Announcing Color Tangle for Flash, FB, and iPhone

I’ve been neglecting my blog even more than usual since joining CrowdStar last February (working on Happy Island and It Girl), but honestly I haven’t had a ton to report for personal projects. Until yesterday, when I finally released Color Tangle as a standalone flash game on Kongregate and Newgrounds, aFacebook app, a standalone website with Facebook Connect, and an iphone app.

I’d played single-color knot games before, but never had any interest in building one. I was actually working on a prototype for an explosive based game using APE (the same physics engine in Filler) when I had the idea to use APE’s grouping system to create collision rules–particles that collide with some but not all of the other “stuff” on the screen. I whipped up a quick prototype, and instantly recalled other knot games I’d played. It seemed like a perfect fit! I had the “first” level up and running in less than a day. I’d been looking for a simple project (and this is a very simple game) to try a multi-platform (facebook, web, iphone) launch, and this seemed like a perfect candidate.

The next task was building an editor–which took about a week. WIth editor complete and a dozen puzzles or so in hand, I next built out the website from scratch (Ruby on Rails hosted on Heroku). I got to play with Sass and Compass (which are awesome), got to play with the Facebook API (not so awesome), and experimented with the blueprint CSS framework (also awesome). I built a widget using LocalConnection so players on external sites could connect to the game via FB connect (which I thought was pretty damn slick). I even started on the iPhone app using OpenFrameworks, getting it to the point where I could play my handful of levels.

It was right about that point that a recruiter pitched me on joining CrowdStar, and the project just… died. In my year and a half plus at CS, I’ve learned more about web programming and games than any other time in my life, and I really haven’t had a lot of time to tinker.

I could’ve just released it–the flash app was working, the website was working, and the facebook app all worked. But I learned from Filler how important it was to be first to market on mobile, so I just let the project sit for a few months while I threw myself into my work on Happy Island. I jumped off of Happy Island and started working on It Girl in June. Between that and getting married last October, I had no free time at all for tinkering. My schedule finally started cooling off around February/March of this year, so I picked the iPhone version up and “finished” it. The only problem was puzzles. Creating a couple puzzles on most nights, it took me roughly 2 months to get up to the 50 puzzles I thought I needed for launch. I submitted the app to Apple in June and it was approved the first time around. I set a release date of August 25 (my birthday) to give me a couple of months to polish up the webiste.

Having not touched the website code for over a year, the FB API was horribly out of date. I got distracted by another project along the way (look for another iPhone app soon), but my self-imposed deadline of August 25 finally gave me the pressure I needed to get my ass in gear. After a couple of weekends to get everything migrated over from FBML to pure iframe Canvas, I invited a few friends to start testing it last weekend and launched it fully yesterday.

I don’t think it will do all that well on FB (I know just a little more about designing for FB now that I’ve been doing it for a year and half), but I wanted to carry the original project vision through to completion. In the end, it was a really fun technical project, and I really enjoy playing it.