Well our first original game for iPhone and iPod Touch was released this weekend and we are very excited about it. It actually was a title that we had planned for Windows Mobile, but the initial designs for the gameplay just never seemed right so it was backburnered. Well Thursday night November 13th I couldnt sleep so started thinking about the game again and came up with a couple ideas that were inspired from a friend of mine’s game Alpha and a few other games from iPhone I had tried. Most of the game mechanics just seemed to make sense so I wrote them down and the next day, I was working on getting the engine up and running and the tiles needed to give it a try using the game engine for Tri-Peaks. I changed a few little mechanic things in the Alpha during initial play testing, and turns out it is SUPER FUN…

 Because of some really interesting discussions I have had with some users I will go into my design philosophy, which I do bounce off multiple people in the process… Basically, I want this game to appeal to Casual Puzzle game fans. They are my first priority, not people who love poker, though it will appeal to them too!  But really you dont need to be good at poker, you just need to know and be comfortable with the poker hands in order to play, and we can teach you those.

So the look and feel and game play of Poker Stacks was designed for:

• Keeping Casual game lovers in mind. Bright colors, nice clean graphics, and some neat animations(with a few more coming in updates) but nothing that you really feel you have to wait for, or that are distracting to get in the way of gameplay.
• Easy processing. This game can start out a little overwhelming to begin with. But then if you have to stare at a tile and read it like a playing card that is going to cause brain fatigue real fast. This way it uses the Standard 4 color deck colors and lets you actually process the suit based mainly only on the color. Like Gems. 
• Its all about game play. It offers some neat strategy moves and things based on the current rules that you really only figure out as you play it more.. But you can pick it up, and just start swapping and matching Pairs right off the bat.

A little more on development. This game was brought to life between Nov. 14th and Dec. 1st. The only reason this was possible is because I had the existing framework from my other iPhone games and existing code and ideas from the Windows Mobile design and my other poker games.  I was able to plug in a Poker Hand and Deck C++ class, re-design the tiles to the new size and the backdrop, use the title screen, help screen, timer bar, persistance, sound, high score system, and everything right out of my engine. It was fun!!

 But… I want to build onto this game so I am promoting it very heavily so that if it actually doing well I can allocate more time to it. I have many ideas for its future, and I know I have a fun game, but I do realize that right now the AppStore is kind of a mess, so it may get passed over and ignored . I’m working hard so that doesn’t happen and am committed to making the game better. So help me out and if you like the game tell your friends or the web about it, give me a good review, send me suggestions… Whatever you can…

I am currently working on an update that will fix a bug or two and show the instructions, probably in a better format, the first time you play the game. I also have plans on getting a pause button in, and possibly a couple other game modes and redesigning the engine for easier navigation. I do plan on doing Online High scores and a few other things soon as well… But I guess I shouldn’t give it all away…

Enjoy…

Oh, and Im definitely not against bringing it to Windows Mobile and Desktop… So if it proves popular…