Wow! There were over 2000 submissions to the #painttheworld contest. It took some time for us to look through them all. We were also blown away by the quality of the submissions. There were so many great ideas with fantastic execution. You have no idea how much agony this caused us when trying to pick the winners.

First place, and winner of the Nintendo Wii U Console Deluxe Set, goes to Widder. Congratulations!

Posted: April 26th, 2013 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 6

We’ve finally got the go-ahead by Nintendo to release our big Colors! 3D update and it will be available in the eShop on April 5 absolutely free. We can’t tell you how excited we are about this – there are so many features that we’ve been waiting for you to get your hands on. Just look at this list:

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Posted: March 28th, 2013 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 111

Sensationalist title aside, this article will present our measurements of our app Colors! across 10 devices: Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation Vita, Microsoft Surface Pro, Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy Note, Samsung Galaxy Note 2, Samsung Galaxy S3, Google Nexus 10, and with special appearance by Nintendo DS and the Nintendo Wii U.

As I’ve posted before, Latency in video-games (and apps) is something I feel strongly about. While the benefit of low latency is easy to understand for video-games where the action is intense, it’s equally true for a painting apps like Colors!. Just try write to write your name on your average note-taking app, and you will see how high latency makes this so much harder than it should be. This video from Microsoft Labs shows that in an excellent way.
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Posted: March 25th, 2013 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 13

I’m sorry to report that there are further delays with the Colors! 3D update. Nintendo found two more issues with our submission and have requested us to fix them before we can make the update available in the eShop. The first was a couple of situations where Colors! 3D didn’t behave as it should if the SD card was full and you re-ran the tutorial (or used a coloring page in the Portuguese version!). The second one was that sometimes the Paint With Friends feature would not connect if the one user had the original version of Colors! 3D and the other had the updated one. We’ve already submitted a new version, so now we are waiting Nintendo to look through it. Based on this, our new hope is to see the update in the store somewhere between 3-5 weeks from now. I’m terribly sorry about these delays – no one wants to see this update go live more than we do.

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Posted: March 2nd, 2013 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 41

The eagerly awaited Colors! 3D update is still in submission with Nintendo. This is the part of the process where we have no control over the timing, so we sadly can’t give you any accurate information on when it will be released. It will probably somewhere between a 2-4 weeks, but that is just our guess. We were hoping that it would be out now, but Nintendo rejected our first submission as it had a number of small problems. On the plus-side, this makes the update a little bit better, so I hope you can still be patient a tiny bit longer.

I’ve mentioned tracing in a few of my previous development post, but I’ve never really gone into details on it. Tracing is probably the single most controversial issue in Colors! 3D. Half the gallery hates traced paintings, since they get so many likes and therefore drown out a lot of original works. On the other hand, the other half very much enjoys watching 3Difed copies of popular images.

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Posted: February 16th, 2013 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 59

With the big Colors! 3D update soon here, I wanted to talk about a major gallery addition that I haven’t touched on yet: Tags.

Being able to tag or categorize your paintings is something that we’ve experimented with before, but it never really worked out as we wanted. This time we’ve borrowed an idea from some other social networking sites and will try out using hashtags.

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Posted: February 4th, 2013 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 13

The holidays are upon us. Luckily for all you out there, we don’t have too many plans this year over here at Collecting Smiles HQ, so we keep working on the Colors! 3D update that we’ve promised to bring you – perhaps eating some delicious gingerbread cookies to get into the holiday spirit.

Here is the new Gallery front page and as you can see, it’s quite slimmed down compared to the current version. I talked about “Followers” previously, and this is where the new paintings from the artists you follow will show up – right front and center. And see the new icon in the bottom right corner? That is for notifications. Read more »

Posted: December 21st, 2012 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 35

It’s been a busy couple of weeks since the last blog-post. Time passes so quickly when you are heads down, crunching to get things ready as soon as they possibly can. But we have some good news! We have finally released the Colors! for Android. It’s pretty cool, and is finally a new device that runs Colors! and supports pressure-sensitivity, just like the original Colors! on Nintendo DS! Check out Colors! for Android here.

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Posted: December 3rd, 2012 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 21

There are lots of things going on here at Collecting Smiles HQ, and I wanted to share some of that with you. Lately, we’ve been really focusing on getting an update for Colors! 3D out for the Nintendo 3DS, and I wanted to talk a little bit about that, but before we go into that I also wanted to mention:

Colors! is now available for PlayStation Vita!

We are still holding off on the official announcement as due to a snag: Read more »

Posted: November 16th, 2012 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 19

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks, and I’ve realized that I never posted the big news here. Colors! 3D has a release date in the US (all of the Americas, really) and it is April 5. That’s tomorrow!

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Posted: April 4th, 2012 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 16