Today we’ve released Epic Zen Garden on iTunes as a completely free download. We originally revealed Epic Zen Garden at this year's WWDC keynote to showcase the power of Apple’s new Metal API.
With the release of iOS 8, we can now make this demo available on the iTunes store.
About Epic Zen Garden
Epic Zen Garden is a slice of peace and tranquility for you to explore on your A7 or A8-equipped device (currently iPad Air, iPad Mini Retina, iPhone 5S, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus).
Once you enter the garden, tap to explore areas filled with calming activities. The general controls are:
- Tap on the pulsing circle to move to a new area
- Tap on the side-pointing arrows to rotate your view
- Tap on the circular arrow to reset activities
- Tap on the top-left arrow to pull back and get a broad view of the area
Once you’re used to the basics, try more advanced moves to find true tranquility.
Spoiler Alert! You may want to skip this section and explore on your own!
- At the Sakura tree, drag your finger around the bare limbs to grow flowers. Once all the petals have blossomed, they’ll begin to fall. Drag your finger around to blow wind through the area and swirl petals around in relaxing gusts.
- Tap the water in the koi pond to entice fish toward your finger.
- Drag your finger to rake patterns in the sand of the rock garden.
- Make contact with the well’s water spout to summon thousands of butterflies, which you can guide with the touch of your finger.
About Apple’s Metal for Developers
We created Epic Zen Garden to showcase Unreal Engine 4 using Apple’s new Metal API. Metal enables developers to create very detailed scenes with very low CPU overhead. Now you can easily throw thousands of individual objects into your world while maintaining high framerate. Even better, low CPU overhead means less battery usage compared to OpenGL ES.
Metal also supports offline shader compiling. This means we can do a lot of shader processing on the Mac instead of having to do it every time the application starts. Add it to the high-fidelity graphical capabilities and easy-to-use toolset of Unreal Engine 4 and you have the perfect combination to create breathtaking mobile experiences.
So, go and grab Epic Zen Garden and find your inner peace! It's fun for the whole family!
Download link:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/epic-zen-garden/id915975445?ls=1&mt=8