Two Finger Play

iPhone game development, by a college student with a short attention span

Name:
Location: Atlanta, GA, United States

I don't wear shoes. If you see a barefoot kid walking around the Tech campus, say hi.

19.8.08

Score Downtime; Deluxe

Well, Tris has done astonishingly well — download count as of this morning was over half a million. Unfortunately, the amount of traffic from the score system completely and totally overwhelmed the shared hosting my database and script were sitting on. I've talked to the host and am hoping to find some good dedicated hosting soon; for now, though, the global score system is simply dead.

In the time in which I wasn't fiddling with and worrying about the score system, I got a few additions made that I'd seen a lot of requests for. Tris 1.0.2 (I've submitted a 1.0.1 but it's chilling in “In Review” limbo) lets you set the movement sensitivity, whether the sidebar appears on the left or right, and whether pieces rotate clockwise or counter-clockwise. Also, there's a bit more of a delay when a piece lands before it gets locked into place.

There's one or two suggestions I've received in comments here that I'm pretty sure I'll add at some point — all, alas, from "anonymous", so I'm unable to properly credit them. One involves multitouch, and letting the player drag and rotate a piece at the same time by tapping with a second finger while moving the first; the other, simpler if a bit less intuitive, would have a tap on the bottom row or two drop the piece immediately.

Another thing: I'm considering what I can do for a Deluxe version of Tris. The original version will stay free, and get the bugfixes and most features that I add in future, but the non-free one will get some improvements over the original. Mostly these improvements are features I would like to add to the free one but that would be time-consuming to implement. What I've got planned so far:
  • Sound (piece rotation, piece landing, row clearing, possibly music)

  • Row-clearing animation (this will be pretty, I promise)

  • Leaderboard split up by time period (separate top-ten scores for the past day, week, month, and, uh, eternity)

I'd welcome any other suggestions. Is there something you'd absolutely have to see in Tris to pay a buck or two for the Deluxe version? Let me know.

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