Zen Puzzle Garden
Saturday November 27, 2010
PikPok's latest game exclusively for the iPad is Zen Puzzle Garden, a game originally done for PC by Joseph White of Lexaloffle. The idea of the game is to rake the sand in the garden, but there are three rules to adhere to:
- You will keep raking in a straight line until you hit an obstacle or the other side of the sand
- You cannot rake over previously-raked areas
- You must be able to rake all the sand and step off the garden at the end
I've thoroughly enjoyed working on this game, despite the various challenges that the iPad's touch screen poses to developers and game designers (maybe I'll elaborate on this another time). I've learned an immense amount from watching people play-test the game and found it interesting to compare people's natural intuitions when trying to complete the gardens.
Again, the small project team size meant I was able to have my hand in several different game domains; I was responsible for input, UI, level editing and serialisation and game logic. You can even find some hot A Star action in there somewhere. Definitely one of the highlights of my year.
Posted by Jeremy at 4:30am on Saturday November 27, 2010 :: 1 comment :: 
Hey, A*. We mentioned that in a class once. As in "A* is a great way to traverse stuff in graph theory, you'll probably have to use it at some point. Now, back to writing up the Sequence Diagrams for this project I haven't told you the nature of yet."