Highest Heart is nicely on Track

The highest Heart made incredible progress the last three weeks. Even though only a thrid of the levels are designed yet, they already look like something. Most importantly:

Eyris lives! The small bird finally has her sprite map, and the GUI is almost finished too. Finally I can show off some screenshots that look like something. Check them out

The Poster for the final exhibition

The Poster for Full Color Planet is ready. It was quite a bunch of work. I hope it will look stunning once its printed

Gaining livelyhood

After lots of work for the semester end, the graphical work now resumes. The highest Heart gains quite a lot of livelihood right now. The enemies are getting their sprites and stuff. Here are some impressions

Hollow Grounds - The Review Roundup

Its been almost 3 months now since the release of Hollow Grounds. As  helper to all who also try to get out an iphone game, here is a final verdict on the amount of reviews and publicity Hollow Grounds got:

Number of Websites written for Reviews: 90
Number of Replies by Websites: 18
Number of Articles written: 18
Number of Reviews: 10

Favourable Reviews:
Big'n'Side - "Gold Award"
Gamecity - "8/10"
Calm Down Tom - "7/10"
iReviewT - "A-" + "Must Have Award"
Save Game Online - "8/10"
Nine Over Ten - "4.5/5"
Master of Hubes/Appblitz - "9/10"

Middle Ground Reviews
iphonegamerUK - "3/5"
indie gamer chick - no score

Unfavourable Reviews
AppAdvice - "2/5"

What are your experiences with trying to promote your app? Let me know. I hope this list might help people new into this thing knowing what to expect.

The Highest Heart is progressing into graphics stage

The work on the Highest Heart is going along nicely. I'll update the Youtube Channel with Speeddrawings during the next months. But for now The test backdrop for the back and the floating islands are coming along very nice. Have a look at the first screenshots

   

Hollow Grounds 1.1

Hollow Grounds got its first real update this weekend. There are a few things that have changed

- Tutorial Skip: The first 6 Levels are now labeled "Easy". That means you unlock straight to level 7 as soon as you beat the first level. I noticed quite a lot of people never played past them, so this is for them to experience the tougher levels with more interesting track pieces.
- Wall Siding: When you fly close to walls you will speed up three times as fast, as seen by the orange trail that you will emit. This can give you a chance of still obtaining a good speed rating if you mess up once
- New Icon: I've allready written this, but the new Icon really looks way better. Not sure if people who already bought the game get something out of that though ;)
- Better Performance: All code has been optimised to make the game fun a bit smoother on old generation iPhones like the 3GS.
- Brighter Graphics: I was able to develop a Unity shader-replacement that makes the colors even more bright an saturated. Now the gae should look exactly as the intended assets were

and finally

- Applifier: The full version of Hollow Grounds will feature now a "More Games" button by Applifier. Applifier has a nice curated little list of games that they recommend. Check them out, there is some nice stuff in there like "Zen Bound 2"

Applifier needed some new assets for promotion of Hollow Grounds, Let me share them here:

Hollow Grounds Icon Update

The Icon of Hollow Grounds has been quite a problem in the past. It wasn't very crisp, it didn't stand out enough and Piri was barely recognizable in lower resolutions.

I've took the time with the Applifier Update (more on that later) and wanted to give it a new Icon here. In my opinion it is now where it is supposed to be. The only thing that could be argued is that it still doesn't reflect gameplay very nice yet... Thats a really tough thing to do in 57x57 pixels