Origin: The Atsumari(TM) iPhone/iPod app was developed at Quadratic Games, as was Atsumari itself. Atsumari is related to (even an homage to) a puzzle called Nurikabe, made by the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli. Nikoli has introduced countless people around the world to the beauty of logic puzzles (most notably Sudoku). Nurikabe itself is based upon an array of square tiles, whereas Atsumari (a Japanese word that can be translated as "cluster") is based upon an array of hexagonal tiles. The tile shape controls the local connectivity of the game board and makes the two puzzles play quite differently. Moreover, Atsumari also has its own specific set of rules, introduces the 0-hex, and emphasizes a wide variety of non-rectangular board designs. Versions: The full version of the Atsumari app contains 125 puzzles. The free version Atsumari Lite features the same media content as the full version (background images and sounds) but only contains 12 puzzles; 4 of these puzzles are unique to the lite version. The free version Atsumari Holiday Edition features all-new media content and contains 16 puzzles; 8 of these puzzles are unique to the HE version. You can learn more about the development specifics of Atsumari HE here. Puzzles: All of the puzzles are hand-crafted (i.e. zero computational or AI support) at Quadratic Games. Painstaking care is taken to ensure that each puzzle has a unique legitimate solution (if you believe that you have found an alternative legitimate solution or, even worse, believe that the proposed solution is not legitimate, please report it to: feedback@atsumari.com). All of the puzzles are named in some fashion or another. The names were typically based on: the solution pattern (black hexes, white hexes, or both), the board shape, the initial set of numerical clues, something about the gameplay for that particular puzzle, or something more-or-less random. Most often a puzzle was made and then named. Less often a puzzle was named and then made (e.g. Orion or Telepathy). Each puzzle in Atsumari is unique but a puzzle's dominant mode of gameplay can be used to categorize it into a style or "flavor":
Code: Objective-C. All done in Apple's XCode and Interface Builder on a Mac Mini with an 8 GB iPod Touch for testing. Graphics: Various graphics tools (MS Powerpoint, MS Paint, MS Photo Editor, GIMP, etc.). Backgrounds taken with Olympus Stylus Verve. Sound and Music: Some of the sound effects come from an earlier XNA version of the game (unreleased) and were made using the Korg DS-10 on a Nintendo DS. The rest of the sound effects and all of the music were done with Apple's Garage Band (and Audacity). Apple's World Music Jam Pak was added to Garage Band to get some more authentic sounds such as koto, guzheng zither, erhu violin, santoor, di zi flute, xiao flute, shakuhachi flute, and lots of world percussion. All of the compositions are original, essentially down to the notes (no loops were used). All of the instruments were either coded in software or played on a USB keyboard, EXCEPT a live piano track (in the puzzle selection track) and a live guqin track (yes, I own one) recorded with an Olympus voice recorder. I would say the tracks are pseudo-traditional, in that they were inspired by traditional Chinese and Japanese music, employ samples from Eastern instruments, and stick more-or-less rigidly to the major/minor pentatonic scale. Beyond the overall feel, however, there was no intent to emulate traditional music (traditional rhythms, song structure, and playability on the actual instruments were never really a constraint). One track for the top-level menus (you can listen to it here), one track for puzzle selection, and six gameplay tracks, all in the range of 30 to 60 seconds each (designed to loop reasonably well). Ultimately, they were rendered at 64 kb/s to keep the app package size below 10 MB to allow iPhone download via cell service. The music can be turned off (Options) and a player can use their own iPod music if they would like. Look-and-Feel History: Here are some iPod screenshots of how the game evolved -  The oldest screenshot I've got. The sphere highlights are very unnatural here.  More colors, better spheres. The spheres are actually just rendered in code using Quartz 2D circular gradients.  This puzzle became Puzzle 2 "EZ Does It" on the Atsumari iPhone release. (The name comes from an old C64 game called Jumpman, which I think had a starting level of the same name.)  At one point in development the player could pan around a game board much larger than the screen size. Scrolling seemed like an easy way to include harder puzzles for the game. However, it just didn't feel right, and zooming in/out didn't make it any better. I decided that the player needs to see the entire game board during gameplay and dropped scrolling. This made higher-difficulty puzzle designs more challenging to develop, but I think the end result was better. I will put some larger puzzles in the Printable Puzzles section because they work just fine on paper.   Had the thought to just go to black-and-white while in a local Mexican restaurant that has Taoist motifs rendered in black-and-white hexagonal tiles on their countertop (it used to be a Chinese restaurant). This resolved some of the color-cluster algorithms I was reluctant to get into.   Transparency really seemed to make it look better. Care had to be taken to not make the background too "busy". The backgrounds are randomly selected (as are the music tracks), so a player can just pop up to the puzzle selection and back into a puzzle if they don't care for a particular background.  Here is the final look-and-feel of the game. Sometimes, as in this case, the background goes well with a particular puzzle. |