Pirate's Jewels II hits beta!

It took 3 months and 1 day of active development but I am proud to announce that my upcoming game Pirates Jewels II hit its first beta today Sept 29th.

My previous gem game in this series had 1 game mode which I am very proud to announce will now be 6 game modes!

Note: All of these screenshots are beta; and subject to change. Most of them have debug information on them also if you see some oddly placed numbers that don't seem to make sense :-)

My biggest two achievements are the creation of a Quest Mode which ties together two of the other game modes in a progressive game play for the player and the specific's of the Battle Mode (name subject to change) wherein you play a game against an artificial pirate opponent. Forming matches along the rows allows you to fire your cannons defeat your foe.

I was able to create pirate opponents with several properties that affect their behavior such as intelligence, aggressiveness, and speed.

Also for each player they have upgradeable ships  with increasing health and bays of cannons so they can have anywhere from 4 to 7 cannons to use against the other player.

Also of course I have several variants of fairly classic gem game play including a relaxing Zen mode with backgrounds that zoom and pan slowly for a beautiful and relaxing scenic game play, or you can turn the pressure on a bit with Timed Mode or Progressive mode which gets harder each level you advance!

I took the plunge for this product and purchased the full version of Unity Pro 3D to render my backgrounds and scene information.  This allowed me to purchase art from the Unity Asset Store and product better looking screens in lower amount of time. Being a solo indie developer its very difficult to find enough time to both do all your coding and come out with nice graphics in the end also. 

There are still lots of polishing and bug fixing tasks left to do but finally all the game modes are functional and it feels like a really huge accomplishment!

In quest mode you can choose your own pirate flag, I am hoping to have a selection of class historical flags as well as a few fun and silly flags for your selection!

And now I return to polishing my jewel so to speak!

- punchy out

iOS 7 looks like a bag of cat crap

So I was not in a huge hurry to download and install iOS 7 but was still a bit curious. I generally feel like Apple's operating systems have a ton of polish that places them light years ahead of Windows OS's.  Mac OS X  (10.1) had more polish than Windows 7 does most of the time.

So I expected iOS 7 to be a refinement on excellence, a few notches better and maybe utilize some 3D hardware to make things more alive and have depth.

Apparently they have hired the Windows 8 designer idiot from Microsoft and put them in charge of iOS 7.

Words  and phrases to describe iOS

- flat

- ugly

- lacking polish

- Windows 8 on sedatives

Also for the first time ever my iPad 2 feels sluggish?  How do you do that? How do you make something look flat and uninteresting and take away most of the perceived depth and also make it run worse?  

Raw talent? 

I have to imagine Steve was alive when they were prototyping this so he had some hand in it; but I also feel like it would not have shipped out looking this ugly and performing this poorly if he were still at the helm.

Note to Apple: if you find yourself being compared to Windows 8 in any way : you are doing it wrong.

The end.