Download PicTour

PicTour is a very simple puzzle game where your child can move a little guy around the puzzle board collecting crystals. Whenever a crystal is collected, a photograph is shown for 5 seconds and a cute sound is played. When all the crystals have been collected a new set is introduced onto the puzzle board. Special blocks on the board allow you to move up/down to the next puzzle board.

Now, that doesn't sound terribly exciting until you realize that you finally have something useful to do with the 10,000 digital photos that have been sitting on your computer collecting static charge. It turns out that 3 year olds love to see pictures of themselves and their family. They also have a great time manipulating the computer and making it do something they can control. This simple game combines those concepts for a lot of 3 year old type fun!

If your child likes PicTour, please send an email to support AT summergrand DOT com to let me know (fix that up to use @ and . so it's a real email address before you hit send.)

Pictour has been tested in both FireFox 1.5 and IE 6.

Nitty Gritty Details

Right now, configuring PicTour to use your own photos is a little laborious. There is a "pictures" subdirectory that contains the pictures. Each picture is explicitly named in the pictures.xml file. To use your photos, you need to create a pictures.xml file for your own photos. For a small number of files this is not difficult even in notepad. For a larger number of files it'll be a big help to have an automated tool. I hope to have such a tool in the future. If you want the tool please email support AT summergrand DOT com (fix that up to use @ and . so it's a real email address before you hit send.)

There are only a few levels defined in the screens.xml file. The format is very simple, so you can easily create as many new levels as you'd like. If you do that, send a copy to me and I'll include it in the master screens.xml file.

Note that the directory containing the pictures is actually an URL specified in the pictures.xml file. You can point at any source of pictures on your machine or on the web.

In addition to the pictures, the sounds can also be customized. Edit the sounds.xml file to add the names of any wav files you add to the sounds directory. I pulled a bunch of free sounds from http://www.wavsource.com/sfx/sfx2.htm. Try to find sounds that are 3 - 5 seconds long. That's long enough to be heard and short enough to finish before the picture goes away.