Graceful Games

Graceful Games is a small indie video game development studio founded by Kevin Yarmosh. Creators of Parsecs - an epic space adventure for iPhone.

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Now you can earn gift cards from places like Amazon, store merchandise, or even give to charity all by planing parsecs!

Download Parsecs today! www.bit.ly/parsecs

More about mPLUS Rewards http://www.mplusrewards.com/

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We’re happy to announce that Parsecs v1.1 is now in the app store, and it’s FREE!

What new:

• Parsecs is now universal! Play on your iPhone or iPad to compete on different leaderboards! • New armory upgrades! Now you can fire asteroid nukes whenever you are in a jam, just be sure to stock up in between plays. • All new backgrounds! Traveling the cosmos just got a whole lot prettier. • Full support for all iPhone and iPad sizes! Now play in the full resolution of whatever device you are using. • Parsecs Rewards - powered my mPLUS Rewards! Earn cool swag just by playing the game. • Parsecs is now FREE! We hope you enjoy! • Performance enhancements.

Download today! www.bit.ly/parsecs

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What do you listen to while you work? Our designer, Kyle, currently has the new track by Strange Talk on repeat.

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Search for extraterrestrial intelligence gets a $100-million boost

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announces most comprehensive hunt for alien life.

You could say that the silence has been deafening. Since its beginnings more than half a century ago, the dedicated search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has failed to detect the presence of alien civilizations. But at London’s Royal Society today (20 July), Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced a shot in the arm for SETI: a US$100-million decadal project to provide the most comprehensive hunt for alien communications so far.

The initiative, called Breakthrough Listen, will see radio telescopes at Green Bank in West Virginia, the Parkes Observatory in Australia, and the Lick Observatory’s optical telescope in San Jose, California, scanning around one million stars in the Milky Way and a hundred nearby galaxies. Milner is also releasing an open letter backing the idea of an intensified search; it has been co-signed by numerous scientists, including physicist Stephen Hawking. “In an infinite Universe, there must be other life,” Hawking told luminaries at today’s launch event. “There is no bigger question. It is time to commit to finding the answer,” he said.

“We would typically get 24–36 hours on a telescope per year, but now we’ll have thousands of hours per year on the best instruments,” says one of the project leaders, Andrew Siemion, a SETI scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s difficult to overstate how big this is. It’s a revolution.”

Continue Reading.

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Hello Pluto!

What better reason to add a new planet to Parsecs than the New Horizons flyby of Pluto! Look for this little guy in the upcoming 1.1 release, along with a bunch of other really great stuff!

Incase you were wondering, Pluto is 0.000172112447 Parsecs away from Earth. 

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Full iPad support coming to Parsecs in v1.1

Our designer Kyle Haapala has been working hard on new backgrounds for iPad. We’re really excited to be fully supporting iPad in our next release. This is a mockup of what a screen might look like.

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Happy 4th from the Graceful Games crew :)

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mPoints are coming to Parsecs!

Our next release of Parsecs is going to come with some major updates, and one we’re really excited about is integration with the mPoints loyalty rewards program.

Collect mPoints simply by playing Parsecs and by earning achievements within the game. Once you’ve collected enough mPoints, you can redeem them for gift cards and merchandise from major retailers like Amazon, Best Buy and iTunes. You can even donate to a charity if you’re feeling generous.

getmpoints.com

Available to US residents only. 

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Then and now

Here is an early prototype we built to test gameplay compared to the current version in full fidelity. 

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Where Parsecs began

We’ve got a blog! It felt right that the first post would be about how the game began and how it got to where it is now. Pictured above are some early, nonsensical, brainstorming notes and sketches from our designer, Kyle Haapala.

The original idea for the game was a zero gravity endless runner based on precision gestures. The thought was that you would swipe to move an object (we had no theme at this point) to a designated area at the top of the screen, once you passed through that area you would come out the bottom of the screen at the same velocity and direction as when you entered. Within each screen would be a series of bumpers aligned in such a way that if you swiped the object perfectly, you would fly through one screen right into the next.

After a bunch of brainstorming on theme ideas we landed on space, mostly because we’re obsessed with space, it can be beautiful, and it opens up endless possibilities visually and conceptually. After a while of trying to fit the theme into the idea, we gradually moved away from fixed locations for entry and exit and having bumpers that lined up just right. It was simpler to procedurally generate levels that were a bit more random, and it was way more fun and opened up more possibilities for obstacles.

We started prototyping the new idea with simple shapes to test out gameplay and then added in asteroids as obstacles. We found ourselves getting addicted to this ultra basic prototype so we tested it on our friends. After a while of testing we agreed this was the direction to go and started moving forward on visual design.

Slowly but surely everything came together, we came up with some interesting obstacles and power ups, and built the game out all while testing it on friends as we went.

We’re now at V1.0.1 with V1.1 coming very soon. We’ve got some great new features, performance improvements, and among other things will have full support for iPad.

You can download the game here