Following the release of Vuvuzela vs Zombies, we were asked if we would be releasing an HD version (among some other requests), so we looked into it and thought that it would be actually a good idea. We have been looking into iPad development for a while now, but with so many ongoing projects we haven’t been able to invest enough time, so a new version of a relatively simple game seemed like the perfect opportunity.

So what did making a universal App from a regular one involve? In first place we had to update our framework, so that the iPad and iPhone 4 resolutions were supported and 2D object positioning was consistent independently of the screen size. In second place, redraw all the graphics so that they would look good at double size (this would have been faster if vector graphics had been used)  and redesign some interfaces.

Regular vs HD graphics

Having designed the game for iPhone in first place, there was not much gameplay tweaking or rethinking to make, since the original gaming experience had to be kept intact. What we did though, was introduce an iPad-exclusive VS game mode, which takes advantage of the device’s big screen. In this mode, every 2 zombies killed in a combo send an extra zombie to the opponent stage and the player who survives longer wins the game.

VS Mode (Click to enlarge)

But HD graphics and VS mode are not the only novelties in Vuvuzela vs Zombies 1.1. A completely new game mode called “Vuvuzela Jump” was added to give more variety to the game. In Vuvuzela Jump players take the role of a zombie trying to escape from hell, by using a Vuvuzela-powered jetpack and jumping over brains, bloody hands and rotten fish.

Vuvuzela Jump (Click to enlagre)

Sounds absurd? Maybe, but we’ve had a lot of fun both developing and playing it, so we’re sure you’ll enjoy it. Especially since Vuvuzela vs Zombies 1.1 will still be completely free.

Stay tuned for a (really soon) release date!

Last Friday we published two new games, iSpot Japan, our previously announced spot-the-difference game based on the beautiful country of Japan, and Vuvuzela vs Zombies, a funny and free game inspired by the annoying vuvuzela buzz we had to endure during the world cup matches.

Delicious Sashimi in iSpot Japan, how I miss it...

Both games have been quite well received so far, although Vuvuzela vs Zombies has naturally gathered more attention thanks to the vuvuzela madness. Let’s take a quick look at the latest publications on both games:

• Touch Arcade: “Three silly games you don’t need but should probably have anyway” is the title of this great article at Touch Arcade, in which Vuvuzela vs Zombies is understood as what it is: a funny parody of the App Store topics, mixed up with a trendy vuvuzela and some ads. <Link>
• The Appera: Vuvuzela vs Zombies was introduced as “Just like the Netherlands vs Spain”, shortly before the great World Cup final. The game is regarded as fun to play and valued to be free. <Link>
• Anait Games: “First Game Of The Year of the Day” is the way our friend Nae describes Vuvuzela vs Zombies in a joking way, praising its humor and the fact that its completely free. <Link>
• AppBank: Our Japanese friends at AppBank reviewed Vuvuzela vs Zombies with lots of detail, including a gameplay video, and recommend to download it since it’s free. I still feel sorry for Japan loosing against Paraguay during penalty kicks, having played a great group phase and with great players such as Honda and Endo, they should have made it to the next stage! <Link>
• Capsule Computers: the first iSpot Japan review comes from our Australian friend Master Abbot and includes a great video explaining the game in detail. iSpot Japan was given a great score of 8/10 capsules! <Link>

Talking about future games, we’re preparing a new update for Vuvuzela vs Zombies which will include iPad HD support and a new game mode. We also have a couple of new game demos which need a bit of development.

This summer we’re spending most of our time developing a game for a different gaming platform. We can’t reveal more details yet, but we’re quite excited about it

Oh, did I mention we’re really happy that Spain finally won the World Cup? I guess that goes without saying!

Nosplay Interview: we were interviewed in Nosplay, the first spanish social network designed exclusively for gamers. We answer questions about the origins of our company, our iPhone games and how is Apple gaining importance in the video game market.

http://www.nosplay.com/articulos/entrevista-desarrolladora-espanyola-undercoders-primeros-pasos

Battle of the Elements review at AppBank: our latest game was reviewed in Japanese website AppBank.net, accompanied by a gameplay video of the game. Our Japanese isn’t good enough to understand it clearly, but it’s nice to see our first appearance in the Japanese media. It seems they enjoyed the original game mechanics, for being different from the rest of puzzle games. The guy playing in the video is pretty good actually!

http://www.appbank.net/2010/05/31/iphone-application/127593.php

Battle of the elements review at Average Apper podcast: a new review of Battle of the Elements brought by the fantastic iPhone gaming podcast Average Apper. The game was pretty well received, scoring 4 stars out of 5, being praised for its graphics, music and original gameplay. Open Feint integration was said to be desirable, so we keep that in find for future updates!

http://averageapper.podbean.com/2010/05/13/averageapperep17-and-were-back/

i·Spot Japan preview at Capsulecomputers: Capsule Computers released a preview article covering our new upcoming game i·Spot Japan. Here you will find some screenshots taken with the latest build of the game and some detailed information on the release.

http://www.capsulecomputers.com.au/2010/06/i-spot-japan-coming-soon-to-the-apple-iphone/

Big thanks to all the people who show their interest in our games and help us spreading them !

iSpot Japan takes you on a journey across the land of the rising sun, explaining facts and curiosities about Japanese culture, while you play the classic “Spot the Difference” game in the country’s most beautiful locations.

Find 3, 4 or 5 differences in each picture, depending on the selected difficulty level, to unlock hundreds of locations. Once unlocked, head to the gallery to lean about local cuisine, historical characters or important monuments, together with their location in the map.

Ranging from southern Kyushu to northern Hokkaido, you’ll get to know all of Japan through exclusive beautiful pictures (no stock photos!) personally taken by the members of Undercoders and carefully tricked to create visually challenging differences.

iSpot Japan is already in Beta version, so expect more details to come really soon!

Oh, and we also have a small surprise ready to publish sometime during the next couple of weeks, so stay tumed!

Among the novelties found in the prototype, one can be excited about the front-faced camera, the camera flash, the larger battery and even the new design which gets rid of the convex back surface.  All of that is great, really, but there’s one technical aspect that bothers us a little bit: screen resolution.

Of course this is all speculation, but it is believed that the new iPhone generation will feature a higher screen resoltuon. And whats wrong about that? The higher the better, right? Sure thing, and it’s completely necessary,  but from a developer’s point of view it can become a bit of a headache. Why? Because to maximize compatibility we’ve got to ensure that our games will work with all of the iPhone family products and that means making several versions of the game.

In the best case scenario, Apple would keep the aspect ratio intact in the new version, so that developers will just have to make 2 versions of the game: one with HD graphics, running at 960×640, and the regular version running at 480×320. This way, the HD version could also be used to sell on the iPad, adding the necessary padding up to 1024×768. Now, if they decide to go with another aspect ratio… that could be really bad news!

So, let’s just hope for the best!

Now, from a pure gaming perspective, the Game Center is clearly the most exciting addition to the new iPhone OS. Although independent services such as Open Feint were doing a good job in this area, users can finally have a centralised social gaming network a la PSN or Xbox Live without worrying about the fragmentation of their achievements, username or gaming score. With the introduction of the iPad, this is definitely the right direction to take if Apple wants to consolidate their devices as serious and competitive gaming platforms (if there’s still somebody who argue it, at least). * Nintendo could take note of it*

From the developer point of view we are also quite excited about the GameCenter, since an integrated system will be much easier to work with than using third-party solutions and all users will have access to it. But, as always, there’s something that bugs us: compatibility. According to Apple, iPhone OS 4.0 won’t be available for 1st and 2nd generation iPhones and 1st generation iTouch and only some functionalities will work under iPhone 3G and 2nd generation iTouch. D’oh!

As we talked about earlier, reaching the widest audience possible is one of our main concerns and user segmentation is very much an inconvenient, especially considering the wild amount of older iPhones and iTouch users out there. Until now a compatibility issue could be solved by a simple firmware update, but with 4.0 that can become a hardware upgrading problem. We have yet to see how will this cases be treated, since a backwards-compatible prepared app could easily solve this issue by rendering unusable the OS 4.0-specific options, but, unfortunatelly, this hasn’t been the case with older updates.

Should we ignore Game Center then? I don’t think we can afford that… so should we create 2 versions of each game? I wonder if Apple will be OK with that.

Last, but not least, everything stated above is assuming that the Game Center will be a service free of charge both for users and developers, but that is, for the moment, merely an assumption.

So, it’s great that iPhone OS 4.0 will be ready soon, Great! But… let’s wait and see how it all turns out.

In first place there’s the first gameplay video which we had been recording last week. As you can see, the video quality isn’t that bad, despite our crappy setup, but the colors look kind of washed out compared on how they really appear on the iPhone screen.

In second place, we revealed the appearance of the game’s selectable characters, which we had been previously teasing. Each of them has a background story and a personal motivation to go on a quest searching for the Legendary Elements. Which one will you choose?

Finally, we also created the Battle of the Elements section in our website, which we will be updating regularly with all the media related to the game. You can access it clicking on the game’s banner from our home website, or directly through this link.

As for the development status, next week is time to start the translation process (the game is being released in 5 languages) and the beta testing. We already have some reports from our testers of the AI being a bit too hard, so we will have to tweak it carefully so that the final experience is both accessible and challenging.

More news coming soon!

Since we wanted to illustrate clearly how Battle of the Elements is played, we opted to record ourselves playing with an actual device instead of capturing the iPhone screen from the simulator. This sounds easy but, being the first time we tried to do so, it took us some time to figure out how to get a decent image. Our MAC is located the on the furthest table from the window in our office (yep, of all the 7 computers we’ve got here, there’s only one MAC… and one Windows) and it has very little light, so we ended up with this strange setup:

If you think our filming setup is crappy, we agree 100% with you! But now imagine it with someone trying to use that iPhone behind the camera, with his arms under the tripod and sticking his head to one side to try to see the screen. Yeah, now it becomes crappy, uncomfortable and hilarious at the same time. Way to go! Or, in our case, the only way to go given our limited resources.

Anyway, despite a few minor issues (the colors look a bit washed out and there are some screen reflections), the resulting quality is quite good and we now have the video ready for edition. In the meanwhile, you can take a first peek at the game it the screens pictured in our setup!

More news on Battle of the Elements coming soon!

The act was supported both by big international companies and new start-ups, some of which were displaying a small sample or demo of their product, all mixed up with student projects that came from within the university. We spent a while watching the 3D cinema screen which was displaying an aninmation modelled after the first scene of Mirror’s Edge, looking pretty much as the PS3 3D demos we could try at last year’s GDC in San Francisco.

After the keynotes we were invited to enjoy some good food and live music, while socializing and networking with some of the assistants. It was nice to meet again a few known colleagues and teachers, getting to know other entrepreneurs from our university and also having the opportunity to chat with Digital Legend’s (The makers of games as Kroll) CEO Xavier Carillo, which had been part of the previous keynote.

All in all the act was pretty interesting and we had a nice time spending the evening at the university, something 4 or 5 years ago was routine during the weeks previous to final exams. Now if only we have had free beer back then…

In the 1.4 version of Quiz Game Land we introduced what we called “visual questions”, which consist in displaying a picture and asking the player about it. With this, we intended  to add a little bit more of variety to the battles of questions, since one could get tired of so much text. An example is shown below.

The idea was nice, so we started to think about the type of questions which could take advantage of having a picture. Identifying pieces of hardware was a no-brainer, so we took out all of our gaming stuff and shot around 150 pictures during a couple of days. It was kind of fun going through all of the consoles, controllers, cartridges and games, but it also was a bit of a mess dealing with all the cables, boxes and plastics and getting them in their place again when we were finished.

Here there are a few pictures of the first day of photo shooting (with some fancy colours),while  preparing the consoles to be nicely captured for the game.

Gathered boxed hardware for the shooting.

Ready to go, Nintendo handhelds on the front.

Wouldn’t the VB be cooler in this colour? Maybe not…

Can you recognize all of them? Sure you can!

After taking pictures of the consoles, we went on with the games, controllers etc. The arcade hardware (none is shown here) was a bit tricky to shoot, due to its large size and the small size of the picture to be displayed in the game, but in the end all was nicely included. After that, we went over all the pictures, selected the best looking ones and edited them in order to remove all kind of logos, text and images (such as cart labels) which could easily give away the answer to the question.

In the end the result was good and, together with the silhouette guessing questions and a few miscellaneous ones, we managed to introduce around 250 visual questions in the game. The only downside of the update was to surpass 10MB in size, due to the weight of the pictures, which is the limit to download the game via 3G network.

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