Hey HN! Thanks for the feedback! I studied graphic design, played/made music as a hobby, and became passionate about coding (mostly self taught), so much that I tend to integrate code into everything I do, including in the design process. The idea for the game happened while coding, all the art in the game is procedural (except the wiggly lines in the center of the planets, that's the only in-game texture), and the trailer is generated in one swoop by code (by automating the game engine and outputting every frame as a png file).
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.
Thanks! About OpenGL I don't know if I'm a good example to follow, in my case I mostly needed to understand how to setup, send vertices to OpenGL, set colors, activate blending, once I figured that out I abstracted that stuff away in a Processing-like API (setColor, drawRect, translate...) so I could forget about all that stuff. I figured things out mostly by skimming through this book [1], looking at the Processing code base, OpenGL tutorials, Stack Overflow... For the odd texture I still use the Texture2D class from Apple's examples. Note that at the time there were not many good OpenGL libraries for iOS, now things are different, OpenFrameworks works on iOS, there's Cinder, etc. Had I started a year later I probably could have skipped all that stuff instead of building my own library.
Pretty nice work, I like the approach that you took. Now that you know OpenGL if you choose some other library in future, you will have a better understanding how it works underneath; in my opinion it's good to do things 'the hard way' at least one time - in order to grasp a deeper understanding.
Thanks! Music and sound were all made with Logic and a software synths. Would love to get into procedural music eventually though. The process for the sound was grabbing some video of the game, throw that in Logic, and hunt for sounds that match by tweaking the synth. The process for the music sometimes start by drawing semi randomly on the piano roll and listen to find for good bits, or sometimes by playing around with the midi keyboard, then tweak it to taste. One trick I often use is to stick to the white keys, it makes it easier when you don't know solfege like me. :) (But it does restrict you a lot harmonically.) Once I have a good riff then I move to a riff to add on top, and so on. This process can take me days to finish one song, but time seems to move very fast (faster than during a focused coding session).
So surprised (pleasantly) to see this! The original Eliss is still one of my favorite games. Last I heard though you were working on Faraway? What's the status of that project?
I found myself annoyed that after the beautiful and charming video you hide the "APPLE ONLY" bit behind the first scroll-down. It is not a big thing, but it has soured me a bit on any future products i might see with the name little eyes on it.
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. :)
I don't and i'm not sure how you got the idea. It only speaks to me of a developer who at worst focuses so much on apple products that they don't even consider that other platforms might exist, or at best is slightly distracted and might be able to make use of an oversight being pointed out. In either case, whenever i see their name in the future, i'll have to look first whether their product runs on any of my devices, or whether watching their ad will just be a small waste of time leading possibly to unfullfillable desires.
I thought you were saying you'd avoid them out of spite. Anyway, yeah, if they don't make apps for your device, it makes sense that you might not give them a look next time.
Hello! Just a quick feedback on the website: I didn't realize I had to scroll to see the rest of the content at first. I tried clicking on several parts of the image but that didn't work. Eventually I pressed the spacebar and was very surprised to see the page scroll.
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.
You do realise that 'scrollbars not showing on osx' is a setting you can toggle, right? Just in case you want to prevent this problem in future and, like me, you see no advantage in hiding scrollbars.
I adored Eliss when it released. I still use it at one of the single best examples of how a touch UX radically changes the computing experience by aligning software behavior with physical intuitions.
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.
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."]
This. I'm at work, I don't want to watch a video (even on a legitimate break). Even if I wasn't at work I wouldn't want to watch a video. Some of us like words :)
Looked at the video some, it doesn't tell me anything about what i'm trying to do or how to play, i just see stuff moving around. hard to sell it like that. other than that, looks cool, as far as i can tell.
I LOVE the video, the music and visuals are really awesome. As others have said, I'm not entirely sure what the gameplay is, but I am curious. So I guess that's good!
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.
> I'm not sure if that's accurate, but that's the impression I got.
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)
The original Eliss was the first iPhone game I installed. The use of multi-touch was really inspiring - it really took advantage of multi-touch and did so in a creative way, very early on.
It's all a matter of style, but I removed the border on the iframe that holds the video player and I liked it better because the video started to blend with the rest of the page. I felt it made it more immersive.
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)
The three iOS device silhouettes in the video reminded me of the family stickers people put on the backs of their cars (Mom, Dad, kid, kid, baby, dog, cat).
Cool, I'd be interested in hearing your experience with generating sales and how your app performs. I recently released an app and saw, first hand, how difficult it is to get any traction behind it, even with a small following and engaged users.
Hah, after watching this trailer I just went and bought it --and this is coming from a person who has literally never bought a game before. It looks beautiful. Great work.
Yes, I designed it. The image was generated using the game engine. Adam Robezzoli from attractmo.de produced it (his idea) in collaboration with LOOMLAB who are really good at making amazing scarves.
Looks neat, but why make games only for iOS? It seems like a very limited market when it's so easy to get into game dev for other platforms these days.
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).
Great production values and music and a really cool video. But I have no idea what the gameplay of your game is. It looked more like a really cool music video than a game trailer. I'm just a little confused about what it is. But everything else is top notch.
> But I have no idea what the gameplay of your game is.
> 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.
Only in that it involves mergers. Eliss uses direct-control rather than movement, allows splitting, and the goals are different (you don't need to conquer the whole field, but to fill a specific number of traps). Furthermore sizes are irrelevant to mergeability, only color is important.
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.
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.