Archive for the ‘keynote’ tag
TouchArcade at Both WWDC and E3 This Month
We are going to be attending both in San Francisco as well as this month. WWDC runs from the 7th to the 11th at the Moscone Convention Center, and E3 goes from the 15th to the 17th at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Readers can look forward to an avalanche of news, game previews, and other interesting things from both events.
Coverage from these events in 2009 is viewable either by taking a look at the E3 Expo 2009 or WWDC 2009 categories.
WWDC will likely bring about the official announcement of the new iPhone, even more iPhone OS 4.0 details, and potentially several other things floating around the Apple rumor mill during the keynote on the morning of the 7th. While game coverage from WWDC will likely focus on games by the various indie developers in attendance, the big players of the gaming industry will be in full force at E3. We're expecting a Sonic 4 hands on, and many other exciting developments from well known console game developers/publishers throwing their hats in to the iPhone ring.
If you're a developer or publisher and would like to meet up at either WWDC or E3, send us an email at tips@toucharcade.com or send me a message via AIM 
to schedule an appointment. Our event schedules usually fill up very quickly, so don't wait to long if you have something you'd like to show us.
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TouchArcade 360iDev Game Jam – A Night to Remember
Late last night the TouchArcade Game Jam at 360iDev brought a room full of developers together to build a game in twelve hours with only a single word as the inspiration: "Tiny". After a few cases of Red Bull, a truck load of Doritos, and some Franzia, each participating developer slowly formed workable prototypes for game ideas thought up on the fly. Some people worked in teams, others went solo, but I feel confident in saying that everyone had a good time.
To track the progress of the developers, we opened up a that they used to post screenshots and get ideas from the TouchArcade community. Ordered by the number of responses each game got, here are the products of the Game Jam:
From and comes a tilt to shoot game where you must defend a cake from …cake lovers? Various power ups are included, my personal favorite being the multi-cake shot seen in the above screenshot.
and teamed up to build this molecular line drawing game where you chain together atoms to clear the screen. Different atoms have various numerical values to them, and matching them together creates huge molecules for massive points.
The Pollinator is less of a game and more of a zen garden app, as it is played by tapping the flowers as bees fly by to pollinate the plants to keep them alive. (As the title may hint.)
built a Canabalt-like side scrolling survival game where you play as a pretty little unicorn. The game's thread is worth checking out to see the iterations the art style went through.
Jason and Jakob of built a chalkboard battle game they're describing as "It's like iShoot meets Warheads for your chalkboard!" Check out the above video to see the game in motion.
This collaboration between and is said to offer Canabalt-style survival gameplay where you dodge things in the game world by pinching to zoom the game world in and out.
A team of three guys form worked through the night to build this game which involves gliding through the air and grappling the terrain to fling yourself forward while avoiding crashing in to the hills.
This oddly beautiful game by involves guiding a particle (named Owen) through a field of magnets. The polarity of the magnets can be switched around to guide said particle through the magnetic field without touching any other magnets.
While I'm not entirely sure if Serban from ever finished his game, the concept art alone is worth showing off. Since the theme of the Game Jam was tiny, his game is about sharks with tiny lasers.
Participating remotely via web cam was who built a tiny (and accurately named) space shooter game.
David Whatley of and 360iDev keynote speaker was working on a game entitled The Will of Steve. I'm not entirely sure what the plan was with the gameplay, but if I know David, it likely involved Steve doing something silly with that iPad.
put together this top down kayak racer and was one of the few people to also fulfill the bonus "Owen Goss" theme. Your kayak is controlled by swiping down both sides of the screen, and the game was just barely finished in time with 25 minutes to spare.
put together a match three based on body parts being dumped in to an open grave. They didn't quite get all the matching logic working, they have plans to finish the game over the next week.
came up with this zombie infection game that features user-modifiable graphics. You can either save the world from zombies, or, if you prefer, save the world from Owen Goss.
and put together this bacon-powered game where you play as a monkey in space with an insatiable love for cured pork products. Shoot monkey cages to free your friends and pick up Slim Fast to, well, go faster.
came up with this amazing side scrolling shooter. I'd summarize the game, but they already did it perfectly:
The unthinkable has happened. After numerous jokes about snow and hockey, our neighbors to the north have unleashed an aerial invasion, loading up tons of cargo planes with… bacon. You play as the fighter ace with a trusty P-51 mustang, who must shoot down the cargo planes with your trusty WWII plane… armed with heat seeking missiles.
This mysterious developer known only as "Rob" or "themuller" on our forums put together a game with a shockingly accurate title. A face scrolls down the screen, and, well, you mini-gun it.
Markus from put together this simple game that involves tapping the screen to leave food for the black dot to eat while you avoid the red dot. Graphics are extremely preliminary right now, but the game itself is fully functional.
I'm not entirely sure if this game turned in to anything more than this mock up screenshot put together by or not, but it's hard to not get behind anything that involves orbiting cats with laser eyes.
put together a concept for a ball rolling game where you suck up other red balls by rolling over them. The catch is, you have to avoid the pillars which becomes increasingly difficult as your red ball grows in size.
Finally, , a picnic raiding game, was posted about in our Game Jam forum but without any screenshots or details aside from the concept of playing two player with opposing armies of ants stealing food from a picnic. Hopefully we hear some more on this one.
And of course, thanks to everyone who came to the Game Jam. The vibe in the room was fantastic, and it's always great hanging around creative people bouncing ideas off one another… Especially when those ideas have to do with rapidly developed iPhone games and Owen Goss. We'll post a followup as we hear from more of these developers regarding the fate of their Game Jam games. I went through and listed everyone who posted anything in the in this article, so if your game is missing, it's not too late to post a thread!
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Apple’s ‘Game Center’ Social Gaming Network Announced
Arguably the biggest bombshell to come out of today's keynote was the announcement of Apple's own social gaming network, that they're calling 'Game Center'. It appears that Apple will be duplicating the functionality of the other social networking services with a matchmaking system, online leaderboards, achievements, and everything else you'd expect to see. Apple plans on releasing Game Center "later this year".
This development makes the future of existing social gaming platforms such as OpenFeint, Plus+, and others seem fairly uncertain. With each new network, it has seemed like gamers have been more and more irritated that their achievements, scores, and friends are fractured even further and require yet another username and password to access.
Presumably, Game Center will work either off your iTunes credentials, or some other tightly integrated way to completely eliminate this annoyance. Details are extremely scarce right now, but needless to say, we will be following Apple's Game Center, as well as the response of the other social networking services very closely as this all unfolds over the coming months.
Photos courtesy of .
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Live Bloggin’ The Apple iPhone OS 4.0 Keynote
Apple's surprise media event unveiling the iPhone OS 4.0 is set to begin shortly. We'll be providing live updates, and focusing on things that specifically pertain to iPhone gaming or things iPhone gamers might be interested in like all of our other keynote coverage in the past.
Steve Jobs just took the stage, and started things out by talking about the sales figures of the iPad. On Saturday they sold 300,000, and as of today they've sold 450,000. Apple apparently is making them as fast as they can, but notes that Best Buy is already out of stock. On the first day, 1 million paid apps were downloaded, and since then 3.5 million have been. (In addition to 600,000 eBooks.)
Photo courtesy of .
Jobs also mentions that there are over 185,000 apps in the App Store, with over 3,500 iPad apps. He then took some time to show off the more impressive iPad apps in the App Store currently such as the ABC app, Netflix, the Marvel comic book reader, and others. Shifting gears to talk about the iPhone, Steve mentions they've won three JD Power awards for customer satisfaction, and currently holds 64% of the mobile browser market share. Apple has sold over 50 million iPhones, with 85 million combined devices between the iPod touch and iPhone.
iPhone OS 4.0 is coming this summer, with a developer preview available today.
Photo courtesy of .
Photo courtesy of .
Among the seven "tent pole" features of iPhone OS 4.0 is multitasking. Steve goes on to demonstrate how multitasking is going to work. With multiple apps running, double clicking the home button raises a window that looks a lot like the bottom dock of the iPhone showing what apps are running. Tapping an icon instantly switches to that app.
Photo courtesy of .
To explain how this all works while preserving battery life and performance, Steve hands things off to Scott Forstall, SVP of iPhone Software. iPhone OS 4.0 will provide seven multitasking services. The first of which is audio streaming, and Forstall specifically cites Pandora as an example of an app that will shine with this functionality. Developing applications to utilize this functionality is apparently extremely easy, as it only took the Pandora developers a day to make the app background aware. Skype also works fantastically with this new functionality, even allowing you to accept calls while running in the background.
Doodle Jump spotted:
Photo courtesy of .
The next multitasking function is background location. Apps that use the GPS functionality such as TomTom will be able to continue routing while in the background. This raises obvious privacy concerns, and a new settings menu will be available to enable and disable location services per application, as well as showing a small arrow icon next to the battery indicator.
Moving on to push notifications, Forstall mentions they've sent over 10 billion notifications since the service went live. Building on push notifications comes local notifications, done entirely on the phone to see alerts from apps you have running in the background. One example mentioned was a popup when a photo was finished uploading to Flickr.
Photo courtesy of .
Steve takes the stage again and announces folders to organize apps. The interface seems an awful lot like the various jailbreak app organization solutions. So far Apple is really knocking it out of the park with this keynote.
Photo courtesy of .
The iPhone mail client is also getting enhanced, with a unified inbox for each email account on the device along with a threaded email view for reading conversations. Unsurprisingly, the iPhone is also getting the iBooks app which will sync pages and bookmarks with other devices that have the app.
Forstall just announced "Game Center", Apple's own gaming social networking service that seems to handle everything Plus+, OpenFeint, and others do with presumably one unified login tied to your iTunes account. Matchmaking, leaderboards, and achievements are all part of it.
Photo courtesy of .
Also mentioned was Apple's own iAd advertisement services, which we expect to see making appearances in many free games that have historically relied on AdMob and other advertising networks.
iPhone OS 4.0 will be coming this fall, and sadly, multitasking will not be supported for the iPhone 3G and second generation iPod touch. That's it folks, Steve is taking questions now.
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‘Riddim Ribbon’ – Tapulous Does ‘AudioSurf’
Nearly five months ago now Tapulous first announced Riddim Ribbon [App Store] . Oddly enough, aside from graphical changes, the game that is available today is almost exactly what Tapulous promised at the event. Three songs from the Black Eyed Peas are included along with three additional 99¢ tracks available via in-app purchase. (Two by Tiësto and one by Benny Benassi.)
The objective of Riddim Ribbon is to guide a ball down a track, and tilt your device to follow a green line that moves left and right to one of the three songs you select on the main screen. When you stray from the track, the music begins to fade out until you're only hearing the faint backbeat to the song. Laid out on the green line are silver spheres to pick up, ramps to jump over, and hoops to jump through. All of these different pickups and obstacles are arranged so you're hitting them with the beat of the song, an experience that's actually pretty cool if you haven't played a similar racing rhythm game before.
As you're rolling down the tracks in Riddim Ribbon, you will be faced with both forks in the road and ramps that lead to secondary portions of track that allow you to mix the song by turning or jumping up on to the same portion of the song remixed by one of a number of different DJ's included in the game. By replaying individual songs and choosing different paths to take, you can come up with a number of different remixes of the same song.
Riddim Ribbon is a game that sounds really cool when you describe it, yet it somehow manages to be not that fun at all when you're playing it. The way the music is visualized is great, and the tracks are laid out very well to match each song. Unfortunately, it doesn't take long to get bored of the three included songs, and the tilt controls are frustrating.
Instead of like most racing games where you tilt to move right or left, then hold your device level straight to go straight, the amount you tilt directly translates to your position on the track. This causes you to spend most of your time holding your device at an awkward angle instead of making small tilting movements to steer as you're probably used to if you've played many racing games on the platform.
As mentioned previously, the way you interact with the music in the game is really neat but by default an announcer is almost constantly talking over it telling you how "dope" and "ill" your performance is along with announcing the many checkpoints on each song. It likely won't take you long to turn this off in the options.
Riddim Ribbon is a great idea for a game that ultimately is ruined by frustrating controls and gameplay which is too easy to get bored of.
App Store Link: Riddim Ribbon feat. The Black Eyed Peas, $2.99
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iPad Keynote Clips and Hands-On Video
Apple put up their full keynote today which can be or downloaded through iTunes by subscribing to the Apple events podcast. We clipped out the three games shown during the keynote:
- X Games SnoCross, $4.99
- N.O.V.A. – Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance, $6.99
- Need for Speed Shift, $6.99
SnoCross was demonstrated as an example of a, existing 3D game from the App Store running on the iPad, while both N.O.V.A. and Need for Speed were tweaked to show some iPad-specific functionality utilizing the additional screen real estate available on the larger and higher resolution screen:
Following the keynote, got some hands-on time with the device where they played Need for Speed, N.O.V.A. and Scrabble:
Also, if you listened to our recent podcast and want to hear more of what developers think of the iPad, both and have great articles worth reading.
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TouchArcade Padcast #11: iPad Discussion with Bolt Creative, Illusion Labs, Imangi Studios, and Freeverse
In the wake of Apple's keynote today unveiling the iPad, we rounded up Dave Castelnuovo and Allan Dye from , Anders Mårtensson from , Natalia Luckyanova and Keith Shephard from and Bruce Morrison from to hear what four successful iPhone development studios thought about the new device.
The reception amongst this group of developers was remarkably positive, and everyone had ideas for new projects exclusively for the iPad, as well as refining or enhancing existing games to take advantage of the additional screen real estate and processing power of the device. We also discuss the niche that the iPad will likely fill, and what kind of usage patterns we expect the device to see once it is available for purchase.
Music lovingly lifted from the .
Podcast: Subscribe in iTunes or (M4A, 50MB)
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iPad Hands-On First Impressions Rolling In
Media who attended the Apple keynote are now being allowed some hands-on time with the iPad, and so far the first impressions make the device sound pretty awesome. describes the iPad as "…substantial but surprisingly light. Easy to grip. Beautiful. Rigid. Starkly designed. The glass is a little rubbery but it could be my sweaty hands. And it's fasssstttt." While confirms the speed of the CPU, they described the iPad as "…not light. It feels pretty weighty in your hand."
provides some details on gaming with the device. The iPad features a "2X" button which scales any iPhone app to full screen, but of course this comes at a graphical cost. Much like upscaling Gameboy Advance games on the Nintendo DS, or Sony PSone classics on the PSP, games are said to look noticeably upscaled. They felt that Need for Speed: Shift actually controlled better with the larget screen, as tilting the device had less of an effect on the screen.
Also, as we expected, the sheer size of the device makes it impossible for your thumbs to obscure most of the screen as you're playing games like NOVA. According to an Apple representative at the event, iPad-optimized games will have their own section on the App Store, although the SDK allows for apps which will run equally well on both devices.
With the SDK for the iPad available today, we expect to hear quite a bit from developers. We've already heard from the people at OpenFeint who are pledging their full support to the platform, and Firemint just dropped us an email announcing an optimized version of Flight Control for the device. They are also "working on some incredibly fun and exciting games that will look amazing on iPad and take full advantage of its features, as well as working brilliantly on iPhone and iPod touch."
Jon Kromrey, GM of the Apple games divison of Namco network also dropped us a note saying how excited they are to create AAA games for the device and feel "the iPad will play a significant part of our goal to reach any player, anywhere at any time."
Photo courtesy of
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Apple’s "Our Newest Creation" Event – iPad Starting at $499
‘Crosswords’ Announced as First Game for Unannounced iPad
The entire internet seems to be in a frenzy today regarding the unannounced Apple Tablet. Between the CEO of publisher McGraw-Hill and Daily Finance on things they don't like about it, speculation, rumors, rants, and questions which won't be answered until Steve takes the stage tomorrow are running rampant.
This morning, Inc announced their intentions to bring Crosswords [$9.99] to the rumored Apple tablet device. While they may be jumping the gun a little bit, announcing a game for a device which hasn't even been officially announced, Stand Alone does have a fair amount of street cred' in tablet application development. They were a major developer for the now defunct and authored an impressive library of software for the Newton, .
Crosswords is among the better crossword games available on the App Store, and is one of the few games which has lived on my phone since its initial release in 2008. If the Apple tablet does run the iPhone OS as many are speculating, and it has either its own associated App Store or operates off the existing App Store, we expect this will be the first of an avalanche of announcements of software coming to the device.
Apple's keynote begins tomorrow at 10:00 AM Pacific, and will be covered live by nearly every tech-related web site. We will be providing live updates with anything that pertains to gaming, regardless of what is announced, and if Apple's tablet does end up serving as a gaming device, expect tablet game coverage to supplement our existing iPhone and iPod touch coverage.
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