Finger Tied Now Available!
October 18th, 2012
It is with great pleasure that I can announce Finger Tied is now available for your iPad! It is available, for a limited time, with a special launch sale of 66% OFF!
Fingers feeling nimble? Fingers feeling flexible? Twist, stretch, turn, and tie your fingers in knots to solve these fun puzzles! Are your fingers up for it?
Finger Tied is a multi-touch puzzle game, only for the iPad. In each Finger Tied puzzle, fill in a shape by moving up to four fingers around on your iPad at the same time. But be careful, lift a finger, or go out of bounds, and it’s game over. Finger Tied will test your mental, as well as your finger abilities!
Finger Tied can be played entirely by yourself, but for even more fun, invite some friends over and Finger Tied makes a great party game!
- Finger Tied has 100+ puzzles to test even the most flexible of fingers.
- Fly solo, or ask a friend (or three!) to lend you a hand with the more tricky puzzles.
- Keep your wits about you. You’ll need to turn and twist your fingers, your body, and maybe even your iPad to solve some of these puzzles.
- Create your own puzzles with a built-in puzzle editor.
- Game Center leaderboards let you compare your best scores with your friends’.
Go get it, and let me know what you think!
Owen
Finger Tied Developer Diary
September 13th, 2012
I figured it was about time I shared some video of Finger Tied in action. So here, I made this developer diary video just for you.
It goes through a quick explanation of how the game is played and shows some of the puzzles. I hope you enjoy it.
Edit: Several people asked if this was the official trailer for the game, so I’m clarifying: it is not. This is more of a developer diary type video of me explaining how the game works, for those who are interested. The official launch trailer will be released shortly before the game.
Owen
The Creative Process
September 10th, 2012
(I started writing this as a series of tweets and realized it would be better served as a short blog post)
As I get closer to the end of development on Finger Tied, I’ve reached that point of development where there’s not a lot of fun stuff left to do. The tasks left on my list as the things that need to be done to finish the game, but none are particularly exciting. As a consequence, I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of making a game lately, and the changes in confidence levels that I experience throughout the process.
For me, my own confidence in my game ranges from those moments where I’m SURE that the game is going to be GREAT, to those where I start to wonder if ANYONE else will like it?
Yesterday, @HelloCakebread wrote up a great post  where he had a conversation with his own doubts. The post reminded me that we mostly talk about the positive in our work, and I think, keep the negative hidden away. For myself, I think I’m nervous talking about doubts because I don’t want anyone to see the flaws in my work. (Which is ridiculous because all great creative work is flawed, I think)
However, in being surrounded with only positive comments from others, it can lead us to feel like everyone else is succeeding all the time, while we struggle away wondering why it’s not as easy for us. While the truth is that at least parts of the process are a struggle for everyone…I hope. 😉
With that in mind, I thought I’d share a somewhat tongue-in-cheek diagram of how the creative process feels to me sometimes.
Here’s hoping I’m not the only on who feels this way. 😉
Owen
Finger Tied: A History
December 13th, 2012
Yesterday I released a big update to Finger Tied (get it on the App Store) which enables the sharing of levels in the game. You can now share the levels you create, and download levels created by other players. I think it’s pretty cool, and I hope the players do too.
As I was working on the update, I started thinking back on the process of creating the game from start to finish. I like it when other people talk, in detail, about the process of creating their games, so I thought I’d do something to share the process of making Finger Tied. I wished I’d kept a diary or journal about the development of the game, but then I realized that I had the next best thing: my commit logs from my Git repo for the game. Every time I check in code or art, I add comments about what I accomplished.
With that in mind, I exported the logs and wrote a little PHP script to generate HTML code of all the commit comments. I’ve also gone back through my screenshots and pulled some that are relevant to given dates. I haven’t edited any of this, so you’ll see references to features that don’t appear in the finished game, because I decided to cut them.
The first commit comments are from Guelph Game Jam 3, in April, where I first prototyped the game. It was a game about planting flowers, called Trillium Fillium. From there you can see it involve into something more abstract and into the final game.
This post is long. I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t read it. I hope one or two of you find it interesting. 😉
Finger Tied: From Start to v1.1
Wed Apr 11
Sun Apr 15
Original Prototype created for Guelph Game Jam 3 (Apr 15, 2012).
Fri Apr 27
Mon Apr 30
Tue May 1
Wed May 2
Fri May 4
Sat May 5
Mon May 7
Tue May 8
Wed May 9
Sun May 27
Wed May 30
    Â
Fri Jun 1
Mon Jun 4
The style of the game is starting to come together.
Tue Jun 5
Wed Jun 6
Thu Jun 7
Fri Jun 8
Main Menu design is largely what shipped, though obviously with different colours.
Tue Jun 12
New colour palette is in the game.
Wed Jun 13
Fri Jun 15
Tue Jun 19
Wed Jun 20
Thu Jun 21
Fri Jun 22
Wed Jul 4
Mon Jul 16
Tue Jul 17
Wed Jul 18
Fri Jul 20
Mon Jul 23
Post Game screen. It’s becoming clear that lanscape orientation is becoming problematic.
Tue Jul 24
Wed Jul 25
Fri Jul 27
Game has been reworked to render in portrait orientation, making everything better.
Mon Jul 30
Tue Jul 31
Wed Aug 1
Fri Aug 31
Tue Sep 4
Thu Sep 6
Fri Sep 7
Mon Sep 10
Tue Sep 11
Final layout of the Level Select menus.
Wed Sep 12
Thu Sep 13
Fri Sep 14
Mon Sep 17
Tue Sep 18
Fri Sep 21
Sat Sep 22
Mon Sep 24
Tue Sep 25
Evolution of the icon design.
Fri Sep 28
Sat Sep 29
Sun Sep 30
Tue Oct 9
Fri Oct 19
Wed Oct 24
Fri Oct 26
Mon Oct 29
Tue Oct 30
Wed Oct 31
Fri Nov 2
Tue Nov 6
Fri Nov 9
Tue Nov 20
Mon Nov 26
Wed Nov 28
Fri Nov 30
Sat Dec 1
Sun Dec 2
Mon Dec 3
Tue Dec 4
Wed Dec 5
Fri Dec 7
Posted in Art, Business, Design, Finger Tied, ipad, Marketing, Misc, postmortem, Project Management, Technical | Comments Off on Finger Tied: A History