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chawkins

[Released] Cooper's Dreams

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Cooper's Dreams is live on the App Store.  Play Twin peaks on your fucking telephone!

 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/coopers-dreams/id1249820676?ls=1&mt=8

 

======== ORIGINAL POST ========

 

Hi,


This is maybe a bit late to start a dev log so I suppose this is going to be as much a retrospective as a dev log.  This is also my first post here and my first Wizard Jam, so sorry if this is totally uncool. Anyway, the game I made is called Cooper's Dreams based on the episode of Twin Peaks Rewatch with the same name.  

 

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In the game you play dream Cooper in the red room and are  tasked with using the mic to dictate messages for Dianne.  The catch is that you have to speak the words in reverse so you get that creepy backwards-talking effect like in the show.  For example, if the word is "spoon" you have to try and pronounce "noops" or somethign to that effect.  It's way harder than it sounds as most words don't reverse as tidily as "spoons".  At the end of the game I run all your backwards talking through speech recognition and you get graded based on how much the computer believed you were talking english. 

 

The core game actually came together pretty quickly.  I made a rough prototype that just recorded what you said and spat it back at you in reverse.  I played this version with a bunch of friends and co-workers and was already having a good time.  It was fun to figure out the word correctly but I found it was probably even more fun (or at least funny) when you got it wrong and the game spits to total nonsense back at you.  I decided to lean into this failure-as-fun style and play up the nonsense elements of the game.  I added a quote generator that mangles real twin peaks quotes by swapping in random other Twin Peaks related verbs / nouns.  I also removed the ability to retry words and instead forced the player to stick with their mistakes.  Finally I tweaked the scoring so instead of just a pass/fail the speech recognition will take a stab at what it thinks you said and read it's own nonsense interpretation of your nonsense back to you.

 

Having a game that was playing pretty well so early I was sure I'd be finished with heaps of time to spare.  Turns out I totally underestimated just quite what a rubbish artist I am.  Progress with the art was super slow as I gradually iterated on my pixel art.  In the end I'm pretty pleased with where I ended up but I'm still not entirely sure things resemble their show counterpart.  Oh well, it was good fun learning to do something a bit different.  I realised I've hung on to the last 5 iterations of Cooper so I made a little before after gif.  Really not sure why I though cooper was that wide before.

 

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Another thing I'm not really sure about is whether this game will ever see the light of day.  It's an iPhone only game (it's tied pretty closely to their audio/Siri APIs) so it's really at the mercy of Apple whether they let the app through review.  I've submitted the application to Apple so now I've just got to pray whoever reviews the game at Apple is either unfamiliar with Twin Peaks or has a generous perception of "fair use".  I will post an update here when Apple makes a verdict.

 

Anyway, sorry for the wall of text, but I felt like I had to share something incase I'm not able to share the game itself.

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Cooper's Dreams is live in the app store!

 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/coopers-dreams/id1249820676?ls=1&mt=8

 

Better late than never, I guess.  Apple gave me the run around all last week.  They rejected the app under grounds of the app being "Incomplete".  They said they "could not proceed past the audio portion of the app".  I couldn't tell if they 

  1.  Couldn't _bring_ themselves to finish the game because it was so dull
  2.  Couldn't understand how to play and got stuck because the UX was so bad
  3.  There was a straight up bug blocking progress. 

I ended up having I send to them a recording of me playing the game which resolved whatever there issue was.  Anyway, a couple of tips in case you get stuck like the poor Apple employee

  • Turn the volume way up.  There's not a lot of audio processing going on so stuff can be quiet
  • You can tap the dialog boxes to speed them up 
  • After you've played one dream you can tap skip in the top right to skip all dialog
  • The rounds end automatically at the end of your sentence. These are usually around 6 words but can be up to 10

 

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