Hi Everyone.
I just thought I’d chime in quickly to let you all know that TrapIt v 1.1 is currently in development. This is a small update that will address a few issues and requests that we have had from users so far. Namely:
- GameCenter support – Yup you’ll be able to use GameCenter with TrapIt soon! Don’t worry, OpenFeint is still there and the two are integrated together.
- Custom achievement notifications. Instead of the default OpenFeint achievement notifications I will be adding in custom messages that better fit with TrapIt’s look.
- Pause on resume. I know TrapIt is meant to be mean and ruthless but in some moment of weakness I decided to add a pause dialog that will appear when you switch back to TrapIt under multitasking.
- A few buggy woos to do with some achievements had not been caught. They will be squished.
- Instructions updated. There’s now an “Overview” page.
- We threw in another background too.
Hopefully I can get this update submitted to Apple within a week. It’s taken a bit longer than expected because I decided to upgrade our development environment and OpenFeint version in the process which I had to do at some point.
Stay tuned and thanks for waiting!
Colour Bonus, Color Bonus, who knows, I sure don’t!
Colour bonuses are something that should NOT be overlooked in TrapIt. You’re not told that they are there, and unless you see the end of game hint, or accidentally get one and work out what happened, you might be missing out on valuable points.
When an area ends up with 2 or more prisms in it, and all of those prisms are of the same colour, your colour bonus count increases. When you successfully finish the level you get points (currently 1000) for every colour bonus you achieved in that level.
Blue Color Bonus Bottom Centre
You cannot use the same prisms for more than one colour bonus, so be mindful how you use them if you want to maximise your score. For instance, if you manage to trap 4 green prisms in an area and then split that area in two with 2 green ones in each, you WILL NOT get another colour bonus. However if before they were separated from other colours you trapped two then the other two you would get two colour bonuses!
So, get Trapping!
The kind folks at iphonewzealand have just published a review of TrapIt and it’s a good one!
…this is definitely going to become a permanent resident on my iPhone 3GS. It’s pretty easy to play, but the trade-off between getting Fill Bonus and easily trapping the prisms make it a game of whits and will probably bring out your inner gambler! It’s bloody addictive – dare I compare it to the almighty Doodle Jump? Heck yes – it’s a lot more fun!
More fun than Doodle Jump? Now THAT’s what I like to hear 
Read the full review here:
The good folks at NZ gaming website ButtonMasher have kindly done a review of TrapIt for their readers. A small quote from the review…
…it really is a great “pick up and play” experience that you can turn to whenever you have a few minutes spare. I really loved this game and was quickly hooked.
Read the full review here.
Many thanks to Ahmad the reviewer and all the BM team!
Sorry for the little delay in this installment folks. We’ve been flat out with the TrapIt official release. I seriously had no idea how much work would be involved post launch. So, powerups…
For the first few levels of TrapIt there are no powerups but soon you’ll notice that little rotating icons appear in unfilled areas of the screen.
Powerup Spawned
This powerup won’t last forever so you need to collect it fast if you want to keep and use it. To collect a powerup is simple; just isolate it in an area with a single prism. Once you do that the powerup will quickly fly down to the bottom of the screen to your powerup bank.
Scatter powerup waiting in the powerup bank
From there it’s a simple job of tapping the icon in the powerup bank to activate it. Easy!
However, there’s a couple more things you need to know
- You can only have 3 powerups stored at any one time. If other powerups are on screen and you isolate it with a prism, it won’t disappear, but it won’t be collected either. You will need to use a powerup before it can be collected.
- If a powerup of a certain type is on screen or in your powerup bank then no more of that type will spawn.
Now, I will leave it up to you to discover most of the powerups yourself, don’t be scared to play around, but here’s a little bit of info about the first two powerups that become available…
SCATTER
As its name suggests, scatter will randomly scatter all prisms within their own areas 3 times in quick succession. It will also give all prisms a new direction. The first implication of this is obvious. Move a prism out of the way of somewhere you don’t want it to be. The second might not be; colour bonuses. I will talk in detail about those next time but basically they require prisms to be near each other. By using scatter you may be able to move prisms of the same colour together and then grab the colour bonus.
Gravity Warp
This one’s a simple one, it pops all prisms into slow motion for a few seconds, giving you a chance to pull off a difficult split. After a few seconds the balls speed up again quickly and you’re back to normal.
Next time: Colour Bonuses
Was nice to see we got a mention in “New and Noteworthy” of the arcade section on the New Zealand iTunes Store!
Now how to get that same mention on the US Store? Hmm…
That’s right, after what seems like eons in development and even longer waiting for Apple to review it, TrapIt’s now available on the App Store!
I want to take this chance to thank a few people who helped me along the way:
- Flightless for coming on board with the graphics and generally being a great bunch of people to work with
- Reti Hedley for the pumping sound track
- All the testers who made sure that people’s iPhones wouldn’t melt when they played TrapIt
- My wife, for reluctantly agreeing to playtest TrapIt then finding she couldn’t put it down. This gave me that last bit of encouragement to fine tune the game and get it out the door!
- My little boy for giving me my first review which you can read in all it’s glory here.
So the last thing to say really is – here’s some App Store links!
Talk soon
Aaron
In this installment of What The Hell Is TrapIt? It’s time to learn how to play the thing! When a level starts you’re presented with an empty playfield and the prisms that will be on that level start to warp in.
Prism warp-in
Now the prisms happily bounce around, not annoying each other and generally minding their own business, however the red bar at the top of the screen starts disappearing. When that goes, you lose a life. When all lives are gone then it’s Game Over so you need to isolate the prisms from each other before then. You do this by drawing walls between them. To draw a wall, you swipe so that your finger crosses an unfilled area. You can start the swipe inside the area, or start in a previously filled part of the screen and swipe into an unfilled area; either way is fine. Once you have swiped and before you have lifted your finger, a little line with arrowheads will appear stretching from edge to edge in the area you have swiped across – this is the split indicator. It will be either horizontal or vertical depending on the direction you swiped.
Arrows indicating position of wall
TIP: Before lifting your finger to split an area with a wall, you can move it around the screen to get a better view of the indicator. The wall won’t draw unless you lift your finger off the screen or 3 seconds elapses.
Now, when you let go (Or the timer runs out) the split indicator will disappear and a splitter will start drawing from the middle of the where you swiped out to the edges as in the left image below. This doesn’t take long, but if a prism hits it while it’s expanding, then BAM – another life lost. If it makes it to the edges safely, then the wall will be drawn, just like it is on the right picture.
Then after that, you rinse and repeat until each prism is in its own area. Once that’s done you receive a bonus for the amount of area you filled and also the number of colour bonuses you managed to get (We’ll talk about those later). Each level gets progressively harder and harder and it’s up to you to survive as long as you can and get as high of a score as you can. 
Next installment I will talk about powerups. Stay tuned.
Hi everyone!
Here’s installment one of a little series I’m calling “What The Hell Is TrapIt?”. The idea is to give a little more in-depth information about the game and how to play it as well as a few not so obviously hints and tips to help you maximise your score. Lets start with the basics….
As far as genre goes, I call TrapIt a casual-arcade title. It’s casual in that it’s super simple to learn to play, with extremely basic mechanics, but it’s also an arcade title in that it will have your blood pressure rising and fingers swiping like crazy as you progress through the levels with limited time.
Each level starts with a number of “prisms” moving around the screen. Your objective is to get each of the prisms into an area isolated from each other. This you do by swiping to build walls to separate them. Once you have all prisms isolated, the level finishes and the next level starts. More and more prisms are added as you progress, making it harder and harder to finish within the allotted time. This is made even more difficult because TrapIt never lets up. There is no real break between levels other than a short display of your level bonuses. After that you are whisked into the next level automatically and your time starts counting down immediately.
Don't let this static picture fool you. That big block of prisms won't be easy to split.
As levels progress, you get powerups that you can use to bolster your score or help complete a level in time. If you’re daring enough, you can also build up special Color Bonuses on some levels to get even more points. I’ll talk about both of these in later installments.
OK, that’s about it for installment 1. See you next time and feel free to ask questions in the comments.
Hello everyone, Welcome to the Little Geek blog.
We’re happy to announce that We’ve finally submitted our first title, TrapIt, to the Apple App Store and are now awaiting approval! Over the coming days we will be posting little bits of information about TrapIt, but in the mean time if you want to find out about the game, go to the TrapIt page.
We’re hoping to get a forum up sometime in the near future so we can get feedback from you all and answer any queries you might have about anything we do.
Thanks for being so patient
Aaron
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