I published a game today

#1

My company published our first game today.

Scratch & Learn is a game designed for young kids (age 2-­4) to help them learn new words in a fun way. Scratch the surface with your finger to reveal an item. When enough has been uncovered, the item will appear in full, with sounds, colors and a voice telling you its name. If your kid does not speak English, Scratch & Learn is also an excellent way to learn it!

Features:

  • 100+ items, divided into 4 categories: food, animals, toys and letters/numbers
  • Intuitive and rewarding gameplay
  • English voices for the names of each item

If you own an Android device, please download it and give me feedback. All impressions are welcome.

Lite version (free)
Full version ($1.89)







#2

Cool stuff, Arch! Congrats

#3

I didn’t code this one, but hopefully we will have time to finish two more games before the end of this year.

#4

How do you feel about developing a VR game/app? Even for something like the GearVR since you’re about that mobile money.

#5

The guy who coded this game owns an Oculus Rift dev kit. If we can come up with a fun idea that doesn’t take too much effort to develop then we might give it a chance.

I haven’t tried this new generation of VR yet and I’m not convinced it will work for most games. It is probably awesome in space sims and racing games where the player can have free control of his/her vision without affecting gameplay. This will increase immersion and with the right engine then it can be done quite easily.

For many other genres it won’t work at all. In a FPS you are used to move the aim together with the camera. Many high-production games rely heavily on scripted events and you can’t take away the player’s control of the camera without breaking immersion.

Here is some reading on the topic:
Gamasutra | Jesse Schell’s six lessons for making VR games
Gamasutra | How Oculus builds its own VR content: Lessons learned
Gamasutra | We learned a lot about VR, so here is why we are rethinking Among the Sleep

#6

Yeah, absolutely. You can’t just shoehorn VR functionality into a game, and not every brilliant idea is going to work in VR. You have to design your game from the group up to work for VR specifically.

Aside from cockpit/simulator games, really. Those work just fine almost as-is.

#7

A new similar article just appeared in my RSS feed.

Gamasutra | How devs deal with 4 problem areas in VR game design

#8

holy crackers, congratulations!