Sunday, November 15, 2009

OpenFeint support

The next update has been submitted. Taking into account some feedback that the game is very difficult, we have made it easier to unlock the next levels. We have also included 9 new tutorial holes (found at Ned's desk) to help teach the game at a slower pace and also provide some advanced strategy ideas.

Also added is OpenFeint support. Now there are over 25 achievements, several leaderboards, and more so that you can see how you stack up against the rest of the world. I have had a little jump start testing it out, so good luck beating fletchlives (my openfeint username). Feel free to add me as a friend.


Saturday, October 10, 2009

Halloween update is Live!


Here is a new YouTube showing more gameplay and strategy, hope it helps.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

New and Noteworthy!


Apple has chosen to feature us on the games section of the app store!

Halloween update submitted!

New levels are already on the way! You will have to find at least 10 hidden stars to unlock them, so start looking now to be ready to play em when this goes live. Enjoy this sneak peek.





Thursday, October 1, 2009

Invisible Links is Live on the app store!

We got the email from apple this morning. I don't know how well the search in iTunes is finding the app right now so here's the link to check out. Buy the game!:)

Friday, September 25, 2009

By the way, I rule at my own game

yeah yeah. I know that I could have easily cheated on these scores but you'll just have to trust me, these were obtained legitimately. This is just the first set, and they get a lot harder, so I'll try and fill out the other score cards to my liking and post them here as well. I'm sure they will be many who can beat me, so say as much in the comments if you like.
Okay, the rest are posted. If you look close there are two B+(s) that I couldn't seem to improve on. Those two are probably your best bet on beating me :)

that's -3


here are the rest




Thursday, September 24, 2009

submitted!

At 2:40 am on September 22nd, our first app was submitted. Here is the first teaser trailer.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

icon woes

I have struggled to come up with an icon for the game that I really like. Here are a few that I have explored, I have a favorite of these but wanted to see what you think. Please vote on the poll on the side bar. I would really appreciate it.

At first I thought that the icon should describe the gameplay, and I still think that's true to a certain extent, however, I now think the icon should be first and foremost eyecatching and interesting. It is probably the sole basis that someone browsing through a sea of 70,ooo+ apps will decide to investigate the game at all. Keep that in mind when you vote, I am looking for the best icon that catches the attention and makes you want to click to find out more. Also it needs to translate to a very small size.

James icon


desk 1


desk 2


chalkboard



Red's disappearing act

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Level themes

Levels consist of a series of nine doodles found in each of your classmates sketchbooks. My math skills aren't great (which is why I am not the programmer) but I'm pretty sure that 45 hand drawn levels will provide many hours of varied gameplay. The great thing about golf, is that it is always fun to go back and try to improve your score, so hopefully we have provided a game with a lot of replayability.

In addition, there is a secret "gold star" hidden in every level, and we are planning on providing more levels through updates. If the game does well, we plan on providing a level editor for users to join in the fun. Any doodle can be a golf course in this game, and we would love to see a huge community of challenging and imaginative courses.

green cliffs


ice


fire


around the world


human anatomy

Thursday, July 2, 2009

making the intro video

I loved the idea of golfing out a divot in the perfect shape of a letter, so I took that idea and here is what I came up with after several iterations. I actually did cut up the grass in my backyard to photograph the grass letters, which made my wife happy I'm sure. Some letters are cleaned up and composited together a bit in photoshop to be fair.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Welcome to polished play's blog.

My name is Lance. I am the graphic artist behind our games. I have always had an interest in game design, and with the ease of entry of the iphone/ipod touch platform, I couldn't resist. It so happens that I found out that an old high school buddy of mine, Heber, was also extremely interested in creating iphone games. I was lucky enough to partner with him to create polished play llc. I take care of the graphics and sound while he takes care of the coding (and does a fantastic job of it).

Our first game is called "invisible links". A spatial strategy, drawing, golfing, puzzle, memory, maze game. It's really simple, despite my previous sentence. The game was created from the ground up to take advantage of the iphone's unique capabilities. There is nothing currently like it on the app store that I am aware of, so I will hold off on further gameplay explanation, until we are closer to release. Call me paranoid but there are so many "clones" in the app store that you can't be too careful.

We decided to start with this game after discussing many possible ideas we thought we could produce. This was the most fun and innovative idea that just seemed to "fit" the multitouch controls. I can't imagine it existing on any other platform, which is really the kind of gaming experience we are interested in creating. We have been developing since January 2009 and we spend as much spare time as we can invested in the game. It will be in development for a few more months, because we want to provide a "polished" experience that we can be proud of. I realize we are shooting ourselves in the foot a little with a name like polished play. If it's not polished it will be all to easy to make a clever criticism in the reviews. Oh well. Hopefully, you'll give us a break, we are just two guys trying our best after all.

The game has undergone many revisions, and design changes all to try and arrive at a seamless experience. We have tried to critique ourselves often, and gather impressions from beta testers along the way to hopefully end up with the best possible product. I love how the gameplay mechanics have been honed so there are no messy buttons or toggle switches, once you know how to play everything is intuitive, but more on that later.

Here are a few of the title screens we have shuffled through to show some of that process. No gameplay images yet. I will be posting more samples of the game and our experiences developing it. More than likely no one will read or follow this blog till after the game is released, but that's okay. As long as my wife is proud of my work I'll be just fine :)








Saturday, March 7, 2009