Colors!

My wife and I recently had the first full-fledged collaborative painting session. Using our two dev-kits, I shared a painting session that she connected to, and we painted together on a single canvas.

While I spent a lot of time just testing collaborative paining to make sure everything functioned correctly, I haven’t really been able to really just play with the feature until now. It might not have been pretty (I can’t really paint, if you didn’t know), but it was definitely fun. We fought over canvas space, painted things behind layers for the other to find and “improved” each other’s creations. Read more »

Posted: January 25th, 2012 under Colors!, Projects.
Comments: 11

The year is almost over, and Colors! 3D is not in your hands yet. This is due to the gallery integration feature. The term that Nintendo uses for features like the integrated gallery is “Rich User Generated Content”. This is not something we see too much of on consoles, so it’s been taking quite a while to work through.

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Posted: December 30th, 2011 under Colors!, Game design, Projects.
Comments: 10

I’ve been told that I’m over-zealous about latency. Having spent more than 10 years working in the video-games industry as both an engineer and a designer, I’ve found latency to be one of easiest things to point out that differentiates a good experience from a bad one. It’s usually not easy to fix though.

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Posted: November 2nd, 2011 under Colors!, Game design.
Comments: 7

Welcome to the first hopefully many Colors! 3D development diaries. In the time left to the release, I will try to give some insight into what’s gone (and goes) into the development of this… game-app-play-thingy. Yep, we are not really sure how to categorize it either, but that’s ok – that’s one of the things we like about it.

But first, I know that many of you are asking. We still don’t have a release-date or a price. This is the first time we are releasing something for the Nintendo 3DS eShop (well, duh), and there are still things we haven’t figured out. We are feverishly working getting things ready, but there is still a little bit to go before it can go into Nintendo’s submission.

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Posted: October 24th, 2011 under Colors!, Game design.
Comments: 47

Nope. Despite the semi-nerdy name, this is not a technical post. Now that Colors! 3D is finally announced, I wanted to talk about all the fun I get to have now, talking to various entities who are interested in all that we’re doing at Collecting Smiles. And one thing I have learned in the process is that it helps to have a buddy.

For the last year, my friend Shara has been helping me take Collecting Smiles from the loose organization that I started so long ago into a proper company. Just like me, Shara also spent time at LucasArts –and managed to pull off some great feats while she was there. I felt very fortunate to be able to work with her there, and so much more to have her with me at Collecting Smiles.

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Posted: September 29th, 2011 under Colors!.
Comments: 2

The last 6 months have been quite interesting. With an office setup in downtown San Francisco, we are now pushing to grow Collecting Smiles into a full fledged developer. Our initial goal is to build on Colors!, the small hobby project I started working on it 2007. Read more »

Posted: March 20th, 2011 under Colors!.
Comments: 2