Help needed testing an iPhone game

[maurj]

Hi,

Myself and a friend have developed a free iPhone game, called "idrops". It's based on the Mac Classic game "MaciGame (http://www.ne.jp/asahi/ken/home/index_e.html)" (which is itself a version of "SameGame (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SameGame)" - the original idea goes back years!). It's all good to go live, but unfortunately we don't have an iPhone (we're based in Europe) to test it on. Could anyone help us out?

It's designed to be played with the iPhone turned to widescreen, with the browser address bar hidden. If you're interested, the development site is here:

http://www.idropsgame.com/

Please do let me know what you think, and if it works! The main things we want to check are:

Does it work (at all) on an iPhone?
Does it display at full screen, or does it get scaled?
Is it obvious that you need to hide the address bar, and if so, how to do so?
Does the hover-over effect (highlighting the joined blobs with a white border) work when you put your finger near the screen?
Is it easy enough to click on the correct blobs - i.e. have we made the blobs big enough? (or do we need fewer blobs in the game?)
Is anything else missing?

This is what we're hoping it will look like (tested using iPhoney (http://www.marketcircle.com/iphoney/)):

http://www.idropsgame.com/images/mockup.jpg

We've lots of other stuff planned, like high-scores etc., but for now we just want to get this out there for people to start playing! Oh, also, it works in Safari 3 on a Mac, and in Firefox and Internet Explorer, with big fancy graphics, so you can play it there too. But it's the iPhone we're really interested in testing with.

Thanks to anyone who can help :)

Dave & Tim.

[maurj]

Anyone able to help us out on this one? It's a long wait for us Europeans otherwise :(

Dave.

[emmcubed]

The game doesn't actually start when you hit the 'new game' button. When you press that button, it only rearranges the onscreen shapes into a new configuration. The game also only takes up approximately 1/4 of the iPhone's screen, in the upper left hand corner. I'm getting zero functionality out if it at this time.

Looks like a fun time-passer. Hope you guys can get it working!

[maurj]

Aha - you need to click on one of the linked blobs to actually start the game.

Annoying that it's only taking 1/4 of the screen - we'll try and fix that. I'll let you know when we've tried to do so. Thanks for the help!

Dave.

[monkeysrock0622]

ok im playing it right now and i already love it! although the blocks are kinda slow when they move and im using wi fi right now not edge, which means they will probably move even slower on EDGEbut thanks for making the first game ive sen on iphone! and also it is still about 1/4 of the screen but all you really have to do is stretch to zoom in and it is fine

[maurj]

That's brilliant - thanks for the help!

We've just posted an updated version, which will hopefully scale slightly better. It also has a high-score feature (via a cookie for now), to remember your high score. Please do give it a try and let us know if it's any better!

Dave.