Time to announce our new game: iSpot Japan!

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!

Nothing for sure really, since Apple hasn’t released any official statements yet, but rumors have been circulating around for some time and, as they say, there’s always something true behind a rumor. That’s why the pictures of a reportedly lost iPhone 4G prototype surfaced a few weeks ago, courtesy of Gizmondo.

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!

Yesterday was a big day for all iDevices enthusiasts, since Apple announced the details of its awaited new revision of the iPhone OS: iPhone OS4.0.  Is this good or bad news? Well good news of course, especially for users who finally will receive some of the most sought after functionalities such as folders and multitasking.

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.

This has been a very busy week for Battle of the Elements in terms of news and releases! Let’s take a look at them.

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!

After a few unexpected problems in development that have taken us a while to solve, our new upcoming game Battle of the Elements is already in Beta testing, yay! This week we’ve been recording some preview videos to present the game and show the gameplay basics, which we expect to release 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!

Yesterday we were invited to assist to an act organised by our former university, LaSalle, in which their new Innovation Park was presented to companies, investors, entrepreneurs and other institutions. The idea behind the Park is to provide back up for innovative projects started by students, establishing collaborations with big companies to ensure that original and viable ideas turn out into profitable businesses.

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…

Today we’ll talk a bit about one of the later tasks during the making of Quiz Game Land, which was both entertaining and laborious: taking pictures.

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.

Time for some more details on our upcoming game: Battle of the Elements! This time we’re teasing you with the silhouettes of the playable characters in the game.

Each of our mighty heroes is originary from a different country and has his own background, personality and motivations to search for the four legendary elements of unknown powers. Making use of their abilities, they will have to travel around the world and face each other in intense Battles of Elements in order to fulfil their ambitions.

Which one will be your choice?

More details coming soon!

After more than a loooooong year of development, we’re excited to finally introduce our brand new upcoming game: Battle of the Elements.

Battle of the Elements is an exciting action puzzle game with a completely original gameplay mechanic, which will make players think as quickly and intensely as they move their fingers. With an engaging background story, several selectable characters, different game modes, original soundtrack and colorful animated graphics, Battle of the Elements is our most important and ambitious project yet.

The game is right now in late Alpha development stage and we will be moving it to Beta testing in a few weeks, so we’re expecting to release Battle of the Elements really really soon (provided that the Apple’s approval process doesn’t take as long as the development itself ). Oh and the game will be released fot Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch (for the moment…) with multi language support.

We will be posting more information and details on Battle of the Elements during the next weeks, so stay tuned!

Reaching the final steps of development of our upcoming iPhone/iTouch games, we’ve recently been discussing about how we’re going to market them: is it better to release a free lite version accompanied by a full paid one, or a single free version with a full-upgrade option? While the first method is still the most used among developers, in-app purchases are becoming increasingly popular in new products. Let’s try to find out why.

Here’s a breakdown of the advantages and disadvantages we found of each of these distribution models:

Lite + Full version

• Pro: The Lite version can be trimmed down to a lighter package (by deleting non-available content), making it a 3G feasible download even if the full version is not.
• Pro: The full version can appear in the “paid-apps” AppStore listings.
• Pro: Separate reviews for lite and full app: usually reviews are higher for paid apps, since people think twice about purchasing it and make sure it’s what they’re looking for.
• Con: The full version can easily be pirated and illegally distributed, reporting us server costs but no income or AppStore presence.
• Con: Two different Apps have to be released and maintained.

Free upgradeable version

• Pro: Piracy is drastically reduced, since the App is already free and In-App purchases need account verification.
• Pro: We only have to care about delivering and maintaining one single app instead of two.
• Pro: More and unified downloads, since people love free stuff, which mean more presence and visibility in the App Store.
• Pro: The upgrading process is easier than downloading 2 separate apps, which may attract more customers.
• Con: In-App purchases require iPhone OS 3.0 or later, so users with older firmwares wouldn”t be able upgrade our game.
• Con: Anyone can leave a review on your game, even though they have not tried the full version.

With reports of illegal copies accounting up to 80% of the total downloads of some applications, it seems that the anti-piracy measure is the strongest benefit of delivering free-upgradeable Apps. However, the 3.0 OS restriction directly reduces the amount of potential customers who could be buying our games, even those who are just curious to try out the free versions. According to this adMob report, there’s still a significant number of users with older firmwares (especially among iPod Touch users) which we definetely wouldn’t want to miss.

In our current developer status it looks like the rest of the points don’t actually make a difference to us, or at least not as significant as to choose one method over the other since both have their valid pros and cons. Interestingly so, this reasoning left us with no clear answer on our initial question, which is probably also happening to lots of other iPhone developers out there.

Only time will tell us which is the right direction to take, so, until then, we will closely be watching how the iPhone market evolves and leave this complicated decisions to our beloved market analyst: Mr. Brainosaur.