about us
There is a famous quote by John Adams, found in a letter to his wife.
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
And so we find ourselves best described by the following continuation:
“…so that, eventually, two guys from a small country in Europe can choose not to graduate from a number of schools of higher learning and, some years later, decide to make a puzzle game instead. And perhaphs they could also be joined by a guy with a degree in comparative literature to do some sound and music.”
Our apologies to Mr. Adams. But hey, at least it’s a really nice puzzle game! Let’s meet the cast.
“I had this idea before? Two weeks ago? We tried it and I hated it? We both liked the other one better? Ok, we’ll go with that one then.”
An ex-architecture/ex-sociology-student-turned-board-game-designer who is not eager to call himself a designer, mainly because his knowledge of typography is basic at best, with drawing abilities to match. He’s the reason all our typography is either Helvetica, or bad, or both. He does happen to know a thing or two about graphics and is usually good at bending geometry to his will. Or to fit, say, a radial puzzle.
“No, no, this is a more beautiful solution, of course we’ll go with this one. It’s three times as much coding time and I’ll probably hate myself for ever agreeing to it but we’ll go with this one…”
An ex-computer-science-student/soon-to-be sociologist, and a kickass data scientist. The Responsible One. Did nearly all of the code and then some! Normally, he would be the true unsung hero of our little endeavour, but we do plan to rectify this by actually singing songs about him. In private.
“I finally have it! (… a long, romantic explanation of his music idea…) Oh, it could be great! I’m probably very wrong about this!”
A verse theorist and a saxophone player who is almost clinically unable to answer the phone. But if you lovingly hold him hostage for a time, you will actually squeeze a nice piece of music out of him. He’s a process. We’re working on him.
ozaiko - a radially different puzzle
“But wait! A circle has a centre point!”
an actual quote from an early meeting for ozaiko
from the App Store description:
We take a photo, cut it into things we call orbits and slices, we shuffle the pieces and let you solve it. But we do it with some beautiful photos by great travel photographers, some nice soothing music written specifically for this game, and intriguing gameplay we’re pretty sure you haven’t seen before.
We worked very hard to make ozaiko a beautiful and worthwhile gaming experience. We think we got it right and we hope you like it. Let's take a look at some features...
Also known as “the thing that makes the pieces look oddly deformed, but it actually helps while solving the puzzle”. We think it’s neat, it was relatively difficult to do well, and we’re somewhat proud of it. It has to do with straight lines not being straight whenever a puzzle piece is not in it’s proper “orbit”. Also, a shape bounded by two concentric circles is apparently called an annulus.
Or was it great photos by beautiful photographers? In any case, some very nice people around the world decided they could entrust us with their high resolution images to jumble around for you to play with. We also include image descriptions, authors’ biographies and links to their online portfolios should you like to know more about them.
Ok, ozaiko is not at all devious or disturbing, but it somehow felt wrong to leave you without a single feature that could double as a pronunciation exercise. Still, it is true that you can play any puzzle with any number of slices - 3, 6, 9, 12,15 or 18.
Because we’re hopeless romantics who prefer people sitting down to a game in a group. Also, one afternoon we played Fruit Ninja in split-screen and that was the day we decided to make ozaiko a bit less “meadows of morning meditation” and more, well… competitive. It turned out to be much more fun!
Our internal testing concluded that it brings no demonstrable benefits to your health, but we like to pretend it greatly contributes to feelings of safety and well-being of your house plants. If they don’t like it, you can turn it off.
They go so nice with our understated user interface we just had to mention them here. Also, we wanted to share that we’re not exactly great at naming ancillary content in games.
Oh yes, the iPhone version is on the way, too!
