One interesting fact about the game. We designed all the levels around Lua, which was officially banned from the App Store when we were making it. I remember deciding with the other main developer, that we should rename all our .lua files, .cfg (.configure) to buy us some time.
Ultimately, Apple eventually changed the rules to allow for this.
I don't recall Tap Tap Dance, but I loved Tap Tap Revenge!! One day I want to get an old iPhone or iPod Touch and jailbreak it and load up some of those old games you can't get anymore. I've always loved music games, and that was back around 2009 on my first iPhone and in the Rock Band era. It was great to be able to play a music game while on the bus.
I remember the App Store rules being even more draconian then than they are now - I recall a brief period where they tried to ban even tools that transpiled other languages into Objective-C by making a rule that all apps must be originally written in Objective-C. That insanity didn't last long, obviously. Now half of apps are React Native.
By the way if this post was supposed to be a link somewhere, it isn't working.
Loved working on those music games. And that we have a nice document of some of its creation in the video above. I have great memories of working on the series, spread out across Champaign, IL (home of UIUC), the NYU Tisch Center, even a restaurant in Montreal.
Steve Jobs even demoed Tap Tap Revenge at an iPhone keynote in 2009! Our little game!
> At the end of each difficulty tier, you unlock a new song that's accompanied by art specific to the track. Daft Punk's "Technologic," for example, has an old-school TV screen that flashes images and the band's name as notes stream down bars that are much shorter and shaped differently than the main game screen. Moby's "Disco Lies" also uses short bars that unfurl from what looks like the mouth of an alien designed by a nine-year-old using MS Paint. (And that's not a slam to the artist -- I think it's very cool.) Once you finish a boss track, that song become parts of the track list on the next tier.
> Unless you want to stab your ears when you hear techno, Tap Tap Dance is the best music game on the App Store right now. The note placement and control sensitivity is just right, making it instantly playable to anybody. But Tap Tap Dance doesn't hold its fire. By the time you reach the hard tier, you are getting a serious thumb workout. With excellent song selection and super-cool graphics, Tap Tap Dance is a pleasure to recommend.
What video are you referring to? This post is just taking me back to this same page, I'm not seeing any video link. Maybe I'm missing something.
Getting Steve Jobs personal acknowledgement must have been pretty amazing. That's a good sign you paid attention to detail. I do think I can recall the visual customization done for specific artists and tracks, was very cool. Style matters alot for the vibe in music games, the attention to it is one of the reasons I always preferred Rock Band to Guitar Hero.
Thanks for the cool game! I was actually at uni for game development at the time and as one of my major projects I made a design document for a DJ music game. The Tap Tap Revenge series was definitely an inspiration and contributor to my love of music games at the time and I had alot of fun playing it. May have been one of the first few apps I ever spent money on.
It's making me nostalgic for the time when my smartphone was a new, cool, and fun device and not the addictive attention span sucking portal to hell it is now.
Oh I think you might have an error in your submission. I don't think it's correctly linking to the youtube video, but I've just found it searching on youtube.
Unfortunately a reality if you care for vintage iPhone games. Piracy is sometimes the last line of defense for game preservation.
In our case, a group of hackers have released a fangame that is in many ways equal to a modern Tap Tap Revenge, and it can be found here: https://taptapreloaded.com/
Apple's conduct is what I'm sad about. It's shameful that their walled garden destroys legally-legitimate and easy ways to use software that they arbitrarily deem "old". They've conditioned the public to just accept this (both end users and devs), and that's ultimately what fills me with crushing sadness.
Ultimately, Apple eventually changed the rules to allow for this.