Jigsaw Guru Free released today

The free, ad supported version of my Windows Phone 7 game Jigsaw Guru was approved today, and is ready to be downloaded from the marketplace. It's basically the same game, with no limitation (meaning: you can use any picture from your phone as a jigsaw puzzle, in addition to those provided in the application), and it's free. But there are actually a few more differences between the two versions:

• The most obvious one is that Jigsaw Guru is a lanscape mode game, whereas Jigsaw Guru Free is in portrait mode. I made this change for two reasons: first, the Microsoft ad SDK only serves horizontal banners for now, which were clearly designed for portrait mode applications and are easier to fit in the screen that way. Second, the submission process and the Zune software only support vertical screenshots, which makes it less convenient to look at landscape mode games in the catalog. Reorganizing all the screens took a bit of work, but I think it was worth it.

• I added tips to the pause screen. They rotate automatically, but can also be glanced through by tapping them.

• The piece browser displays 8 pieces instead of 6.

• I removed one of the icons from the puzzle screen, since none of my testers was using it, they couldn't remember what it was for, and I had a hard time explaining it.

I'm curious to see how many people will download Jigsaw Guru Free, and I'll try to write a post with some numbers in a few weeks. If you've read the game's postmortem, you already know it can only get better :)