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AliceX: First Mac Game Returns to the iPhone
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Thanks from Steve Capps
Thanks for these positive (and negative) comments about Alice. It was a blast to write and it's even more fun to see people get nostalgic about it. The Mac world was so simple back in 1984 and it's a nice little reminder of those times.
It's also great to see the GW theme get trashed -- you don't have to play with that theme, you know, there are 3 others.
Follow Alice and other iPhone developments on twitter (under @stevecapps).
Thanks for these positive (and negative) comments about Alice. It was a blast to write and it's even more fun to see people get nostalgic about it. The Mac world was so simple back in 1984 and it's a nice little reminder of those times.
It's also great to see the GW theme get trashed -- you don't have to play with that theme, you know, there are 3 others.
Follow Alice and other iPhone developments on twitter (under @stevecapps).
Dang, reading this made me wonder where my copy of Alice actually is. The mac SE I last played it on is still working , but 2000k across the countryside, but i havent seen the physical game since at least one house move ago
Hey Steve,
Great to see you comment. Good luck with the App. Hopefully it'll get more recognition considering the history behind it.
(and, it looks like the political comments were modded out, we try to keep those out of the news threads as they are hard to keep under control.)
arn
Good to see you in the forums, Steve. We're big fans of the app over at Touch Arcade.
http://toucharcade.com/2009/04/16/alicex-the-macs-first-game-comes-to-the-iphone/
blakespot
Thanks for the effort, Steve...and thanks for the great original work done to the Finder and Mac apps in general...good and simpler times indeed! (I still remember using my Apple //e clone and longing for a Mac back in the late 80s...)
p.s.: yep, where are the Easter eggs?
Ahhh, those were the days...
When I saw this I could hardly wait to get home to buy it!
Alice and the melting clock were awesome. I have seen some other melting clocks since then, but even with much fancier Macs than my 128, no of them are as smooth and pretty as that one.
My one disappointment with Alice for the iPhone, unless I just haven't found them yet, are some of the other options. E.g. upside-down board and mirror clicking (click left to move right). Also there was an option where the holes were permanent, so the board eventually disappeared.
(I also seem to have a hard time getting it to respond to my finger taps, so that by the time Alice finally moves it's too late, and you can't tap ahead. )
(I was hoping the eyes/ears/nose/smile would do something, but I haven't had any luck there either.)
When I saw this I could hardly wait to get home to buy it!
Alice and the melting clock were awesome. I have seen some other melting clocks since then, but even with much fancier Macs than my 128, no of them are as smooth and pretty as that one.
My one disappointment with Alice for the iPhone, unless I just haven't found them yet, are some of the other options. E.g. upside-down board and mirror clicking (click left to move right). Also there was an option where the holes were permanent, so the board eventually disappeared.
(I also seem to have a hard time getting it to respond to my finger taps, so that by the time Alice finally moves it's too late, and you can't tap ahead.
)(I was hoping the eyes/ears/nose/smile would do something, but I haven't had any luck there either.)
AliceX
If you click on the score, then the Cheshire Cat comes up and click on his eyes and the levels change (left goes down, right goes up). I think that's right. Anyone else check?
Anyone remember Capps' SoundEdit for the Mac? When you clicked on the About box, the alert with the bomb would come up (the Mac guys called it the Deep **** Alert). That was scary and cute.
If you click on the score, then the Cheshire Cat comes up and click on his eyes and the levels change (left goes down, right goes up). I think that's right. Anyone else check?
Anyone remember Capps' SoundEdit for the Mac? When you clicked on the About box, the alert with the bomb would come up (the Mac guys called it the Deep **** Alert). That was scary and cute.
AliceX
The chessboard slightly changes because the player you play as changes every 4 levels. When you first play as a knight, for example, the possible moves for a knight are highlighted; these are the visual changes you may have noticed as you went through levels.
The chessboard slightly changes because the player you play as changes every 4 levels. When you first play as a knight, for example, the possible moves for a knight are highlighted; these are the visual changes you may have noticed as you went through levels.
I hear that you can't get refunds from the iTunes store, and besides, its not really worth the effort for such a small amount of money. Just means I'll have to wait until I get an iPhone later this year to play
.@SteveCapps: It's great to see you on these boards. I've throughly enjoyed reading about you and the rest of the original Mac team over at Folklore.org.
Thanks. I knew that is what I had been noticing once I found out that the levels were changing with eye touches.
Tapping ahead
You certainly can tap ahead or otherwise the game was unplayable. I'm curious why you don't feel you can. One of the purposeful difficulties with the game is if you click to an illegal move square and then click ahead after that assuming the first square was good, you will often end up stalled and capture will ensue.
As for the sensitivity, I actually go to great pains to make the clicks do something. When I first coded it, I did the strict bounds testing on the squares but quickly realized I had to respond with the closest square because the taps are notoriously inaccurate. Then, I added a small amount of cheating which biases the clicks towards squares that capture opponents. So, at lower levels <24, you can miss the square by almost almost one whole square and it'll still take the best move. (At higher levels it's less forgiving) The easiest way to see this is to capture all but one piece, get captured, hope you revive on a square that can attack the last piece, and then click on various squares near the piece.
That said, there's always room for one more bug, so if you've got a reproducible case, let me know and I'll rev the app if I can figure something out. I sometimes felt like it missed a click but every time I instrumented it, it turned out I was clicking on an illegal move as mentioned above.
Finally, as for the missing modes in the original Alice: I reviewed them and concluded they were throw aways and didn't really add that much... Except for the trap door which I put in all the time. I changed it slightly in that the trap door will jump locations only on your click so if will sometimes deviously move just when you jump for it. The Mac game's trap door jumped around at random and only rarely did it disappear at just the wrong moment.
As for easter eggs in general, I posted a little musing about this WRT version 1 vs. version 2 on my blog yesterday.
When I saw this I could hardly wait to get home to buy it!
Alice and the melting clock were awesome. I have seen some other melting clocks since then, but even with much fancier Macs than my 128, no of them are as smooth and pretty as that one.
My one disappointment with Alice for the iPhone, unless I just haven't found them yet, are some of the other options. E.g. upside-down board and mirror clicking (click left to move right). Also there was an option where the holes were permanent, so the board eventually disappeared.
(I also seem to have a hard time getting it to respond to my finger taps, so that by the time Alice finally moves it's too late, and you can't tap ahead.
(I was hoping the eyes/ears/nose/smile would do something, but I haven't had any luck there either.)
You certainly can tap ahead or otherwise the game was unplayable. I'm curious why you don't feel you can. One of the purposeful difficulties with the game is if you click to an illegal move square and then click ahead after that assuming the first square was good, you will often end up stalled and capture will ensue.
As for the sensitivity, I actually go to great pains to make the clicks do something. When I first coded it, I did the strict bounds testing on the squares but quickly realized I had to respond with the closest square because the taps are notoriously inaccurate. Then, I added a small amount of cheating which biases the clicks towards squares that capture opponents. So, at lower levels <24, you can miss the square by almost almost one whole square and it'll still take the best move. (At higher levels it's less forgiving) The easiest way to see this is to capture all but one piece, get captured, hope you revive on a square that can attack the last piece, and then click on various squares near the piece.
That said, there's always room for one more bug, so if you've got a reproducible case, let me know and I'll rev the app if I can figure something out. I sometimes felt like it missed a click but every time I instrumented it, it turned out I was clicking on an illegal move as mentioned above.
Finally, as for the missing modes in the original Alice: I reviewed them and concluded they were throw aways and didn't really add that much... Except for the trap door which I put in all the time. I changed it slightly in that the trap door will jump locations only on your click so if will sometimes deviously move just when you jump for it. The Mac game's trap door jumped around at random and only rarely did it disappear at just the wrong moment.
As for easter eggs in general, I posted a little musing about this WRT version 1 vs. version 2 on my blog yesterday.
My friend Scott Warren released a Dali-inspired clock today. While searching for it, I discovered another friend (from Apple long ago), Burt Sloane also wrote one. Search for "Dali" in iTunes and both should pop up.
I mused about this because it was a complete surprise to discover there's a lot of Dali-ness out there. I think this is one of the few things written for the Alto in the 70s that has made the 30 year jump to iPhone. (well...except for all that GUI stuff, ethernet, laser printers, and the other hundred things invented at PARC)