The secret to beating No Evil Monkeys…

DID YOU KNOW… Unscrambling the pictures in No Evil Monkeys can seem really hard at times. Like, REALLY hard. But there’s a simple rule that will give you a big advantage over those sneaky monkeys: before you shuffle the tiles, memorize which monkey is on which cube. Then focus on putting the monkeys back in their original positions. As long as you can remember which piece goes where and don’t let yourself get turned around, you’ll be juggling monkeys in no time.

A little while ago, we took a look at LoopLoop, a music sequencer for Sifteo cubes developed by our friends at Stimulant. We’ve been super excited about it ever since we saw their initial paper prototypes, and we’re happy to announce that LoopLoop is now available for download in the Sifteo store.

The word “play” has two very different meanings when it comes to music: it can refer to the experience of listening to a recording, or to the act of creating music for yourself and for others. LoopLoop offers a little of both, but it also mixes in another meaning of “play,” the one where you get to goof around and have fun making a sweet-sounding mess of things.

We’re sure that Stimulant’s game will inspire people to have fun making crazy songs, and we’re hoping that it will spark some imaginative thinking among developers that leads to other interesting musical games as well. Enjoy!

Sifteo, a venture-backed start-up creating a next-generation play system, is seeking gameplay programmers to help create a new generation of interactive games on a super interesting, super compelling new platform. We humbly think it’s an amazing product that is going to positively change how we play.

We are looking for someone who has proven expertise in building gameplay systems and tools, works well with designers and artists, is passionate about games, and is excited about jumping into a start up environment.

You’ll be working with a small team and will be responsible for the development of a wide range of games. In short, you need to be able to build high-quality games quickly and robustly.

Continued »

Today’s post is brought to you by intern and jet-setter Rexy Tseng. Rexy is working on his MFA at UCLA’s Design and Media Arts program. Rexy just returned from a showing at the Begehungen art festival in Germany. We are all trying not to catch the cold he brought back with him.

Greetings, Sifteo fans! My name is Rexy, and I have been a Game Design Intern here at Sifteo for two summers in a row!

I first worked with Sifteo when there were only a handful of guys. But in a one year period, the company has more than quadrupled in size. Sifteo has grown in all aspects and is becoming a rising star in the Bay Area. Without further ado, let me tell you what it is like working at Sifteo in present time.

A Tuesday goes like this: Continued »

Today’s post is brought to you by game intern extraordinaire Max Meyers, who has spent the summer creating cool demos and games on Sifteo cubes.

Hi, Sifteo fans! I’m Max, and I’ve been an intern on the Games team for this past summer. I’m also a computer science major at New York University, as well as an aspiring game developer, so I couldn’t have asked for a cooler summer job. It’s been a wonderful and fun three months, and certainly the most productive and fulfilling experience I’ve had in the game industry. Continued »

At Sifteo we love creativity. The ethos of making stuff cuts across our entire team, and collectively, some of our favorite experiences with technology over the years have involved bending it to our will (e.g. LOGO, Arduino).

You know what’s just as fun for us as creating things? Enabling other people to do the same! With this in mind, we are excited to release the Sifteo Creativity Kit, a brand new feature we’ve been working on during the last few months. The Sifteo Creativity Kit is a small but growing collection of special applications for Sifteo cubes that you can modify. Each application comes bundled with an easy-to-use editing panel in SiftRunner (our desktop software), and after editing a new Creation you can play it on your cubes immediately.

Our first Sifteo Creativity Kit application, “Sorting” (included with every purchase of a Sifteo pack) enables you to create games that involve arranging letters, words, or numbers on three or more Sifteo cubes. All without having to write a single line of code!

For example, you could create mini-games tailored to teach your child how to form sentences with words (e.g. dog, ran, the), sort mathematical equations and numbers (e.g. 2-1, 1/4, -5) or rank chemical elements by atomic weight (e.g. Xenon, Helium, Iron). Or create even more specific applications like foreign language flashcards or simple trivia games like timed social challenges – for example arranging Led Zeppelin’s discography by year (hint: Led Zeppelin III came before Led Zeppelin IV).

As with our growing library of games, we’re just getting started with the Sifteo Creativity Kit. In the coming weeks we plan to expand the kinds of games you can build, from custom jigsaw puzzles using your own images, to audio flashcards, multiple choice exercises, music-making games, and much, much more. We are also in the process of integrating community features to enable Sifteo users to upload and share their Creations with others.

To supplement the great games our team and our partners are building, we invite you to bend this technology to your will and express yourself with the Sifteo Creativity Kit. An active imagination is all you need.

We’re always hard at work making new games, but as we’ve talked about previously, we’re also dedicated to improving and extending our existing games based on your feedback. This week brings a cornucopia of updates that make your favorite games more favorable:

The introductory tutorial game, Get Started, has new narration that sounds much more friendly and less stuffy than before.

Cube Math has a fresh coat of graphics that make the numbers easier to read. The whole thing feels way slicker than before.

As one of their perks for being among the first to sift, Early Access users got Chroma Shuffle for free. But we want our future customers to get a taste of that dot-matching action as well, so we’ve added Chroma Lite to the library. It contains Timer mode and a dozen or so puzzles. Some of the puzzles are unique to the Lite version, so even if you’re a veteran Chroma Shuffle player, you might want to give Chroma Lite a quick spin.

We like posting experimental games and widgets for people to try out, and Tiny Sketch and Shaper represent some really interesting ideas, but they feel a little too rough and unready for public consumption. We’ve removed them from the store so that we can go back to the drawing board and come back with more compelling variations on those themes. (If you’ve already downloaded these games, you can keep on playing them as long as you like.)

There are more game updates coming soon, as well as some major new titles that we’re really excited about. As always, stay tuned!

One of the facts of life in game design is that no game is ever really finished. If you ask the developer of any game, no matter how successful, they will always be able to list a bunch of things they wish they could have included, but had to leave out due to a lack of time or resources. If you know any game designers, you know that they are all crazy, and this is one of the things that drives them there.

So in the interest of improving our games and maintaining our sanity, we’ve made a few tweaks to Chroma Shuffle: text is easier to read; tilting feels less stiff; there’s a menu for selecting which puzzles you want to play; and the ambiguously named “Random Puzzle” mode is now called “Patience Mode.”

Also, in the interest of rounding out the game’s puzzle mode, we’ve added a few more puzzles for players with four, five, or six cubes. They’re pretty tough, but players who have completed the previous puzzles should be up to the challenge.

We have more improvements and expansions to our existing games in the works, as well as a bunch of new games that we’re working on. Stay tuned!

A while back, we posted a video of a Breakout-ish prototype we were messing around with. That little prototype has evolved and morphed into our latest game: Moon Marble!

Moon Marble has grown far beyond a simple brick-breaking game and into something that’s more about exploration and tactical thinking. Moving the moon around to collect stars is simple enough: just tilt and neighbor the cubes. But there are numerous obstacles and hazards getting in your way, from asteroid belts to exploding meteors to evil rats that think your moon is made of cheese.

It’s been really fun seeing Moon Marble evolve from its humble origins into such a rich and exciting game. We hope you enjoy playing it as much as we enjoyed making it!

We come up with a lot of game ideas at Sifteo, and after a while, certain patterns start to emerge. Games for learning, puzzles of all kinds — of course we have plenty of those. But what we also have is a surprising number of games that revolve around food. If you were to look in the Sifteo Super Secret Game Concepts File™, you would see sketches for games about fruit smashers, sentient tomatoes, and bears that have eaten too much ice cream. This week we’re presenting one of our more delicious games, Smörgåsbord!

Smörgåsbord! is a little bit like a rummy-style card game — you want to complete your hand by trading out your cards with a draw pile or with other players. Instead of cards, though, you’re holding a plate full of meats and swapping them to create a dish for a demanding chef. If you can play off more plates than the other players, you might get a trophy for being the Overall Wiener.

(Yes, “Overall Wiener” is an actual achievement you can get in the game. And yes, I groan at the pun every time I see it.)

What I really like about this game — besides the food — is that you can play it either competitively or cooperatively. If you’re in a giving mood, you can trade meats to other players to help them complete their hands; if you’re the cutthroat kind, though, you can try to pull meats off the draw pile just to mess your opponents up. Either way, there’s plenty of meat for everyone who wants to play.

We hope you enjoy playing Smörgåsbord!, and that it doesn’t make you too terribly hungry. I, for one, am going to go have a snack now.