I got a reminder of how poor Game Center is today.
You are enjoying the new hot iOS word game LetterPress right? It has been downloaded 60,000 times in its first hours, and I noticed two things about it right away:
– It seemed to bring down Game Center
– I was getting a lot of friend requests.
Back to Game Center. Loren has created a beautiful, minimalist game that feels Windows 8 Metro-ish in ways (well, the squares and flatness). It turns out that Loren wrote it in OpenGL mainly because of an old iOS bug (fixed in iOS 6) around catching scrollable elements….. but I digress.
The only way to play the game is via Game Center. And, it has problems:
– It is garish. The green felt and Vegas feel isn’t well liked, and it stands out in spades against the minimalist feel
– It is buggy. Notice the image above and how it handles orientation poorly
– It is frustrating. I can’t just invite someone, I need to first invite them into Game Center and then at that point I need to get a game going
– It fights me. I may want to play my child on another device, but I can’t “play myself” when using the same Apple ID.
I hope that Loren partially kills the beast and gives us full beauty. He has built a real gem here, and I am sorry that Apple has puked up a lil on it.