Tickle Tap Spotlight: Field Flier, Pattern Painter and Color Collector
Just in time for the holidays, we now have three more Tickle Tap Apps available for download on the iTunes App Store!
Field Flier is a highly imaginative app that’s jam-packed with all-original (and quite wonderful!) illustrations, animations, music and sound effects. It took a great deal of programming prowess on Luke Lutman’s part as well. You really have to play it to appreciate all the minute and adorable details it includes. I love it when Robin reads the newspaper and stands on the turtle. “Robin is dancing!” is definitely my favourite part though. We were so excited when our composer Brian McBrearty delivered the music track for this animation. It’s got a definite Euro dance feel to it. Perfect!
Pattern Painter seamlessly integrates patterns and shape drawing in a single app. That’s because behind-the-scenes, this little app puzzler literally had our team going back to the drawing board repeatedly! We thought long and hard about usability. Our programmer, Colin McCune, had some tricky business to work out with the shape recognition as well. But once we had it all figured out and added our animal friends in (Jinja the cat, Harvey the dog and Robin the bird) it proved to be as fun and enjoyable as we’d hoped, if not more so!
Color Collector is awesome. The team had great fun running around the office collecting colors during testing (we quickly realized we have a dearth of purple objects here for some reason!). But we were also breaking new ground in terms of programming with this app, and pushing the capabilities of the iPhone camera technology to its limits. Our programmer, Stefan Arentz, did an amazing job figuring out the challenges and intricacies of color recognition, and what the iPhone camera could and couldn’t do. After many, many hours of hard work we finally had something that worked wonderfully! And then we tested it on the iPhone 3G. Uh oh. I’m proud to say we at zinc Roe are not ones to panic, even in moments of sheer horror like that. We’re problem solvers! Of course we got it working well on 2G, 3G and 3GS in the end. Now that it’s available on the App Store, we really hope parents and children discover this game and enjoy playing it as much as we do. . .er did.
Thanks to everyone on the Tickle Tap Team: Jason Krogh, Stefan Arentz, Luke Lutman, Colin McCune, Carlo Alducente, Vanessa Leggett, Anne-Sophie Brieger, Ian Partridge, Aaron Leighton, Davin Risk, Lara Salam, Brian McBrearty, Carla Fisher, Mike Palozzi and Laura Kyswaty.