Show HN: I built this game alone – design, code, music, sound, marketing
toucheliss.com
toucheliss.com
Eliss Infinity is a reboot of Eliss which was an early iPhone game (2009) which took me 5 months of work (+2 months to learn and build libraries in OpenGL and Objective-C). I polished it, made it more accessible, added a tutorial, added new modes, new music, a text-free interface... made it universal (there was only one resolution when Eliss came out), added Game Center, sync ... All this work took me more than twice the work I put into the original game.
Let me know if you have any questions.
You may want to put a description of the gameplay on the site. I was only compelled to buy it after the video + gameplay instructions.
Secondly, this is hugely inspirational.
Can I ask how you taught yourself OpenGL?
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Mobile-3D-Graphics-Kaufmann-Computer/d... [2] http://processing.org/
Is the music/sound procedurally generated too?
What is the process like for creating the soundtrack for the trailer or effects for the game?
What's the squiggly black icon for/go to in the options list (Settings, Leaderboards, About, goes to a black screen???)?
Can’t wait to give this a shot later tonight!
Though, i guess i expressed it poorly. I didn't mean to imply that you intentionally hid it, just that the way you laid it out hid it to the average user no matter what and since you probably have both devices, weren't even aware that an important piece of information wasn't available until after the sales pitch. :)
Root cause: your title graphics is beautiful and well centered, so it looks like a splash screen, not like something with more content below (and scroll bars don't show on OS X).
Suggested fix: just add an onclick handler so that you smoothly scroll down to the next screen of content when the user clicks the image. That should be enough to teach the user that they have to scroll to see more content.
Other than that, game looks gorgeous, congrats!
Consider multitouch. Conventional mouse-desktop thinking orients us to one pointer and a one-point interaction mode. "Normal Users" (aka, the Your Mom archetype) new to the touch experience and to Eliss almost always use a single finger to drag around the screen objects, switching to two only to pinch. But around level 3, the game ramps up in difficulty, and this is when the magic happens. The user starts falling behind. Without asking or thinking about it, nearly every single one of them suddenly starts using their other hand. Nobody told them it would work! These are users terrified of clicking the File menu, because it once ate their Word document. Experimentation has a huge mental inhibition, and yet touch is so intuitive it bypasses the block. I've asked all these users whether they noticed -- and while this isn't rigorous by any degree -- nearly all of them reported they did not. This is magic.
Thank you Steph Thirion, for hours of enjoyment in Eliss as well as a lovely natural experiment in UX.
"Error
Over Quota
This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later."
In the meantime the trailer is here: https://vimeo.com/85870689
I saw what I think was a combining and separating spheres mechanic but past that it wasn't clear to me.
On a positive note, I did like the music.
Unfortunately, I think the posters mis-linked the trailer video instead of the interview one. Someone have the other link? [Edit: NM.. The first image in the post is the video embed for the interview. Just missed that it was a vimeo embed]
Trailer is awesome. Really neat music.
[Edit Again: The interview is great, and explains some of the gameplay: http://vimeo.com/86028762 Also contains a great quote that sums up software development timelines pretty well: "What I thought would take two weeks took five months, and the whole five months I thought I was two weeks from being done."]
The gameplay looks a bit like Osmos (http://www.osmos-game.com/) in lo-fi. I'm not sure if that's accurate, but that's the impression I got.
In fact, the Osmos website is probably a good example to follow on how to explain your game a little better when it might not be clear from the video.
They have one mechanic in common (merger), but more or less everything else is different:
* The goal of Eliss stages is to fill traps with planets of the right size and color
* Eliss uses direct input (you drag the planets directly), although in both cases planets have inertia. Eliss does not have a gravitational (or repulsive) model, movement is either directly input or linear inertial
* Eliss allows splitting planets into half-planets
* Eliss's field is not static, planets and traps regularly appear.
* In Eliss, sizes are not relevant to absorption, only color is. Differently colored planets interfere, both lose mass and the player loses health
* Eliss is faster-paced
* Eliss is very specifically built for and around multitouch, initially you can get by with a finger or 2, but as difficulty ramps up you'll have to start using more fingers simultaneously in order to keep your planets under control and out of one another's way
* I think Eliss is a better fit for very small devices (Osmos always feels cramped on a smartphone screen, Eliss did not). OTOH, Eliss simply wouldn't work on a PC (the input does not work). I'm not sure how it works on a tablet either. That's one's a personal qualitative judgement rather than an objective description though.
Not relevant to gameplay, but Eliss also predates Osmos by several months (March 2009 v August 2009)
Cool music and the 8bit style gave me flashbacks of some games I played in the 80s.
Good luck, it looks great! (though I, too, didn't really get the gameplay or the type of game it is)
How did you learn to do pixel art ? I guess thats what you would classify the art in this game.
And why did you mention 'sound' and 'music' separately ? Hmm.. Did you have to do different type of work for these two ?
And sound as in sound effects. I wrote more about that process here [2].
[1] http://hello.eboy.com/eboy/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7192558
Turns out, they exist: http://ifamilystickers.com
It's here if anyone is curious: http://shop.venuspatrol.com/products/eliss-scarf
Thanks! I used Apple Logic, long time user since the Emagic days. [1]
My dad and his brothers and sisters grew up under a strict piano every morning before school regimen.
He tried to teach me too when I was 5 or 6 with little discipline and moderate success, it never went very far, I wasn't very interested in the technical stuff, I just sometimes fussed with it. Eventually in my teen years I got into playing guitar and come up with structured songs, then piano, then singing, then music production, then electronic instruments... But always as a self taught hobby, not much discipline. I know close to nothing about solfege. I mostly fuss with stuff and try to find melodies that sound good to my ear.
It's funny because musically I became the opposite of my dad. He has absolute pitch, I absolutely do not. He can't memorize songs because he was taught to play while reading scores, I can't read scores and play everything by memory. He never made a song of his own, I only play my own stuff. That said the times he tried to teach may have been important, I think I have a good ear for melody and those very early days of piano playing may be why (but that's just a guess).
Have you had prior experience to making music? What tools did you use?
Well... Fuck.
> I'm just a little confused about what it is.
(note: not connected to developer, but bought the original Eliss on iOS back when it was first released in early 2009. I've never played Infinity, but it looks like an "expanded" and more polished version of the original with more stuff and modes)
The gameplay is actually shown starting at ~00:40. Eliss is very simple when you play it, but confusing to explain/show (it also quickly becomes frantic, and was one of the first good multitouch games[0]).
You get planets and targets.
00:42 planets of the same color can be merged (into a bigger one) by making them overlap
00:45 by putting a planet of the right color and size into a target, you make both planet and target disappear
00:50 you can split a planet in half-size planets by pulling it apart with 2 fingers
01:00 when planets of different colors overlap, they interfere and lose mass (and you lose health)
01:04 apparently there's some sort of planet eating interference I didn't know about
01:08 planets continuously spawn on the field, you get a warning showing the color and size of the arriving planet and should move other colors out of the way fast
01:12 any contact will lead to aggregation, you can clear a field
It's a delightful game with great design and very cute sound effects.
[0] and remains one of the few where you wish you 1. had more fingers 2. had more nimble fingers and 3. had fingers able to go through one another. It remains one of the best and most complete uses of multitouch I've seen.
Osmos has a much slower and more reflexive gameplay, Eliss is faster-paced and reactive. At the end of the day, they're very different games although both fall under an umbrella of "extended puzzle games" I guess.