Zach Gage is about to release another fine app, this time for the iPad. It’s a neat puzzle-game, that can be called a little bit of “one step further” to his first game Unify. Zach answered some questions in an interview at CreativeApplications. He said about the app some interesting design decisions:

I borrowed management systems of drawing lines like in Flight Control, but reduced them to the simplicity of control in a game like Tetris. In Flight control you have to manage pixel perfect collisions, meaning a plane can be in hundreds of thousands of unique positions. Tetris (and other similar puzzle games) work so well because a piece can be in one of only a few unique positions on one axis. In Halcyon pieces can only be in up to 9 positions on the vertical axis, so instead of making dozens of tiny tweaks to individual objects, the player has to make one tweak to dozens of objects.

When you look at the preview-video, you will notice the elegant fine line between playing game and playing music. Most of Zach Gage apps have this kind of “precise poetry”. Sometimes I miss a little bit of that extra, extra mile of polishing, to have absolutely awesome apps.