a positive contrast and therefore, made the elements more visible.
At this stage I was able to see my work in action and check if everything works as planned.
The colors turned out to be allright. Bricks were clearly visible and didn’t get lost in the background, even while moving. Definitely great news :).
The biggest problem were the shapes.
Here’s the issue:
Each block has either rectangular or round hit area. My graphics had to fit these shapes constraints, otherwise, the ball would bounce off the bricks in a weird way.
For example, the shape of this brick is too complicated:
Here’s the visible contour, from which you’d expect the ball to bounce off:
Here’s the physical area, from which the ball actually bounces:
You see the problem?
Another example:
This time, the shape is too round. Instead of hitting the rounded corners, ball would hit the invisible walls, making it look weird and confusing.
Seeing the bricks in game revealed also another problem.
As I mentioned before, I knowingly enlarged my canvas to focus more on the details. Unfortunately, after resize the graphics became too blurry and lost it’s consistency. As a result the visuals became less appealing.
Knowing all that, I decided to start again.
This time I set the canvas to 1:1 scale and began working. I reduced the amount of details on each brick and focused on making them more pixel-perfect.
After several attempts, I worked out the right style and began to create other bricks using the same methods.
Here’s what I came up with:
As you can see, the bricks are now less realistic and more cartoony. This style fits well with the mood of the game. It was definitely the right direction.
Following the same path, I started making other blocks.
The most difficult part was to create a proper design-process. After it’s mastery, creating further elements became almost a routine.
Here’s the final bricks-set from the rectangular and round groups:
As you can see, most of the rectangular blocks have twins in the round-group.
This procedure allowed for an easy increase in the number of blocks, thereby reducing the amount of work over the whole set.
Also, some of the bricks are animated.
“The statics”
Having the interactive elements ready, it was about time to create the static bricks.
These blocks belong to a special category. They had to be visually different from the other bricks not to confuse the player.
I decided to give them a metallic feel, so they’d look as if they were part of the background. I also added more details and depth to differentiate them from the interactive elements.
Here’s the result:
Conclusion
Designing a game graphics was an unique, tiresome, yet extremely satisfying task.
Like in a videogame – the battle was long, dangerous and bloody, yet I managed to get out of it alive, richer in experience, knowledge and with a set of new bricks tricks.
From now on, every next fight will be easier, shorter and more pleasant… At least until the next “Big Boss” ;).
I hope this blogpost will help you in your journey to becoming a better designer.
Dribbble
Boys and girls, I have two Dribbble invites to give away. If you want to get drafted, leave a comment under this post with the link to your portfolio. I’ll pick my favorites and let you know who I chose.
You have one week from today to participate.
PS. This is not a competition or at least not in a usual sense. Every Dribbble user is in a way responsible for his draftees, so I’ll choose the best from what I consider “the best”. Please don’t be sad if I won’t pick you – it doesn’t mean you’re a bad designer ;).
Cheers,
Tomek
As you may have noticed, Circuloid is now available in App Store both for iPad and iPhone. To celebrate we will talk about our experiences and lessons learnt during the whole process of making a game. Circuloid is our company’s first game title released for iOS and, for most of our team members, a first game released ever. That fact, we suppose, allowed us to have a fresh look at the whole process.
We plan to publish series of posts created by different team members describing interesting aspects of work with Circuloid believing that our experiences can be useful for other developers willing to create or just creating their first game.
In the first part I will mostly try to describe how the game concept was born.
…for those of you who need a few words of explanation about Circuloid :)
Circuloid is Macoscope’s tribute to a great family of arkanoid-style brick-breaker games. We took this old concept then twisted it a bit, and bent it around until we got some interesting shapes in hand. As you can guess from its name – Circuloid is basically an arkanoid game, based on a round board, but that is not all.
The original idea came to my mind with my first use of iPhone. “It would be great to have an arkanoid played with a whole device” I thought. Unfortunately, as a man whose computer addiction was born in the good old days of C64, I had a rather steady picture of all arkanoid games as one breed.
More or less static colorful bricks hit by the ball. It does not sound as an exciting game for today’s players, right? It was obvious for me that gameplay needs to be a little bit refreshed. Obvious choice – adding real physics to the game. Real physics means not only a simple application of the laws of reflection, but also of friction, elasticity, etc.
Considering the above-mentioned way of refreshing an old game concept, I was absolutely sure that this is almost impossible if you are targeting (somehow limited) mobile devices.
Things got changed when I saw a short movie of Hyperballoid2 gameplay. My mind exploded when I saw what happens when some physics are applied to this old genre. Bricks now can rotate, move, slide, explode, etc. etc. I started to rework the problem: “maybe there is a simple way to add physics…” and of course after a few hours I knew that my original assumption was wrong. There are simple frameworks ready to be used, to drive a flat 2D world even on mobile devices – Chipmunk, Box2D to name a few. That’s how we get to the first lesson – don’t assume, check and then check again!
The next “big idea” came from an observation. When you are holding your iPhone on its shorter sides and start to rotate the whole device as a kind of steering-wheel your hands are drawing small fragments of circles in the air. This observation inspired me. What if the whole game playing field will be changed from a rectangle to a circle?
The original rectangle shape was born, I believe, to properly fill the only display device of those days – a TV screen. Obviously, no one thought back then about rotating an over 100-pound TV set just to bounce a funny ball on the screen…
Changing the basic shape of a game play-field seemed to be an interesting mutation. Here we have the second lesson learnt – new devices bring the new ways of interacting with them, so keep your eyes open!
That is how Circuloid’s game concept was born. The rest of the improvements or enrichments were born “on the table” during the whole development process.
We all know that for most of the time development is a rather boring process of changing pure idea into something that can be tested by other human beings. Of course in the next parts we will share with you a few fine-grained development details. For today I would rather like to share one observation about the development time.
You may think that a great gameplay makes a great game. It’s true, but only partially. Great gameplay can easily become a social meme. It will also be appreciated and maybe even awarded. Unfortunately from the developers’ perspective game is a mix of great gameplay plus lots of boring stuff: menus, intro screen, settings, hall of fame, scores serialization and storage module, mechanisms to freeze, pause and restart the whole game, etc. Most of them can be easily implemented, but it does not mean that they are zero effort tasks. So the third lesson, probably well-known to some of you: transition from the prototype game to a market ready product always takes longer than you expect.
For the scientific minds among you, here is a very rough math rule that I “invented”: time needed to finish a game is equal to the time needed to finish a prototype expressed in the next time unit in increasing order plus 50 per cent. Example: if your prototype took 4 weeks to build, your game will be ready in (4+2) months :)
That is like gravity, we may not agree that we are falling, but our disagreement will not change the reality. Gravity just has us.
That’s all for part one.
Next time Tomek will reveal the secret details of graphic design for Circuloid. Stay tuned!
We are happy to announce that we have just released Circuloid for iPhone. For only $1,99 you can play this super-addictive brick-breaker game with a few twists and a circular aspect which adds a new dimension of challenge to the arkanoid genre.
Just like in the iPad version, the goal of the game is to break all the bricks on a given level (24 available and more coming soon) with a ball you bounce off your paddles. You can also compete against your friends (or total strangers) for high scores using Game Center.
Circuloid for iPhone is iOS 4.2 compatible and you will be astonished by it’s crisp, retina-ready graphics!
You can get Circuloid for iPhone here. Check also circuloid.com for screenshots and an awesome trailer!
We have received a lot of questions on whether Code Pilot will support Xcode 4 or not, and if it will – how much will the upgrade cost. It’s not an easy matter, because new Xcode is entirely different beast on the inside. Basically, all code allowing Code Pilot to interact with IDE has to be rewritten from scratch and that’s why we can’t “just release” another version of CP after checking that everything is compatible and works beautifully.
Nevertheless, we have started working on Code Pilot 2.0, with Xcode 4 support in mind. We’re hoping to have a beta version ready by the end of March if everything goes well.
Code Pilot 2.0 will be priced the same as the current version. Everyone who bought CP 1.x in 2011 before the 2.0 version’s release, will get the new version completely free of charge, everyone else gets the 2.x license with 50% discount.
And one more thing – we’ve decided that all the profit that we will generate this month on Code Pilot sales will go directly to developersAgainstPoverty.org campaign for clean water. We strongly encourage you to donate as well.
Code Pilot 1.2.4 was just released. It includes support for latest pre-release version of Xcode 3.2.6 and some installer fixes.
Here’s a direct link to Code Pilot 1.2.4 package.
Don’t be afraid to say it – when it comes to productivity, for many of us the end of the year is a pure horror. It’s not only find-a-tree, buy-a-turkey, find-presents, check-christmas-lights, find-better-presents, check-christmas-lights-again, next-year-we’re-going-to-Hawaii time. It’s also time of making plans for the coming year, promises to work harder, save more money, afford Porsche (slash another Porsche) and – most of all – not to procrastinate anymore. And guess what – Santa’s coming earlier this year to make all your wishes come true!
For all those in love with Getting Things Done, but also for those who just want to improve their lives and make much more of it, we come with a real bargain. Now you can get Nozbe for iPhone/iPod and iPad for nearly half price! This means you get a powerful, integrated with Evernote application that not only helps you manage tasks, but actually get them done, cheaper than ever before! And if you have Nozbe.com account, you also get full cloud sync and teamwork support. Christmas price for iPhone app is now only $2,99 (compared to $4,99) and for iPad $7,99 (instead of $14,99) but you have to hurry – offer ends on 1st January 2011.
If you’re still not convinced, let us just remind you, that there is much more to Nozbe than just a Christmas sale. What you can achieve with Nozbe is organizing your work in projects so you won’t forget about anything, planning next actions to help you simplify your work day, delegate actions to save your time, integrate with Evernote, sync your projects, work in teams, browse files, make notes and much more to keep your life as simple and as organized as it can be.
So if you’re really thinking about making your life better and getting better results faster and easier, check Nozbe’s bargains now!
With have just released Circuloid 1.2!
Version 1.2 adds Game Center leaderboards support, enabling players to compete against each other for high scores. By popular demand, Circuloid 1.2 also includes sensitivity settings for accelerometer and slider control modes, as well as support for Apple’s recently released version 4.2 of the iOS (fast app switching).
Circuloid will be on SALE for $1.99 (50% OFF!) during thanksgiving and black friday.
Check out some screenshots revealing new features:
Game Center leaderboards on a floppy! What's not to like?!
Slider and accelerometer controls got sensitivity setting
More on Circuloid on it’s website: http://circuloid.com