The game was recently plucked from obscurity to be featured on the front of the iTunes stores and the “Hot Games” section of the app store. Huzzah!

The game is a simple and addictive puzzle/action hybrid in which you bash simulated physics blocks of the same color into each other for massive combos.

BUT. It seems that a significant number of people seem to be confused about how to play the game. In fact – most of these confused folk don’t seem to understand that you must knock a block into another block of the same colour to destroy them. Some of them just resort to randomly pushing blocks around, never understanding why they sometimes go boom.

Explaining your game to the player in an unobtrusive way is a reoccurring problem in game design. It appears that our in-game tutorial wasn’t enough to get people to understand that coloured blocks have to be matched, and that has lead to a few hilariously angry reviews on the app store.

There are also a few genuinely glowing reviews, which is always nice to see. (especially after reading a “I will smash your balls with a hammer” type review ^_^)

Our first step to resolving the confusion about matching colours was to update the app store images with a somewhat overly obvious “hint”:

But as far as we can tell, this hasn’t made an impact. It’s of course totally possible that a large % of people won’t look at this screenshot long enough for it to sink in.

We’re working on an update that will hopefully resolve this confusion once and for all. (I have an idea about how to show the information visually, i.e. by demonstration instead of by text) We’re also looking at doing some additional game modes and tying the scoring in with OpenFeint.

Personally, as a player, I don’t really care about leaderboards – I like killing time with the game and I don’t care if my score isn’t in an online database, as I can always use Twitter to brag.

But not if Mark is Twittering too:

Geez! Nobody’s beaten that. (yet…)

You can pick up Das Cube for $1.99 from the App Store.

P.S. If you happened to pick up the game and enjoy it, you’d be doing us a great favour by writing a review. If you’re curious as to why I’d have the gall to ask such a thing, check out this take on the App Store. Since users are presented with a review box after they delete an app, the users who had a bad experience are more likely to contribute to an overall rating than someone who actually liked the game.

P.P.S. In other news, we are going to be continuing with Marian Mondays, only on a bi-weekly basis for the time being. We’re getting into areas of the game that would give too much away if we started talking about them now. Things are starting to come together in a big way…

Fun, simple, addictive and endless.

You can now get it from the app store. Check it out!

Phil talked about our iPhone collaboration in Montreal yesterday. You can also view his presentation slides.

I love it when a plan comes together.

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The art style and game design continue to evolve as we port our prototype to the iPhone hardware. Katie’s been redesigning the art so it’ll look great on the small resolution and Ian has been redesigning the gameplay so that it will play well on the limited hardware and make full use of the ‘Phone’s unique input methods. Here’s a screenshot of a basic test running my ol’ iPod Touch:

Will the final game actually look anything like this? That’s a very good question, and we won’t know the answer to that for a while!

But later today, I’m going to be doing a 2 hour presentation on iPhone game development at the University of Manitoba. It got filled up pretty fast, so we’ve added an extra night. (which was all registered up in 6 hours? crazy.) It should be pretty fun!

I’m planning to talk about some games my friends have released for the iPhone (iSplume and Wurdle), some that are in development (Phull and Das Cube), as well as looking at the making of games in general, like our recent experience making Paper Moon. I’ll also be talking about XCode and Unity as game development tools, and how they compare to each other. I’ll also throw in my two cents about how to analyze and think about games. (the Triforce of Game Development)

If I can pull it off, it should be pretty interesting.

Update 01: Added a photo from the first night. It went really well! Chris helped out with the talk too.

Update 02: Second night done! I think it went a little smoother in some areas. Katie came to this one, which was cool. All in all, a pretty awesome time!

Phil Fish is the creator of Fez, a very promising indie game that picked up “best visuals” at the Independent Games Festival last year. Phil is also a fellow Canadian – in fact, he’s _French Canadian_, which only adds to his awesome.

I’m using a game engine for the iPhone that I’ve been working on with my friend Mark Johns, for a few weeks now. Its loosely based on the engine that I wrote to make Aquaria, and it lets me put together prototypes of new game ideas very quickly.

As far as the game’s concept goes, we don’t want to give too much away at this point – so I’ll leave you with this quote from Phil: “You play as a little dose of medicine inside people’s bodies, and you have to cure them.”