Pipes (iPhone)
January 16th, 2009 2:26 AM PSTUpdated March 4th, 2009 1:29 AM PST
Rotate the pipe segments to connect all the pieces. Easy to learn and very addictive.
Features
- Randomly generated puzzles – never the same game twice
- Multiple board sizes ranging from “Training Wheels” (4×4) to “Insane” (40×50)
- Wraparound option (also known as “without walls” or “endless”)
- “One color” option – when enabled, all pipes are blue, making it harder to tell which ones are connected
- Zoom and scroll using familiar iPhone/iPod Touch gestures
- Auto save and resume – never lose your place, even if someone calls in the middle of your game
- Timer (can be disabled if you want a more relaxing game)
- Every puzzle can be solved
New in Version 1.2 (released January 15, 2009)
- Online leaderboard – compare your best times to other players around the world
- Offline “personal best times” – try to beat your best times
New in Version 1.4 (submitted to Apple – awaiting review)
- Added two new board sizes: Super Insane (48×60) and Mega Insane (56×70)
- Added piece locking feature
- Added tutorial on how to play and basic strategies
- Rewrote graphics engine for much smoother zooming/scrolling on larger board sizes
How to get it
Go to the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store to buy the full version, or to try the free lite version.
(App Store links will open in iTunes)
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Have you thought about porting the version 1.4 to j2me?
Yeah, but unfortunately I doubt I’ll ever have time to actually do it
are the “online scores” available online via the web? or just from the iPhone/Touch?
Right now they’re only available inside the game. I’ll think about adding some kind of web-based display though; it shouldn’t be too hard. Good suggestion
Have you considered aside from publishing a list of online scores on the web, also making a version of the game that is playable as a separate pc game or as a browser game? with its endless and always varying boards it’s the perfect game for that. And different from most other pipeline-style games in that it has the need to connect all ends of the puzzle together. I think it has potential for more than just iphone based.
Hi,
I like the game ‘Pipes’ very much!
But I really would appreciate a different online high score list:
Only one entry for every user/account and mode with his best time and it’s record date.
It’s really boring to see 75 times ‘MagicMvL’, 52 times ‘Hueg’, 45 times ‘Sonya’
and so on.
And faked times of 0:00.736 or even 00:-2:-392 can’t be welcome.
How to handle only one account?
If Pipes is installed/running the first time an internal (persistent) variable (let’s call it user-id)
is set to default (0 or -1 or something like this).
If a high score is submitted the mode (wrap-around, one-color, size), the time, the name
AND the user-id is sent to the server. If user-id is the default the server generates a unique number
and returns this to the app which will persist it as the new user-id.
From this moment on the submitted times (and perhaps changing names) of the one user/iphone
could be related to each other (and only the best will be stored) and so the high score list
could contain only one entry (per mode) and user-id.
I hope you like the idea and I’m looking forward for the next version of the app and the
new online high score list.
Best regards
Hey, thanks for the comments
I’ve actually been thinking about making some of the changes you suggested. I don’t like seeing 1-2 people filling up the whole top 100 list either. I don’t want to lock it to one account per phone, though. Some people like to hand their phone off to a friend or other people, and in that case it’s nice to be able to just type in a different name. If I do a one-entry-per-person limit, I’ll just do it by name. It won’t be 100% perfect, but it’ll keep things nice and simple.
I also thought about adding an option to view the all-time bests, or just the ones from the past week.
Some other ideas I’ve had (and these are just ideas; I’m not committing to them just yet
) were to add a friends list and some sort of challenge system (“I just beat this puzzle in ____, let’s see if you can beat the same one any faster”). I’ve been playing Bejeweled Blitz quite a bit lately, and it’s a lot more fun and competitive when you actually know who you’re competing against. I would use OpenFeint to provide support for those features, and would migrate the existing leaderboards to OpenFeint as well (as long as they provide some method for doing that).
Hi Michael,
YES! I do like the idea of two high score lists VERY much!
Perhaps:
)
- last week – with repeatings (as it is now; to give the MagicMvL’s and Hueg’s their bullfighting arena)
- all time best – just one entry with record date per name (for those like me
I could hardly await the new version!
Best regards
Hi Michael,
here is an other improvement idea:
Could you add a short (and unobtrusive) sound to the lock/rotate-button?
Perhaps a “klick” if switched to lock-mode and a “schhh” for rotate or something like this.
The sound should just give a (acoustic) feedback, so that I do not need to verify if I really hit
the mode button. If I’m not verifying it I very often lock, unlock, lock a pipe piece instead of
turning it before recognizing the wrong mode … which costs “a lot of time” :…-( and prevent
me from gaining a good high score … =:-))
What’s your opinion to this? Hard to do? Or easy to implement? … Coming soon to the App-Store?
Best regards
Hello,
Do you need any help in translations into Japanese?
Hi. Any plans for a version for the iPad?