Time for updates!

There are lots of things going on here at Collecting Smiles HQ, and I wanted to share some of that with you. Lately, we’ve been really focusing on getting an update for Colors! 3D out for the Nintendo 3DS, and I wanted to talk a little bit about that, but before we go into that I also wanted to mention:

Colors! is now available for PlayStation Vita!

We are still holding off on the official announcement as due to a snag: the demo version did not go up on the PlayStation Store as it was meant to. It looks like that will be corrected on Tuesday the 20th, but if you already know you want it, it’s in the store for you to grab for $6.99. Let us know what you think about it!

We are also getting very close to pushing out Colors! for Android. Just a little bit of bug-fixing here and there, and you should be able to get Colors! on your favorite phone which in some shapes even comes with a pressure-sensitive stylus.

Also on the horizon is a major update to Colors! for iPhone and iPad (with active stylus support) as well as a Windows 8 version which you can already grab as a free App Preview in the Windows 8 Store.

But now on to what I’ve promised you: some long-overdue news on the Colors! 3D update. I know we haven’t really said much about it other than mentioned we would do one shortly after the Colors! 3D launch. Of course, we were absolutely blown away with the reception of Colors! 3D, and we had to spend a lot of time handling the great influx of new users and paintings in the gallery. We pretty much had to rewrite the gallery code from scratch to deal with things (over 500 000 paintings!).

These many new paintings every day also highlighted some major problems with the gallery (which honestly wasn’t really designed with that in mind). And that will be the primary problem for us to solve with the Colors! 3D update – to radically improve the Colors! Gallery experience. You will of course see some improvements to the offline side as well (specifically some fixes to bugs that I know have frustrated some of you), but the gallery will see some major changes, and here’s the first one:
This is a work-in-progress version of the artist’s screen, and shows one of the major new features: Followers. Followers is something you should be familiar with from services like Twitter and Instagram, and we feel that that approach was best way we could allow you to customize the Colors! Gallery browsing experience. If you find an artist that you like, you can just hit “follow artist” and his/her paintings will show up on the gallery’s front page. With this addition, we’ve also chosen to make your “favorites” (now renamed to “liked paintings” to make things clearer), public. This gives you a new way to discover paintings where you can drop in and see what your friends, or other artist’s you respect, have found and liked.

And that little thing in the bottom left corner? That is what we call filters, which will play a very important role with finding a good solution for the divided opinions in the community regarding tracing. But I will talk more about that in the next blog post in about a week!

Jens

The Colors! 3D update for Nintendo 3DS will be a free update that you will be able to download from the eShop. There is no set release-date, but our goal is to get it out before the end of the year. It might be tight though!

 

23 thoughts on “Time for updates!

  1. It’s really nice to reveive this update.
    I know that Colors! 3D is simple and powerful app, but I would like to see some more tools for drawing (eg. new brushes).

  2. really great update,,would also love to see if any good additional brushes/tools to be added possible in future for 3ds .

  3. Yay! This is awesome! I hated it when I found an artist and then I’d lose them once I like to many paintings! So thank you for adding followers. Also I love how my gallery will look with this peticular update. And the bugs! I hated them! Glad they’ll be fixed. Are there going to be any new brushes and tools? Please tell me you’ll add the search bar!What about more than 6 hours in the playback…? Anyways it seems like this update will be even more than I hoped for! Thank you everyone at collecting smiles for creating colors! I have made so many friends! Anyways can you tell me more about the filter? I’ve been traced and had people steal my characters many times. So I would love the filter. I just need to know more about it.

  4. Will the Colors 3D update address the issue of the 3D effect?

    When adjusting the 3D slider, enlarging all of the ascending layers is not a good way to achieve a 3D effect as it crops all of the detail from the edges and corners.

    Please tell me you are addressing this in the update! All it needs is an option to do a conventional 3D effect, where two images are horizontally separated. This is the conventional way since that’s how our eyes perceive 3D in the first place – it is up to the artist to make that depth effect more authentic by creating the sense of scale themselves through the layers after all!

  5. I like a lot of the new features coming to the update. I really think that the Colors! gallery should have a flag as spam button for pictures such as friendcodes or “I need a gf/bf” pictures. I hope to see this or a similar feature in the update.

  6. I was running an ACEKard on my 3DS and I was surprised to get the homebrew version of Colors! running without a hitch. I found out that the 3DS did not lose its pressure sensitivity. Is there any chance we’ll see this pressure sensitivity transferred to Colors 3DS?

  7. I’d like to see two toolsets: one for basic users and one for advanced users. And do I dare hope for custom stamps? Adding text would be nice too.

  8. It’s been two weeks -_- is their anymore info about this update? Maybe something more accurate about the release date?

  9. I hope this update comes. I hate it how people dont like my art, so now youd probably see a lot of people on colors! posting paintings saying: FOLLOW MY GALLERY!

  10. I really wish they would add some sort of music player feature. :S
    But search and followers are both really important so good work. :)

  11. well, if you want some advice, if you ever make another colors update, maybe you could add on some of the tools that paint tool sai has like: a selection tool, different brushes, water/blur brush, color hues and saturation tool, and maybe a pen pressure tool. ;)

  12. @Charmandrigo, We’d love to expand the Windows 8 version of Colors! beyond the demo version, but we don’t have a timetable for that at this time.

Leave a Reply to Skorek Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *