Zen Balance v1.0.1

Hello again!

It’s been a while since we’ve posted something but we’ve been a little busy rapping up the semester with finals and projects.  But winter break is here and we hope to be working more and have more to share with you guys.

Incase you hadn’t heard, Zen Balance was successfully released on the App Store and we were happy to have that go as smoothly as it did.  We have received some feedback on the release version of the game and made some changes to the game that will be released shortly in v1.0.1.  The major updates include:

•  Easier game play
  • We found that the game was a little harder than we had initially intended so we’ve made it a little bit easier which will hopefully get people past that first hill
• High Scores!
  • We’ve added high scores to the normal game play so it’s easier to keep track of your best game
• Decreased Ad-Fill
  • Because the game was a little more difficult than we intended we’ve decreased the ad-fill rate from every three plays to every five plays which should help you not be bombarded with ads
• “More” page
  • We’ve added a learn more page with links to the Zen Balance web page and our other games
• Other minor bug fixes

Hopefully these updates will make the game even better than it already is so be sure to look out for a Zen Balance update coming soon.  “How soon” you ask?  Well, that’s a great question.  We submitted the update for review December 8th but hit a bit of a hiccup.  Turns out you aren’t allowed to have “iOS” in the name of your game.  The official name of Zen Balance was “Zen Balance for iOS” so they denied our update (Although I’m not sure why they didn’t catch that when we submitted our first version. . .)  But we’ve changed the name to simply “Zen Balance” and have resubmitted for review.  Hopefully we’ll see v1.0.1 out by the end of the week.

As always, thanks for reading

-Matt.

One Day Until Zen Balance!! -- Official Trailer

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!!  We are only one short day away from the release of Zen Balance on the App Store!  Today's post is the official trailer for Zen Balance.  Hopefully it will give you a better idea about the game and a little sneak peak of the game play.  Check out the trailer here:

 Zen Balance will be available tomorrow, for FREE, on the App Store and we can't wait for you guys to check it out.  If you want to read a little more about the game, you can check out yesterday's count-down post here.

As Always, Thanks For Reading,

-Matt. 

Two Days Until Zen Balance!! -- The Art

We are super close to the release of Zen Balance this Friday and for today’s “count-down-to-Zen-Balance” post I figured I would talk about the art.  If you haven’t read yesterdays post about the development process go check that out here. 

Art, for us, has always been a bit of a struggle.  Neither Austin, nor I, are really artists and we don’t have the capital (yet) to go out and hire one.  For the most part, we’ve been able to get through with our limited abilities and with some added help from some people who have graciously donated some of their time for us.  Zen Balance was no exception to these difficulties.  We probably spent a good three or four meetings just talking about what we wanted the game to look like and how we would go about implementing it (given our aforementioned lack of skills in the art department).  When we were in the first stages of development we were using just simple colors for our circles.  If you’ve been following our development process then you may have seen some of those images (They looking like this:). 

But we knew we would have to up the aesthetic a little bit to have a game that looked half way decent.  At first, we had the idea of doing some kind of “textured” circles to just add a little bit of artistic appeal.  This is was sort of a first draft:

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This idea didn’t last long at all and was quickly scrapped.  But it did give us the idea of doing some kind of “cartoonish” style patterning for the game.  But before we could move forward with that idea we had a second one.  What if we did the art using real pictures?  While I'm not much of a hand drawn artist I am a bit of a photographer; and with all the games using 8-bit style art we figured a photo-reaslitic approach would set us apart, for better or worse.  The idea had come up in previous brain storming sessions for other games and at this point we were stuck on the art and needed something to, at the very least, try.  So with that, I busted our my camera and started taking some macro photos of grass, wood, rock, and water.  These are all of the final element circle images in the game:  

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The pictures for the element circles came to gather rather quickly, the background picture however. . . took a little more time.  We went through a few iterations before we found something we actually liked.  Here are a few of the backgrounds we decided to pass on.

Here's a fun little fact about the background in the final game.  While the final background looks a lot like sand, and is a real picture, it is not, in fact, a picture of sand.  It’s actually a picture of the milky way!

It turns out that if you invert the colors of a black and white picture of the milky way, add a little sepia tone for that sandy color, you end up with something that looks a lot like sand.  So there’s a fun little secret about the art in Zen Balance that you probably didn’t know before.  And I think that’s a good place to end the post.  Tomorrow we will be releasing the official trailer for Zen Balance so make sure to check back for that!

And, As Always, Thanks For Reading,

-Matt.

Three Days Until Zen Balance!!

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We are super excited to announce that Zen Balance for iOS will be released this Friday, November 27, in the App Store!!!

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(If you don’t know what Zen Balance is you can read more about it in our official announcement post here, and you can read our previous development blog posts about the game here)

So, to kick off our count down to release, today's blog post will be about the development process that went into Zen Balance.  Looking back on all the work we did for this game, the one thing that stands out the most is the development environment we used.  Zen Balance is the first game we've developed using Unity3D.  Before we even had the basic idea for Zen Balance we knew that we wanted to start developing in Unity because of its ability to allow us to make more robust games, but we weren't quite sure where to start.  We needed a project that we could feasibly accomplish in a shorter amount of time, but also something that would show us around Unity and give us a good introduction to the software.  Zen Balance turned out to be the perfect introductory project for us.  There wasn't a whole lot of difficult programming or in-depth class building that went into this game.  With block'd! we had had to build a ton of classes and methods that ran mostly in the background, but with Zen Balance most of the code translates directly to action on the screen.  With this game we were able to spend less time worrying about making our code work and more time just figuring out how to simply make a game in Unity.  Most of the issues we ran into during development had to do with figuring out how to accomplish a task in Unity (ignoring the issues we had with code signing and provisioning profiles, but that’s a whole other story).  So, for the most part, the development of this game was really us learning a new environment, and less actual code development; but again, that was kind of the point.  We knew we were going to want to make larger games in the future and we would need a stronger platform to do so, but we didn't really want to jump into a large scale game with a completely new development environment.  Zen Balance turned out to be the prefect learning tool for us, giving us a good hands on tutorial of Unity and allowing us to feel comfortable tackling a larger game project in Unity further down the road (hint hint).

For the sake of keeping the post short there’s really not much more to say.  Honestly, this game was more of a hands on introduction to Unity for us, so there’s not a whole lot of interesting coding that went into the game.  But none the less, we are still thrilled with the game and can’t wait for you guys to play it!

Tomorrow we will be talking about the art that went into Zen Balance, which is actually a little more of an interesting topic so be sure to check back for that.  And of course, don’t forget to download Zen Balance when it comes out this Friday!!

As always, thanks for reading,

-Matt.

Zen Balance Has Been Submitted!!

So. . . It's been a little while since we've posted something here, but that doesn't mean we haven't been working.  (We just haven't had a lot to talk about in terms of the work we were doing).  But now, we are officially done with Zen Balance!  YEA!!!!  We have officially submitted version 1.0 to the App Store for review!  Look, here's proof!

It doesn't say Zen Balance. . . but just take our word for it

If you don't know, this still means a little bit of a waiting process before Zen Balance is out in the App Store, even if our app has no issues(and we don't anticipate that it will).  So in-between now and release we will be posting about some of the development process for Zen Balance, so be sure to check back for those updates; as well as an official release date for Zen Balance.  We are super excited about having a finished product and we can't wait for you guys to check it out.

Thanks for reading,

-Matt.