Hey everybody- I'm submitting Christmas Air Hockey very soon & would love for everyone here to help me pick the icon. I do plan on adding the air hockey table air holes to the red icon backgrounds & maybe some glow from the lights to make it look more like an air hockey table. Please pick a favorite and/or share your thoughts! Here are some screenshots from the game: Some details on the game: - Full retina display support - Game Center and/or OpenFeint - your choice! - Sweet starburst particle effects - 5 Table themes - Snowmen! Santa voices! Thanks!
Thanks guys. Lots of people on Twitter were leaning towards #3. Here are some variations on #3. Thoughts? Still like #1 best?
So....I've had a couple people tell me they really hated the bigger lights on #1, so I'm inclined to not go with that one. Can you guys pinpoint what about #1 you like? FWIW, I did some more tweaking on 3 - the shadows are "hard" to match the style of the game & refined the light glow. Here's that one: Thanks everyone! I'm doing final testing now on the game. If all goes well, I'm submitting it today.
Submitted! Christmas Air Hockey's now in review at Apple! Here are some extra screenshots showing off some of the particle effects:
The ribbons on the 5th screenshot actually stay completely out of the way - they're drawn underneath the action. Two of the tables are done this way for so you can have nothing in the view of the action. The lights & plants on the other tables are rendered above the mallets & pucks - they cast shadows & light onto the game pieces. The lights don't really get in the way at all. I think they really give a cool holiday effect to the table!
I'll vote for #2. The bat is easily identifiable on the bottom left and draws the eye, and there's clear conceptual separation between the bat and the pine boughs and Christmas lights. The rest either don't draw the eye to the bat first (so users can instantly identify it as Christmas air hockey), are too crowded/busy (don't separate elements with enough background), or are unclear at a glance on which elements of the icon belong to the game or the theme symbols.
Wouldn't that be great!? I'm sure you've noticed that no one is doing that well with an air hockey-type game. For a game as fast as Air Hockey, you really can't deal with network latency. I've done lots of tests for this over the past couple years & even more recently with Game Center. Even across town (over wifi), pings can be around 100ms. That's 1/10th of a second - it doesn't sound like much, but you'd absolutely hate it in a game like this. Playing over 3G is much worse. Others have claimed they can do it, but after really digging in it looks like they've all found what I have. The best way to give you a great gaming experience is to NOT have multiplayer over the internet for an air hockey game. Sorry.