I think you are right about that. Yeah, I am wondering about the how graffiti thing. The cooler you make graffiti look, the more unreadable it is, that's why the extra writing is over the top. I'm not sure if that works or not.
I have an idea for this version or maybe True Skate 2. Create a simple iphone controller app to control the skateboard that is playing on another iphone or ipad. The orientation of the iphone controller would be used to perform maneuvers and to lean left and right to steer. I really think this would work well as input and really create a sense of immersion in the game. Example... iPad on the desk where the main game is playing. Wrap your hand around the iphone controller so that the face is down and it is level. If you flick the top of it up you will do an ollie. How hard you do it mimics how hard it is done in the game. Tilt the phone slightly to the left and the skate board will slightly start turning left in the game on the ipad. With the face of the iphone down and your hand already wrapped around it would give the possibility to have a single button on the screen to enhance of give some other input that the game might need. Someone really needs to do this! I am not into skateboard games or skateboarding but I would be interested in a game with input like that. I think it would give enough input to make the experience feel more natural and yet more complex in the range of motions and stunts. This would really show off the physics engine too I would think.
Here is some more logo concepts. I think these are pretty close to the final style now. You can see the progression of the logo on our facebook page. There are a couple early screenshot there too, but it is all low quality images because of fb, and the HUD is place holder. The in graphics for the skateboard and world are pretty much final now. The skateboard was just finished last week. The next step is to replace the place holder HUD. I will be trying to get some feed back on that soon. Following that, it might be time to release some decent in game screenshot. Interesting idea, it would be interesting to try that out and see how well it works. It might play really well, but I am guessing that most of the market will only be able to get there hands on one device at a time to play with. It might be worth considering for an update though.
Looking awesome! Glad to hear you are making progress. Any rough estimate for how long until this will be press ready?
I'm just working on getting the Sound into True Skate now. Things are starting to come together. I've been trying to get some feed back on icons on facebook. Here are the latest True Skate icons. Also, here is the first ingame screen shot taken on the iPhone4s. A kick flip is being attempted. There is a fish eye lens distortion effect turned on which looks really cool, although, makes the screen shot look less sharp. The cool thing about it is that it lets the board take up a lot of the screen so that it is easy to hit with your fingers, while still letting you see where you are going. I think only the 4s is fast enough for that effect. The orange wisp is the touch effect. It will be useful for tutorials and stuff.
Everytime I ask for feedback, I seem to get a good spread of opinions. I think the middle one is most popular on facebook.
Either the middle left or the middle, pick whatever you like and enough people like either that it won't matter
Thanks As long as I avoid picking something everybody hates. I'm making a bit more effort with the True Skate icon then with JCS. The JCS icons had to go through a couple iterations after release before it looked ok. I think we did the OpenFeint icon better then most, but, it is still a bit trick to work out what you are looking at. Maybe it's ok to remove the OF icon now. We where considering removing it earlier until we got the OpenFeint gold feature and added replays to the leaderboards.
I just added a teaser video of True Skate running on an iPhone4s too Facebook here. It just shows off the intro sequence plus a failed kick flip attempt. Hopefully it wont be too before I can get together a high quality trailer to show of the game better, but this give a hint of the game. I'll have to think about releasing a bunch of high quality screen shots soon to.