Hello my name is Francesco Maisto and today I would like to tell you about Quad, a game I have been working on for the past 6 months. After many years working as a game developer of web games at Miniclip.com I have decided to open my own game studio in Tallinn, Estonia and devote my whole self: soul, body and wallet to my first mobile game. Without further ado, with a little bit of pride and note without some trepidation, here it is.
Quad is a 2D puzzle, the main concept of the game is to merge four square tiles of the same size into a bigger one of the same color until you create one as big as the whole board. Our main source of inspiration has been the legendary Tetris by Alexej Paitonov, which I believe to be one of the best puzzle games ever created, as well as a great example of simplicity and playability (not to mention global success!)
Most of our efforts so far have been made to create original game mechanics and perfecting them. We have tried very hard to make Quad as intuitive as possible, while at the same time making it fun and entertaining.
Picking a graphic style has been one decisive step: we spent a long time playing with a bunch of different themes and style. Our goal was to keep the style simple and yet original. We tried everything: gems, candies, fruit and season vegetables but in the end someone who understood graphic design way better than we do came to the rescue... as you can see from these screenshots the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian has been a great source of inspiration!
Recently we have customized the excellent level editor Tiled in order to create new levels using a graphic interface (as opposed to writing arrays manually which is never very fun!)
From a technology point of view we are using a combination of FlashDevelop + Starling which gives us decent performance, a mature and friendly programming language (ActionScript 3) and most importantly it allows us to use the same codebase to publish the game on multiple platforms (iOS, Android, web, PC and Mac).
The purists among the audience are probably cringing at the only mention of ActionScript :-D, but for a 2D puzzle I must say that it’s performing well and me being a long-time Flash coder, using ActionScript allowed me to hit the ground running instead of learning a new technology from scratch.
At the moment we are a 3 people team: Giampaolo who is taking care of PR/marketing, Emanuele composing the music and myself, looking after code and graphics.
You can find more info on our mini-website: www.quadpuzzle.com. And if you want to keep yourself update with the latest developmente, Quad’s Facebook page: Facebook.com
Questions, suggestions and critiques are always welcome!
Thank you!
FRAMAISSSSSSS
