Archive for category Game Development

DirtMovers – Construction Counting

DirtMovers - Construction CountingIt’s Done! (Well Almost)

After 3 months of off and on development work, RatCat Software’s newest iPhone App DirtMovers – Construction Counting has been uploaded to Apple for review and approval.

Construction Counting is an action packed construction yard playground for your preschool aged kids that gives them multiple opportunities to learn numbers 1 to 10.

There is the excavator that announces the number and displays a new pile each time it takes a swipe of dirt.

Then there is bulldozer pile up, where you child pushes the desired number of piles of rocks then chooses when to check his answer to see if he is correct.

The dump truck fill up is where your child is instructed to load the dump truck to a desired amount, then the answer is checked when the dump truck pulls away.

There is the tap and count game where your child taps a number then watches the screen as that amount of items appears with real voice counting to follow along with.

For the more advanced counting fun, there is the count and tap game, where your child is instructed to count the number of dirt movers on the screen and tap the correct answer.

Features:
• Real Voice Counting
• Realistic Construction Site Sounds
• Illustrations by Cartoonist Robert Salanitro
• Requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later

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RatCat Software begins development for Android

androidsIn an effort to extend our market reach, RatCat Software is please to announce that we have joined the Android Developer Market and begun the process of porting our MyFirefighter application over to the Googles Android OS.

The MyFirefighter app has been a huge Apple Iphone success and listed in the top 50 in France and Germany, the top 100 in Austria and Canada and the top 200 in the United Kingdom and the United States since its launch.

The Android Market offers quick, easy access to a wide variety of applications developed specifically for the Android platform. These have been created by developers all around the world, and are rated Android users.

It will be interesting to see how well myFirefigher performs on Android. We plan to study the results for a period of time before moving on with any other development work on the platform.

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A brief display of the words when the game begins

A great suggestion came in today from one of  Meghan’s Memory Game customers. Add a feature to allow the front of the cards to display at the start of the game for a brief amount of time. This will give the player the opportunity to see where the words are before beginning to flip cards, adding to the challange of achiving a low amount of tries. This feature will probably be added in as an option that can be turned on or off and should take only a short time to add in. To learn more about Meghans Memory Game view the product page.

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Moving right along with another update!

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.

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YouTube video posted of 1.2 enhancments to MMG

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:

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