“Traits” Available
Although “Traits” was originally approved a few weeks ago, I couldn’t find it in the App Store. I was about to contact Apple (“my app is not listed” is a standard item in the support dropdown), but during the week between submission and approval I’d found a few minor issues I wanted to correct. Since I had never been able to find version 1.0 in the App Store, presumably few people (if any) managed to download it. And now… an updated version along with the requisite approval interval later, and we’re live at last, with version 1.01!
Thanks for Traits. I’ve put app on i-Pad. (Colors, esp. the green, look better there than on Safari browser.) Concept’s understood but I’m having trouble playing. Thrown off by: 1-The solid square inside of all circles. Could you make it a circle? Or put equally distracting solids inside of other shapes… triangle inside of squares, circle inside of triangles? (Perhaps this is already done once player gets out of ‘training’.) 2-The blocks to be matched aren’t delineated well enough. My eyesight, slow brain – something causes me to spend more time in searching for items to match to than in finding the match. I even find myself selecting blocks that are already in final trio! If this is part of your grand plan, I will walk away with regret while wishing you well.
Hi, thanks for the feedback. My thought was that the figure in the center of each shape is not meant to be distracting, rather to help in differentiating the shape from other shapes. It adds another “feature” for your eye to catch on to, and is part of the design. I originally tested the game without these features, and found that they actually added something subtle to the gameplay when present. Instead of thinking of the shapes as “square” or “circle”, think of them as just different things. Say, one is a “cracker” and one is a “donut”. Now, all that matters is that “crackers” and “donuts” look as different from each other as possible, so that you can tell when you see two things whether they are both the same, or both different. It doesn’t matter in Traits that they’re squares / circles / triangles; I could have used different shapes like squiggles / hearts / bananas. All that matters is that you can easily tell them apart. If the solids are distracting, I think that will go away with practice, so it’s a feature of the game. :) I know that grasping the concept intuitively and being able to see these matches, when you first start playing, is very, very hard. You might find just one or two per game. Just be patient with yourself, and you’ll start getting better; then finding the matches is very satisfying.
You are right that the “selected” and “unselected” state for the tiles is not differentiated enough; I’ve received other feedback about this. I’d like to consider updated the graphics in a future version. Also, I want to update the game to work natively on the iPad so that the graphics are nice and sharp, which should help a lot too, I hope. Please let me know what you think as you play a little more, so I can take that feedback into account.