The techniques for getting the Illustraions right

1. Goto Illustrator, new page, place an artwork or two, save the file.

2. Create the illustration. Use the BLOB BRUSH!! Not the standard brush :) Or you will be sorrrrry...

Alternatives: a. choose the 5pt oval, 1pt stroke (no fill) for a line that automatically seems to have different weights (and hang the pressure sensitive potential of the pen!)
b. Use the pen and dick around trying to get a responsive brush that shows different pen weights. You could research more here to get better at this with the aim of SAVING the brushes so you don't fluff around so much next time.

2a. make sure that as you go, you keep a copy of the line work as blob brush without the make-paint-object quality, and put this on top of any paint work. Lock it.

3. delete the template file

4. Save a back up.

5. copy the layers, making sure everything is unlocked and selcted. This will remain an untouched master file.

6. In Photoshop, go paste, choose to paste as smart object.

7. When you want to edit the smart object click the icon on the layer. This will bring up a new Illo file - NOT your master file. Edit that. Save.

8. Go back to PS. File will update in a few seconds.

ref: http://www.vectordiary.com/tips-and-tricks/pasting-smart-objects-in-photoshop/

I think this is the way to go with animals - cleaner is better

TestFlight: iOS beta testing on the fly

http://testflightapp.com/

Round 2 visual direction

Deciding on a visual style part 2

This illo makes no sense - just have a look at the style of it... It borrows heavily from the Japanese 2d aesthetic, especially in its black and white stage, but it would have Australian foliage and animals. It's less representational than my last image, which seemed more naturalistic. This is a little more abstract, but a little nicer. Does it work across the entire game set? Does it have to? Food for thought.

Deciding on a visual style

On black with multi-coloured backgrounds...


On black with a simple black background

ON white with a cartoon treatment...


On white with a more detailed illustration treatment...


Showing what happens when a user clicks on any animal... it scales up to fit 9 squares, then the word appears, and we hear a voice say "Crocodile"








and when you click on the little circle in the 9 square main attraction, you get a screen like this:

Wireframes: Homepage

swipe sideways for more games. They appear to be on a circle which rotates.

swipe sideways for more games - they are on a horizontal line

simple click an animal to go to a game. Have to be clever because we also want the game title to display on click, and we need to allow those titles to get longer for diff lang translations, and we need to allow for more (future) games.

The two circles on the front page in every drawing link to settings and credits.

Wireframe: My house

As easy as it looks! Drag the animal to where it should live. If it doesn't live there, we hear a 'dinkle dinkle" sound and the animal floats back to the top. When you get it right, we hear another sound and maybe the animal gives a soft glow when you release it in the correct area. If you release it very near where it is supposed to go, it floats to the correct position. Perhaps we hear a voice say "Good! Koala's live in gum trees!". The top RHS arrow goes to the next screen within this game, and we get all new animals and a new collection of habitats.

Wireframe: What do I like to eat?

Pretty straight forward! You drag the food over to the animal. If he likes it the food stays in his area, he smiles, and the top area says "I eat... ants"... or... "Echidna's eat ants". Then the 'next screen' icon appears. If he doesn't like it he shakes his head slightly (and we hear a 'dinkle dinkle' sound) and when you let go of the food it floats back to its box.

Wireframe: Meet the animals

A bit of an evolution from the 'p' if for Platypus game. This version has a number of key ideas...

As we originally envisaged it, this was going to be about learning to associate a letter with an animal, whilst hearing it pronounced. I later learned that its better to teach children 'puh' is for Platypus, rather than 'pee' is for Platypus, because that's actually how children learn to spell. I learned we should use lower case letters, because children only learn about capitals later on. This posed a bit of a design challenge because my original concept was a circular one, with no descending letters - all caps.

The original idea would have been the most language intensive game amongst all our games, and translating this game would have been the most work. One interesting translation challenge is that in Spanish

Platypus = ornitorrinco.

Thus we would have run into a bit of work when making the Spanish version, as if we move the platypus to display when the user clicks the 'O' we'd have to make sure we have an animal for the 'P'. All of which we could have done, but it seemed to me like maybe we should get clever early on. Additionally, for languages that don't use our alphabet, having a navigation system completely dependent on 26 English letters seemed a trifle problematic.

The other thing that happened was that as I prototyped these screens, what emerged were some consistent positions for the game area and the 'buttons/text' area, and I wanted to see if I could carry these design elements on for this game.

So in effect, when the user clicks a picture, it expands to encompass nine squares, and the top area displays a single word. Perhaps we hear a voice say "Platypus!". This evolution is more about meeting the animals. You can close the big square and go back to choosing animals to meet. The big image is so large that we could include some text on it, or some futher interactivity, without too much problem. The top right hand side arrow sends a whole new set of animals into the main game area to meet.

It would still be possible to have an image of your child in the grid!

Wireframe: flip cards

Different sizes. Different sized flip cards have a bit of an impact on how I draw the images.

Wireframe: Find us all

ok we start this game with the first icon active. a voice could say at this point, "Find one dragonfly". After a few seconds the dragon fly 'appears' in full colour, without user interaction.

Notice how I've put a glow on the dragon fly... just as it appears it would be nice for it to glow for a second, but that's a NTH. (Nice to Have)

Then the active button 'fades' to the 'completed' state, and the next button becomes active. We could have a voice here say "Find two frogs". The child clicks on the frog in the game area and it goes full colour, maybe with a 'croak croak' sound. When they have found both frogs, the current icon fades to the completed state and the next item becomes active. Perhaps we hear a voice say "Find 3 flowers"...

When all the creatures have been found, a word like "Great!" or "Excellent" pops up for a little while, and then it is replaced with the next screen icon.

And, just for kicks, here's the same screen with Japanese translations. I've learned that the 'game identity icon' on the far left needs to be wider than I've allowed here for longer non-english words. This will be the case whether we make these as images or translatable text.

Japanese language

Q. Which do you commonly use to write Japanese: vertical or horizontal writing?

A. In old days Japanese was only written vertically. All historical documents are written in this style. However, with the introduction of western materials, the alphabet, Arabic number and mathematical formulas, it was not as convenient to write vertically.

Since each kanji and kana has its own meaning, they could be arranged either way without losing their meanings. Science-related text, which include many foreign words, gradually had to be changed to horizontal text.

Today most school textbooks, except Japanese or classical literature, are written horizontally. Young people mostly write this way, though some older people still prefer to write vertically as it looks more formal sometimes. Most general books are set in vertical text. The Japanese don't have problem to read or write either way. However it could be said that the horizontal style is more common nowadays.

Getting coverage via reviews

Falling on Deaf Ears

The first avenue I explored in app marketing was in trying to get some review site coverage. I tried all the major ones that I could think of – TUAW, MacStories, Macgasm, TiPb, 148Apps, iPhone.AppStorm, AppShopper, theAppleBits, etc. with varying levels of success. Understandably, the smaller the review site, the quicker they get back to you and generally more willing they are to cover your app. However, some of the bigger names are really cool as well. The guys over at MacStories have been amazing since day one and I can’t recommend them enough. Developer friendliness aside, they are probably my current favorite app/news/review site. On the other end of the spectrum, some won’t respond to an email unless you sign over your first born child …. you know who you are, lol. Remember not to take it personally and stay persistent. Your best approach is to network like crazy. You will be amazed how interconnected everyone is, and it carries a lot more weight when an app is recommend by a friend instead of by the app developer.

Unless you can get some type of exclusive with one of the bigger sites, get as many as possible to cover you. If you can organize the reviews so they all come up simultaneously or at least close together, that should give you the biggest benefit.

from: http://mobileorchard.com/ipad-app-marketing-case-study-flickpad/

Promo codes

prIn addition to advance copies, Apple provides up to 50 promo codes for each application version (submitting an update will reset the promo codes available back to 50). All review sites will accept these promo codes to review apps. Prior to launch, you must get in touch with sites to know who should receive the initial promo codes.

Twitter and YouTube are also proving to be very popular channels for iPhone app promotion. Trailers on YouTube can be viewed thousands of times, and nearly all iPhone review sites are very active on Twitter as well.

While there are a few major iPhone review sites, there are hundreds if not thousands of individuals and tiny sites also doing app reviews. While no single one of these is significant, in aggregate they have a significant impact as each person may influence 10 to 50 people. The most successful long-term marketing and promotion will realize this and will try to do things to take advantage of these micro-channels.

taken from: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4211/iphone_development_everything_you_.php?page=4

Checklist before launch

I think we'll need a checklist before launch. We should include on it:

Make a comapny, get an ABN, set up a bank account

Make the promocode/marketing list

Press release (ha ha! but maybe we should have one?)

Get together the following assets for this:

Submission

When everything is complete, an Admin user on your account will submit the app to the App Store via iTunes Connect. It is recommended that you walk through this process before preparing to submit, so you are aware of exactly what is asked for at submission. You will need to have your app description, keywords, screenshots and logos all ready to go along with the binary to be uploaded.

We can learn from this experience

The process someone else went through building an iPhone app for kids

http://www.tentoed.com/gamedesign/2010/1/15/building-a-preschool-iphone-game-part-2.html

Feb 17 meeting recap

Meeting recap:

Dan and Dan still up for continuing project. yay!

D2 happy with the evolving, more detailed visual style. yay!

4 games to launch with:

Alphabet and animals game
Flip cards
the Animals in their habitat game
The counting game - can you find two tiny turtles? Three leaping lizards? etc....

Next week (Design Production week - yay!) should roughly look like this:

Monday: full day - wireframe pencil drawings, and notes on game mechanics

Tuesday: full day drawing - Tuesday night, skype talk. Desirable outcomes would be that D1 knows the dimensions to cut assets to, perhaps we talk further about x-code.

Wednesday - half a day getting D2 the assets, half a day drawing/refining screens from feedback last night

Thursday - drawing all day

Friday - drawing and blog project update.

Following Monday - cutting assets for delivery

Following Tuesday - Skype 'where are we at' talk.

Koala !

koal, work in progress