Storming the AppStore: The Unfinished Story of the “Spread” Puzzle

On request, “Puzzle” in the apple store now gives out a lot of similar genres, but very few puzzles (in the classic sense of the word). It so happened that our first application went to the market to conquer this particular category, and I believe that we managed to correct the situation.
For us, frankly, it remains unknown what exactly inspired us to create such an application, because there were quite a few lovers of mosaic in the company, and many puzzles of a similar type were assembled. Although our team is firmly convinced that it was our Stretch the Puzzle that turned out to be unique and cool!

Development

It is difficult to say something about the development itself, because the technical project and implementation could be imagined from the very start. Some difficulties have arisen only in connecting all sorts of buns, in the spirit of the game center (it was left for the next update), facebook and twitter.
Could not help flash the thought of screwing the ability to freely load their pictures and saw them on new puzzles, but having thought over all the pros and cons, we decided not to weigh the game and move the creation of our mosaics to the supplement.
Development was carried out on Unity3d.

Preparation of materials

I decided to give it a separate item, because we really took pictures for the site for a long time, because we did release a commercial application, and about rights, owners and closed applications was already a separate topic on Habré. Therefore, we carefully smoked the manuals and read the placement conditions from each source, so as not to debug anywhere.
Then we decided on several sites and quickly gathered a collection for the game and for the upcoming additions.
All collected images were taken under the following licenses: CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, CC-BY-ND. I will say right away: the main resource has become Flickr . Fortunately, there is a search for a certain type of license and a huge collection of images.
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Registration

A small feature of the design turned out that there were no artifacts that had dropped out of work. From the very beginning, the artist lingered a little with the choice of style, selecting the one that was closer to him - but then he caught up with the deadlines, without burning up valuable man-hours for extra work.
Here are the rough sketches of the interfaces that were successfully rejected:



As a result, agreed on a paper-cardboard version as the most attractive.

Publication

From the first, as they say, did not take off. Downloading the file to the app, we waited a few minutes in a row and saw the inscription Invalid Binary. Of course, the formulation of the error did not commit it to anything.
However, Major General Google quickly clarified that in order to prevent this error, you need to disable the akylaud checkbox in the profile settings.

Test users

What inspired us great is the first tests. People sat behind the game with the words "well, oh ... I do not really like to collect a mosaic ...", and came off from it after an indefinite period, usually from forty minutes to an hour and a half.

Results

At the moment there are no results at all. The game is gradually being sold, there was a small problem at the time of confirmation of the release, in connection with which we were published yesterday, and we strongly moved down the list. So at the moment we are still waiting for the results to add something in this paragraph.

Official trailer:



Here is the gameplay video:



Thanks for attention.

iTunes App Store

Promotional codes:
YLKAE677HKX7
FEXFTL9WWPKK
PYET6LLPT6F3

PS We are currently preparing an update for Christmas, wait for more promotional codes. The news will be posted on our blog.

UPD # 1 Our friends from macosworld.ru have published a review on the game.
UPD # 2 After a week and a half there will be an update of the application, new puzzle packs will be added.
UPD # 3 Have published a game on the Android Market