Well we are not in the top 100 any longer but we had a brief run in the limelight and we appreciate the fact that our feedback so far has been all positive. Couple of things were accomplished tonight, the biggest is that the 3rd grade edition has been finished up. This will be the final grade covered in the Meghan’s Memory Game series and hits the market with all of our previous improvements, and then some, built right in. The second thing is that I coded the 1.2 changes into the 1st and 2nd grade editions, however I took it a step farther and added display time for successfully matched cards allowing for some time to read the matched words. This was a suggestion made by Troy, one of my colleagues at my day job after he watched the youtube video we released last week. Showing the cards after matching them made a lot of sense and adds education value to the app. This enhancement was rolled into version 1.2 for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade editions.
With those updates completed, the testing team and I decided that this was a big enough improvement to release it into the Preschool and Kindergarten editions asap. This has added a bit of confusion to our incremental update process. I will try to explain. Last weeks release of Kindergarten and Preschool has been tagged as having game engine v1.2. Today’s updates to 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade, which I had already uploaded to iTunes also where listed as v1.2. Guess what, the numbers must keep incrementing as updates are provided. So, I was left with no good choice but to call the new versions of kindergarten and preschool v1.2.1. Ideally all of the editions would be on the same version since they are actually running the same code. Next time around, I will plan things out better and build my application with multiple targets right from the start, that way, all these incremental changes will be rolled out simultaneously rather then the manual approach that I have taken. There are plenty of reference available online that I should have read before I started this adventure. A little work upfront setting things up correctly would save plenty of time as things move forward. Live and learn! Tomorrow, I will work on creating a new video to show how nice an improvement the extra card display time really is.
Archive for May, 2009
Released to the iTunes app store just yesterday, Meghan’s Memory Game Preschool edition has just hit the leader board in the education category! I think Meghan put it best herself when hearing the update saying “Awesome” with a big smile on her face! Back a month ago, we climbed into the top 50 with our First Grade edition. Hopefully this rally will last a bit longer as First Grade spent only a short stint (about a week) in the top apps section. This edition is running version 1.2 of our game engine which has some new features that Meghan and the rest of the in house testing crew really like. They also feel it makes the game play more enjoyable. The enhancements include more time to read the words when non matching cards are flipped over, sound effects during card flips and better efforts at application memory management. Click here to see a brief video of the new game play in a previous post. Our kindergarten edition, also available on iTunes, has been released with these same improvements.
Now available on iTunes, Meghan’s Memory Game Preschool for the iPhone and iPod Touch contains over 200 age appropriate words. This edition kicks off with the V1.2 game engine!
The idea behind the game is for your preschooler to remember the position of the words that have been revealed on previous turns. It is a great game to develop attention, learn new words and sharp listening skills.
Meghan’s Memory Game Preschool starts with twelve cards. The player is instructed to find the matching pairs of cards until the board is cleared. To help develop reading skills, as each card is selected a real voice announces the word. As a match is made Meghan praises the great effort with phrase like “Good Job” and “Awesome”. When the board is cleared a surprising splash screen is displayed with sounds of children cheering and some more praises from Meghan. The second level fills the screen with additional cards and the game concludes when the player completes the matches. Both the number of tries and the score is kept during game play.
Features:
- Grade appropriate word matching
- Spoken words
- Two levels of difficulty
- Engaging and educational gameplay
- Sharpens memory skills
- Develops reading and word recognition
Enhancements to Meghan’s Memory Game engine V1.2:
- More time to read the words when non matching cards are flipped over.
- Sound effects during card flips to make the game a bit more fun for the little ones.
As mentioned in our previous post, in the latest update of Meghan’s memory game we enhanced the way the cards flip over. Version 1.2 of Kindergarten should be showing up in the App Store anytime now (our updates status has been changed to “Ready For Sale”).
Here is a video of how it now functions:
Today I was able to finish up coding some important changes to the way the cards display when being selected and complete the coding of a 1.2 version of the game. In earlier versions, the cards flip over a bit too fast for little readers to be able to fully grasp what they are looking at. So, to make the game play more enjoyable and hopefully more educational I spent a good bit of time re-engineering how things work. I had to incorporate a game play timer and spawn off a thread to flip the cards after about a second of time has passed. The results look very good and we are excited to see how this change is received as we incorporate it into the other editions. Also new to this version and especially geared toward the younger players of the game are some extra sound effects when cards are flipped back over. The Preschool edition should hit the store on or about the 15th of May.
