Here are some of the reviews streaming into the iTunes user reviews. The game has been rated 11 times so far, and all ratings have been 5 out of 5 stars! This is great for us, and even better for those who purchase the game. We are only planning on making the game better too! Enjoy!
great game
"This game is fun, I love how chill the music is. Easy difficulty is nice and laid back, hard is great for me (I'm always looking for a good challenge). Definitely a good buy for anyone who plays games on their iPhone."
Original game that's addicting
"This game is great, from the original visuals to the fantastic sound track this game is great. They arn't kidding when they say it's addicting. And hard mode truely is hard offering some serious challenge. I would recomend this game to both the casual and hardcore gamer."
Addicting
"Simply addicting. Anywhere from casual to hardcore gameplay, along with some obviously, highly paid musician or sound effects guy as the music and riffs are beyond words. You won't regret this purchase!!"
Exactly what the description says
"The game is simple, but that doesnt stop it from being fun. I have enjoyed playing it greatly when there is nothing to do. I would recomend it to anyone who has bus rides, time to kill in between classes, or anyone just looking for something a bit different."
Simple but fun!
"A good way to kill a few minutes."
very good
"Good game with challenging hard mode and good replay value. Very original definately worth purchasing."
Simplistic and fun
"A great game that gives you some nice music with some fast paced gameplay. Hard does actually give you a good challenge."
Soothingly challenging
"This game gets progressively harder as you increase difficulty. With multiple nodes on the screen to defend you will have to find a good way to keep track of where the enemies are at any given time. The music helps calm this game down with its mellow guitar sounds. Having each enemy's death have an additional string pluck gives this game an interesting twist in the same fashion as Rez."
Addictive
"I can't put it down."
Great!!!
"I first saw you on gamepro.com!!! Great app!!!!"
- Ryan Herda
Hey all! Tap Touch Defend has been approved! Pseudo Playgrounds first game Tap! Touch! Defend! was put on the app store today, and we only managed to get rejected once! This is pretty cool, some of us expected to be rejected more than that, seeing as how we really didn't understand the submission process all that well at first. If you are interested you can purchase the game for your iPhone/iPod Touch for the lowly price of $1.99.
Now that this game is out though, I am going to take the time to tell you about some of our future plans. With in the next two weeks, we are going to put out the first update for the game. It will include higher quality audio and new features. On that note, if anyone decides to purchase the game, please provide us with any ideas or things you want changed to the game, and we will see what we can do in future updates.
Pseudo Playgrounds would also like to thank our friends, family, and those that follow us in the Gamepro community for all their support in our endeavors. We have some bigger and more ambitious projects in the work right now, some announced, and some not. We look forward to showing the world what else we have being worked on here, but for now please enjoy our first game. It taught us a great deal about dealing with Apple and iTunes. Thanks Tap! Touch! Defend!
- Ryan Herda
Tap! Touch! Defend! does not have Aliens, Robots, Zombies, Blood, Fast Cars, Hot Ladies (though it may turn you on?), Skateboards, Helicopters, Freemasons, RPG Elements, Sail Boats, Potato Salad, Tornadoes, Astronauts, Political Affiliations, Trademark Infringement, Couches, Electrolytes, Three MC's and One DJ, T-Pain, Skinny Ties, Chex Mix, and other things you may or may not find in other games. What it does offer is a relaxing gameplay experience with various modes to keep it challenging and fun.
Is your life lacking happiness, fulfillment, and closure? Fear not for what I offer is enjoyment in solitude with a lasting relationship between man and machine. Tap! Touch! Defend's! high score system allows for an everlasting battle against yourself and all the accomplishment and reward you could ever ask for! Fight off strange shapes as they continually bombard your diamond node and earn a higher score as your reward. The dynamic music helps to create the perfect mix allowing for the player to enter a sort of trance. With an Easy, Medium, and Hard Mode along with progressive difficulty, players will always feel challenged and have a satisfying and timeless experience.
Tap! Touch! Defend! will hit the app store soon! At a mere 2 dollars how can you go wrong?
Disclaimer: Tap! Touch! Defend! may not actually improve the quality of your life. That is up to you.
- Adam Bergstrom
Yes, I know it has been a while since we have done a blog on our website. I can explain this though, I swear! We have been blogging regularly over at our Gamepro Developer profile. We have links to that from here so you can still keep up with what is going on here. If you check the news section you will see the announcement of a new game, and this game is actually finished and being submitted to the app store today or tomorrow!!
There will be more information on that title for you to read about in the games section, so go check it out! Onto iArena. This game is nearly finished, I know we have said that a lot, but that is because it has been for awhile. We have spent an incredible amount of time optimizing it and changing it to get it to run how we want it to run. The engine we are using is very limited, and it has not been the most friendly piece of technology. iArena is winding down though, and coming to a close. It will be out in the very near future. I promise that.
Other than that, we will try to do more blogs here, and in the meantime keep an eye on our developer profile over at Gamepro! Have a good one all!!
- Ryan Herda
All right all, we are going to be releasing the PC version of iArena on July 1st. As of now, we are unsure where you will be able to purchase the game at, but it will be a download title only. The price has yet to be determined, but it will not break your wallet, I promise nothing over 10 dollars. Gamepro has some say in the final price, so we will have to wait and see.
Other than that though, the iPhone/iPod Touch version will follow shortly after. With the 3.0 update just having come out we need to make sure it is compatible on the new operating system. So it will take a little extra time making sure we get it right the first time on both 2.2.1 and 3.0 operating system.
The optimizations are coming along for the iPhone version. We have done so much to make sure the game runs as smooth as possible on the iPhone/iPod Touch. There is still more things to do however, and when the game is done you can be rest assured we pulled all the stops in optimization. It has been an interesting ride working with hardware with such low specs. We have learned so much about improving loading times, using different file types, messing around with when things get loaded and how the processor calls and handles the assets. I can honestly say that was the hardest thing about developing this game for the iPhone.
There will be some differences between the PC version and the iDevice version. First and foremost the graphics will be slightly improved in the PC version. The framerate will be much higher and the controls and GUI will be different. Other than that though, the games will be fairly identical and what ever platform you choose we hope you enjoy Pseudo Playgrounds first release!
- Ryan Herda
Last Wednesday everyone at the company became stricken with a high fever and a painfully long list of other symptoms. Its not very fun being bed ridden and not able to work on your game. The whole painful weekend can be blamed on someone though. Adam is the reason we all suffered and Adam is the reason we all nearly died.
As of now, the rest of us at Pseudo Playgrounds need to go interrogate him and make sure hes not working with the Goat. We cant seem to think of any other reason why he would have used a viral attack on his own team!!
- Ryan Herda
So, we are still getting work done over here. But, E3 is going on right now and we have been maybe working at a tad slower pace than normal with all these press conferences going on. It's hard to work on iArena when there are so many new games and trailers being announced!!!
Other than that however, today I spent a lot of time optimizing the levels to help reduce load times and memory usage. Since we have moved the release date to July 1st, Adam and I have begun production on Metal Migration again. We are still working on iArena when ever something arises, but for now we are both animating enemy characters on Metal Migration when there is no work to be done on iArena.
I'm heading out right now, gonna get back to work so that we can get iArena finished!!
- Ryan Herda
Hey all, taking a little break from torque scripting to update the site a little bit. I fixed a few layout problems, also updated the links section along with the mobile version of the blog as I tend to not update that version nearly as much as the main sites version, mostly because the main sites version is just as easily readible if you have an iPhone as you can just double tap the main content area on the blog and it will autofit it perfectly to your screen!
iPhones are pretty amazing, but they lack quality games. By lacking quality games, I mean that the games on the iPhone are very casual. Casual isn't necessarily a bad thing all the time, as long as you put some time into it and make the look and feel of the game high quality. Which is why we're bringing iArena to you soon. Quality at it's finest, and just to make sure your not bored while you play our games, we have that very unique art style you have all been waiting for. I'm 100% sure you all will enjoy iArena when you buy it.
I have also gotten global high scores to work on the iPhone too so you can expect to be battling for the top 10 glory! You will be able to view the top 10 on the iPod Touch or iPhone and everyones highscores on the iArena site when it comes out so you can compare yourself to friends or others.
- Dakota Nicol
Sorry for lack of blogs last week. We have been working diligently to complete this project. As each day goes by it gets a bit closer to being finished. The game is always shaping up better than it was the day before. In the mean time however, if blogs are not updated as frequently, please bear with us a little longer. The game will be done soon, and it will be worth the wait! Thanks,
- Ryan Herda
iArena animation break down.
I am here to talk about the animation process involved in creating the characters in iArena. As you may know iArena has a unique art style in that all the characters and environments are hand drawn. It was my task to come up with a method for creating the character sprite sheets. The basic process can be broken down into:
Idea. Come up with what you want and how it'll work and interact. I do all the concepting at this stage and figure out everything the character will be doing so I can minimize the amount of backtracking.
Early sketches and concept work for a boss.
Sorry about the quality of the pictures.
Animate. Draw the frames that are to be on the sprite sheet. I follow the guides of traditional master animators such as Richard Williams. As with any commercial product you have deadlines, quality standards, and technology limitations to deal with and in such cases as iArena we did not lack these. The number of frames allocated to each animation varied depending on the animation i.e the run animation for the players character is 12 frames compared to 8 for many of the other enemies. Some of the tools I used at this stage are light table, peg bar, animation paper, and drawing tools.
The light table and peg bar in action.
Scan. Scan in the individual frames to be setup into the sprite sheets. There are alternative ways of doing this stage such as taking pictures with a camera or capturing the individual frames with a video camera. Some are easier than others but require more equipment and equipment costs $$$ and a decent scanner isn't very expensive. After scanning in the images I use a program called monkeyjam to see how well the animation looks.
Pencil test of King Salmon.
Photoshop. Once we have all the frames scanned in we use photoshop to chop them up and make sure they look the way we want. For some of the animations we would go through and add details or clean up the frames in photoshop to make things animate how we want.
I hope that gives a little insight on how things are done on the art side of things for IArena. If you have any questions or comments let me know.
Thanks,
- Adam Bergstrom
Hey all, just in from a footbag break. Adam, Dan, and I have been playing footbag (hacky sack) on our breaks and we're getting better, though we are a total disgrace to ourselves still. We also made our intern come out with us this time, it was either lashings or hacky, he chose hacky. The wonderful works of what goes through a game developer's mind at all times of the day, we actually come up with some pretty decent ideas while hacking it up. Anyways, just letting the fans know, we're getting further on the game quickly now with a lot of the issues resolved and the scene of the whole game went from being in an underground barred tunnel with no escape to an open prairie, sun, grass, flowers, and a little pond with a boat just so we can go on it every once in awhile and sing the "I'm on a Boat" song. Intern, seriously, if you're reading this, get back to work! ^_^
- Dakota Nicol
NO SHAVE TIL LAUNCH
We have decided that no one here is allowed to shave (anywhere) until the finishing and launching of iArena in the iTunes app store! This is gonna be a pretty hard commitment for me to make but the others here seem like they will be just fine with it. We are determined to get this game done by June 1st. We were talking yesterday though, and decided that we will not release it on that date if the game is not up to our standards. This is our first game and we will not release something that is not ready for the consumer. As far as I am concerned, this game is probably going to be one of the most important releases in my career. There is a lot riding on it and everyday is a different feeling for me when I'm at the office and working on it.
The problems that the new engine brought seem to be clearing up though. Things seem to be getting back up to speed and I am pretty comfortable that the game will be finished by June 1st. At least for my itchy face, I hope it's done sooner than that.
- Ryan Herda
Where are you? I want a physical replica of the Companion Cube from the game Portal. It will never threaten to stab me, nor will it leave me as it has no legs. Oh how I would enjoy it. Anyways, back to game developing issues. With the new Torque 1.2 update and Apple requiring all new apps to be v3.0 ready, we're having some engine problems again! Argh, right? It's alright when you get errors because of your own fault, but when you have errors caused by the program your using, it's really frustrating. While we continue running into these problems, we still have our date of June 1st in mind for submission of our game to Apple and will try our hardest, working overtime, and overnights if needed, we'll get this to you. In the meantime, why don't you sign up in the forums and make a post or two, encouraging us, or giving us ideas for future games, as we're all about the community.
Regards, Dakota Nicol
Well, we got an important update for our game engine that we have been waiting for!! I hope it does everything we want it to. It has presented some new problems though. I hope they get resolved pretty soon. Other than that, things at the office have been good. We had a big meeting last friday and discussed how things are going to be going over the next 3 weeks as we work to finish iArena by June 1st. So, wish us luck everyone!!!
- Ryan Herda
For the last week we have been dealing with an issue that has kind of put us in the slumps. We have been using the iTGB game engine, and though it does have many great features and an ease of use, there are some things about it that make us want to strangle our computers at times. The main issue we are having is loading, and how the engine manages the art assets. To make a complicated story short, the game crashes if it takes more that 25 seconds to load!! Which, it almost always does.
But, have no worries, because things are looking up. With our mad skills at problem solving and a great dedicated programming team, we have figured out what we need to do to fix this problem. So, our spirits are back up, and we are kicking it in full gear to get these projects done, by hopefully June 1st. (we have our fingers crossed here) Either way, things are looking good and bright here in our office everyday. The thing is, when making games, things don't always work the way you want them too, and things will go wrong. The only thing we can do as as a company is deal with it, and just work as hard as we can through the problems at hand, or find a way around them. When it comes down to it, its not how good you are at doing these things, its how good you are at figuring out how to make these things work! Well, I'm off to do some level design for Metal Migration, so have a good one!!
- Ryan Herda
All week this week I have been animating birds for this game. It started out rather difficult, because animating is not really what I do. The thing is, Adam has his hands full with all the animations for iArena, so I decided I had to step up and animate for Metal Migration. I have developed a pipeline for making my animations in a speedy manner. I am now making an animation in a lot less amount of time than I was compared to the first one I did. I will keep animating and designing enemies so that when you finally get a hold of Metal Migration there will be lots of enemies for you to battle!!
- Ryan Herda
The two song previews featured here are sections from the Colusseum and Graveyard levels. To create the fight music to the Colusseum level I studied some orchestration from the Hans Zimmer soundtrack to Gladiator. This was able to put me in the mind set of a fight environment from Rome. I used several rhythmic drums to create a marching feel, along with a largely reverberated snare drum to create a nice open space. I also used a lot of instrumentation from the horn and cymbal section for that epic type of feel. To put a twist to this I also recorded some distorted guitars to make it sound very metal and evil'ish ... which is def my type of style.
For the Graveyard music, I wanted it to be very eerie and droning... Basically I just used a simple melody and reversed it to make it sound really incoherent. Then to make it perspective and create balance, I layered in another melody which is VERY coherent and memorable... I also used a tad of delay to create some space. I didn't want to get to crazy with over-layering this levels music.. I really wanted it to be very simple. Which it is.
Graveyard Demo
- Jens Andersen
Upcoming News!
We are hoping to have a release date for iArena this friday! In the coming weeks we are planning on announcing our second title that we have in the works too!! We will unveil this new game along with its home page for you guys to look at. We really think you guys will like what you see for our second game. In the meantime however, I'm going to talk about our new blogging format that we will have for our Gamepro Labs Developer Profile page! So check that out and enjoy all the great blogs that are sure to come with it!!
- Ryan Herda
Hey all, I know it's been awhile but we had some engine issues that had to be resolved and over half of the company (3 people) are sick currently, but we are working it off and have 3 levels completely finished, and we plan on finishing the game up soon. We're hoping by Friday that we'll even have a release date ready for you! We still have a lot of animating, programming, and more levels to create but we'll have it ready for you soon, don't you worry.
- Dakota Nicol
For the art direction in iArena we are going straight old school. All the art and animations will be primarily hand drawn using multiple mediums. We have finished designing all the characters and will begin animating and creating sprite sheets for them in the following weeks.
Here is a sample level I threw together with a few of the characters you'll be able to hack and slash through (save it on your iphone/touch to see what the game will look like).
Hit me up if you have any questions.
- Adam Bergstrom