BigSeed (lite)



BigSeed is a puzzle game originally developed in Flash for the MIND Research Institute's STMath program.  Puzzles feature tiles and empty squares arranged on a grid.  The objective is to fill all of the empty squares.  To do this, existing tiles must be flipped into the empty squares by dragging them with your finger.  Tiles come in three colors; when you drag a tile, all tiles of the same color will flip over, creating a mirror image of the arrangement of the colored tiles (and adding the new tiles to the existing tiles).  In later levels, you are given the ability to change the color of your tiles by dragging a paint can over them.

The game is available on iPad only and requires iOS version 4.0 or higher.  Check out the lite version (linked above) to get a much better sense of the game than you'll get from my description... (Dammit, Jim, I'm a programmer, not a marketer).

Since the original was programmed in Flash, I used Pixelwave for the iPad port.  At this point, AIR is starting to become a real alternative, but using Pixelwave keeps open the option of using all of Apple's native libraries.  In particular, I use UIKit for the menu system, and OpenGL to draw the tiles in 3D as they're being dragged around.  All of the procedural graphics from the Flash version have been replaced with much better-looking bitmap equivalents, and the UI has been substantially improved using touch instead of a mouse: The Flash version had a set of eight arrow buttons (for north, northeast, east, southeast, etc) for each color (for those keeping score, that's up to 24 different buttons just to flip tiles), as well as separate buttons for changing the color of the tiles; the result was a cluttered UI that stole screen real estate away from the puzzles.  On the iPad, we got rid of all that; touch just makes everything so much simpler, and the gameplay is much more intuitive.

This game actually uses a somewhat modified version of Pixelwave.  During development, several issues in Pixelwave were identified and fixed, and a new event -- PXEvent_PostRender -- was added to facilitate drawing flipped tiles in OpenGL.  The PostRender event works like the EnterFrame event, but it is delivered just after Pixelwave has drawn all its content and just before presenting the framebuffer.  This gives the application an opportunity to draw its own arbitrary content on top of Pixelwave's content, using a different OpenGL context attached to the same framebuffer.  This works very well in BigSeed; drawing the flipped tiles is lightning fast, with no visible input lag as you move your finger.

There are outstanding pull requests for all of the modifications made to Pixelwave, and in fact most changes have already been pushed into develop.