ChromaWaves (iOS)

 

ChromaWaves was a student project that started in the fall of 2009 and was published to the App Store in the summer of 2010 (it is unfortunately no longer available since the team split up after graduation). It’s an ambient color mixing game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Essentially, you defend a water droplet in the center by firing colored bullets at similarly-colored enemies.

I was part of a team of 13 people that came together for a game design seminar jointly offered by Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Art. The goal of this semester-long class is to bring artists and coders together to make and publish/distribute a game that both functions and looks good. It was this project that helped me validate my desire to span the gap between artists and programmers.

I worked on a variety of things for ChromaWaves. I provided some of the visual effects animations, including the bullet, splash, and wave, as well as the iGameTeam logo and splash screen. While I did not directly contribute to the game code, I did build a simple program that automated the task of making sprite sheets from a folder of sprite frames.

Visit the official a copy of the original ChromaWaves website for more details about the game, and see this write up by fellow artist Andrew Kuhar on VentureBeat (archived from the defunct BitMob website), who also produced a series of podcasts about the development process and what we learned, accessible at the Escape Route blog (he also made the website!).

This was the second time I took this class; the year before we made Waterworks.