Tetra for iOS - my new Letterpress-inspired board game app | Hacker News Reader

Tetra for iOS - my new Letterpress-inspired board game app

itunes.apple.com

38 pointsjazzychad32 comments

I'd say it's more that inspired by...

s'ok - I showed Loren before it launched, and he was cool with it :)

for the sake of your own brand, I'd iterate that design so it doesn't look like a carbon copy. Either people will assume you ripped him off, or that it's another of his games, not yours.

I agree. Especially since you've copied another existing game (Quarto). Which is fine, I guess, but at the moment you've copied someone else's game and copied someone else's style... Your unique idea is bringing these two elements together, which is good, but in the future I might suggest copying Loren on a deeper level: Create both your own interesting presentation style and a clever new game mechanic to go along with it.

How is this game different from Quarto [1]?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarto_(board_game)

It's not :) It is an app version of the same game. You're the first person who has made that connection in months of beta testing and showing people the app. I'm sure other people will recognize it as well, but I don't think it's as recognizable as was, say, Words With Friends was an app version of Scrabble.

Quarto is a great game, and I think it's well suited for an app like this where you can take your time thinking about your turn. However, it would be nice to give the game designer some credit.

That's true. I'll add some credit to the app and website on the next rev.

Well, the first person that commented on it anyway. I made the connection as well. :-)

Cool game, nicely done!

It wasn't that clear to me that I could play more than one game at a time though, might want to make it clearer. It's been a while since I played letterpress, but I recall I had dozens of games going at once there.

Wish it didn't require iOS 6. I don't upgrade my iPad after previous updates made it slow.

Usually, apple tries to improve firmware speed after they add features. I found that staying updated is the best policy.

Unless you're trying to run iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 or iOS 6 (or was it 5?) on the 3G.

There are definitely times where it DOES NOT END WELL even though the device technically supports the upgrade.

A better policy is to wait for reports and then upgrade after a few weeks if they're positive.

If you're expecting performance from BETA operating systems I may have bad news for you.

A better policy is to wait for the official releases rather than buying a UDID slot from a dodgy website.

It was the iOS 4 update that practically killed my 3G. Everything became too slow to bear. If it wasn't for the great work of the jailbreakers, i wouldn't have been able to get back to iOS 3.

I upgraded from iOS 5 to 6 on my iPhone 4 and immediately regretted it. There are multi second delays with no visible feedback. Text boxes (such as the one I'm typing into) is almost completely broken in Chrome (by the update). iOS 5 was far superior to 6 and I wish I could downgrade easily.

I couldn't upgrade my iPad because it's the first generation one...Again, would love a non-iOS 6 version; what features of this app depend on iOS 6?

It's a $0-$2 app. It's not worth the effort to support an older generation of iOS. 93% of people have upgraded to iOS6.

The one thing Apple really got right was getting a large percentage of their users upgraded to their latest OS. Hope it goes as well for iOS7.

An entirely fair point, although if the dependencies are relatively limited it's less painful/more feasible to support iOS 5.

My iPad is reaching its retirement age anyway.

I'm in the same boat as you. I have an iPad 2 and since there is no easy downgrade I'm not prepared to move to iOS6 either.

I had a bad experience with my iPhone 3G. I had to jailbreak it just to downgrade back to a usable phone. That whole process took several hours of time, which I really don't have these days.

Does this app share any code with Letterpress or did you re-create the UI elements/interactions?

No code was shared. I wrote my own UIKit layer to accomplish the UI (whereas Loren used a 100% OpenGL implementation for Letterpress).

I think that is probably a sensible way of doing it - it did seem a bit extreme that Letterpress is pure OpenGL. How much do you rely on QuartzCore/Core Animation rather than regular UIKit animation?

I use QuartzCore layers extensively, and especially lots of Core Animation for the in-app animation stuff. For UI widgets like buttons I mostly made subclasses of UIKit components. So, lots of both.

I think in an interview Loren said he wrote it in OpenGL for his own fun. Haven't we all done that? It's extreme, but it's very good at providing a lot of rich control, but with iOS7 a lot of fancy tricks he did will be pretty simple so I'd imagine that it was a one off.

I must admit I have done that, however I never really extended it very far. I think I was just trying to animate really complex bar charts really quickly.

Game looks awesome. I'm glad to see that you got everything put together and out there :).

A little too "inspired"

What do you get with the $1.99 upgrade ?

You can play more concurrent games and change themes (color schemes) in the app. The free version lets you have 2 concurrent games and use the basic theme.

I wonder where that idea came from...

Nice work, chad!

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