A while back I made a game, Hungry Hungry Castaways, for LD17. More recently, I’ve been updating it and putting a lot of polish into it. Today I announce that it is finally done and rebranded as: Blow Da Bricks! It is a fun and addicting puzzle game. I have put on MochiAds and the game is also on Kongregate. I’ll stay posted with my ad revenue, hopefully I’ll reach $1.00 by Halloween. Check it out on Kongregate. If you like it, please rate it 5 stars 😉

I’m quite happy right now, I’ve gotten the game to work a lot better, the spawn system is kinda working, which means one of the things I had problems with is partly solved. I’m just going to finish that tonight and then work on moving backgrounds/saving. I may update the graphics as well. I gave the game a play test earlier, I find it quite fun, if a little basic.

-bear

Well, first of all, I’ve been spending lots of time doing paperwork, and a few hours working on this: Olofson Consulting.

When it comes to actual game development, there have been some issues as well. Not exactly unexpected, but I’ve spent a little too much time trying to figure out how to actually use ZeeSpace for backgrounds. It is fast enough for realtime rendering, and at first, I intended to leverage that to do away with map size restrictions – that is, you’d be able to fly “forever” without wrapping or hitting some artificial limit. However, there are various problems with it, most importantly:

• You need to generate the background graphics incrementally, and unless you’re running rather low quality settings, this is expensive enough that distributing the work evenly enough across frames becomes tricky.
• To use the shadowcasting feature – which looks really nice, and is pretty much required to spot tall structures and mountain peaks – I need access to Z channel (ie height field) data way outside the area I’m actually rendering.

I have figured out various solutions, but obviously, this is pretty hairy stuff to get right, and certainly not something I can whip up in a day or two.

So, what I’m going to do for the alpha version is simply restricting the map size to some sensible size (slightly larger than the Kobo Deluxe maps, I think, as Kobo II won’t wrap) and simply pre-render the whole thing before starting the level! If you want native resolution backgrounds at 2560×1600, that’s almost a gigabyte of data – but if you can get by with 640×480, you “only” need 50 MB or so.

Obviously, there is a huge potential for compression here, for future releases. There is the obvious lowering the color depth and various graphics compression algorithms, but more interestingly, since all graphics is either generated (Perlin noise and the like) or structured (various primitives; surfaces, domes etc), there is a lot of potential for the compression algorithms taking hints from the structured data, rather than just looking at the raw pixels.

And, there is also the option of actually following the tile grid when placing map objects, to improve the chances of the compressor finding identical tiles. Chances of leveraging this can probably be improved if lighting data (shadows) is separated from the “raw” graphics, so that top-right corner of building 23 is always the same tile, regardless of whatever other tiles are casting shadows on it.

Given the nature of the graphics at this point (mostly monochrome surfaces with geometry + lighting doing most of the work), one might actually get away with trivially compressing many of the tiles to 8 bpp monochrome, with just a single RGB color per tile for “colorization”. One might even interpolate color across the surface of each tile, to support smooth chroma gradients with virtually no memory overhead.

Anyway, bed time…!

Endeavor is a game about a dwarf trying to recover an ancient secret. Or maybe it’s about exploring and collecting treasure. Or maybe it’s about collecting powerups. Or maybe it’s just about killing things.

With multiple endings, quests, interactive npcs and ambient critters, it’s shaping up to be my most involving game yet. It features multiple original musical tracks, over 8 upgrades, an improved control scheme, and several secret areas.

It’s scheduled to be done by the end of the month and will be published for free on Kongregate.

If anyone’s interested in helping me with some beta testing, send me an email at zillix7@yahoo.com

Today (Or what would have been on Monday – Cheers, my faith in internet applications) is a massive update on our Dwarf Dash project.

Firstly – as detailed in my last post, the name has changed to ‘Dwarf Dash’ and we now have our title art as below;

Now – the more exciting news is that we have several fully rendered levels. They’re all playable, and whilst only simple tracks all have working collision meshes.

The sprite physics have all been tweaked and we believe work well on every level, and there’s some feeling of speed attached to make it a fun little game.

Then there’s 3 biggies:

ANIMATION – Our sprites are now animated – so as they wonder round our dreamed up levels they’ll be pedalling away with the wind blowing through their hair.

SOUND – We’re close to deciding on background audio, but our dwarfs now have a sound as they move about too, this varies in pitch and speed depending on the movement of the cart. Again, this gives a great feeling of speed and of things going on around you.

AI – Yep – AI. This as of yet isn’t quite finished, but there are several AI characters in the game, at present they have no real pathfinding ability (Although there’s some weird attraction to seeing them scatter) but this is under review and should be sorted fairly soon.

I think that’s it for now – But what was a working prototype is now all of a sudden starting to look like a real game – Menu elements are being designed and hopefully — We’re not all that long off submitting the thing for approval!

We’ll be regularly blogging here and on our parent site under ‘Ludum Racer (challenge blog)‘
Further to this, both myself @deltamikealpha and Gareth @36peas will be tweeting about the project as it evolves.

Getting to the point where I am concerned it will not get approved in time. Still “waiting for review”.

wiresq on youtube

AVOIDAL (my August 2010 Ludum Dare entry) and October Challenge entry has found a home!

I’m excited to report I finalized on a primary sponsorship deal with Tom Fulp of Newgrounds last week and have finished all the integration and testing work required. That work included getting to create 23 fun medals (achievements) for players to win when the game is played over on the Newgrounds site with a player account. The game will launch over there next week on November 3rd. I’ve also managed to sell a few non-exclusive licenses including one to Big Fish Games. The primary sponsorship was found via posting to Flash Game License. I spent a good bit of time in October working on, play testing, and polishing the original competition version into the final version.

The highscores have been reset so get in there and play!

Tags: avoidal, challenge, enemies, fgl, flash, game, license, medals, mines, newgrounds, october, robot, seekers, spikes, sponsorship, weapons

Space Waves is getting close to being a fully working game. Its feels fun to be me and its something I’m quite proud of.

I’ve still got the saving and the moving backgrounds, but I can hopefully do them quite quickly, some work tomorrow should have both things out of the way.

I won’t have the game on the app store by the 31st but It will be done and submitted.

-bear

I’ve been working on getting sound to work on space waves, it wasn’t working….. And I just found out why. It turns out ‘ofSoundPlayer’ hasn’t been ported to the iPhone like the rest of OF, turning into one big headache for me to find out why it wasn’t working. I found out after searching on the OF forum, and looking at the last page.

I’m going to use something called ‘ofxiPhoneFile’ for saving. I just got to work out how it works.

I’m going to make sure that enemies  don’t spawn on top of each other and then finally submit it to apple.

-bear

Hi

I created simple helper that might help few of you who use c++ with STL. It adds foreach to the c++ that traverses over all of the STL container, so the code is more readable, like in this example:

#include <cstdio>

#include <vector>

#include "foreach.h"

int main()

{

    // make int vector and fill it

    vector<int> k;

    for (int i=0; i<10; ++i) k.push_back(i);

    // show what the upper loop filled

    foreach_ (it, k) printf("%i ",(*it));

    printf("\n");

    // show all the data, but get rid of 4

    // http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraphobia :)

    foreachdel_ (it, k)

    {

        if (*it == 4) it=k.erase(it);

        printf("%i ",(*it));

    }

    printf("\n");

    return 0;

}

Will result in following:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

0 1 2 3 5 6 7 8 9

More on my blog:  http://pleasanthacking.com/2010/06/17/foreach-in-cpp/

I hope some of you will find it useful during compos

Tags: C++, goodies, libraries, libs, tools

Hey guys,

My game Fruits! is now ready for test release. You can play it directly in the browser here.

There’s a few issues discovered earlier today that’s in need of fixing. Expect to release final version tonight or tomorrow. No sales though, so no Ludum dare challenge win, but at least a released game

Enjoy and be sure to let us know what you think can be improved!

We’ve had a change of thoughts on our Ludum Dare Dwarf Dash project.

The original deadline for the project was to have a game that could be submitted by the end of the month.

As things lie at the minute, we have a game that we could easily submit to the Apple store for review, but to be honest we don’t want to do that.

The game that we’ve come up with has surprised us in playability and already seems to be quite a lot of fun – because of that we want to extend it a little and add some features and content. We’ll be launching it as a kind of hybrid game jam / actual release.

We’ll continue to update this blog with progress and link to announcements and other information as and when available. Look forward to reporting back again soon.

We’ll be regularly blogging here and on our parent site under ‘Ludum Racer (challenge blog)‘
Further to this, both myself @deltamikealpha and Gareth @36peas will be tweeting about the project as it evolves.

My game, Blow Da Bricks, has been public on Kongregate and in other places, embedded with MochAds. After less than 3 days, I have earned over $1.00 in ad revenue! I have earned $0.88 on Kongregate and $0.17 through MochiAds! I have also received a Kreds tip on Kongregate, so that totals the money I’ve made for the game at $10.61. In addition to that, I have just been approved for MochiGames publication and distribution, so hopefully I’ll see another spike in game plays and add revenue over the weekend. As for the game itself, it is currently been hovering around a steady rating and is at 2.8 on Kongregate now. I was a little disappointed that I didn’t reach 3 stars, but for my first released game, I think a 2.8 is pretty good. Head over to Kongregate and play it now, and rate it if you like it.

Hey guys,

Fruits! is finally done and while it can still need further polish, I decided to submit this evening to Ludum dare.

Play it in your browser here: Fruits! web version

Thanks to the guys at Ludum dare for organizing all this, it’s been a great motivator for getting the game done.

(cross-posted from Under The Bridge)

So no doubt you remember ten days ago our Ludum Dare October Challenge entry BallZOut went live, and that was rather satisfying and everyone has been very complimentary thank you, but as an investment … well, not the greatest idea. Week and a half later, a total of 101 sales and down to trace daily levels; still just hanging on to the charts in the Puzzle category as of this morning with yesterday’s single sale amazingly enough,

but as those rankings are on a four-day rolling average (last we heard, anyways) no doubt it’ll descend into complete obscurity in short order.

So while we’d really like add a bunch of stuff to make it more engaging, pretty darn hard to justify setting any more time aside in the near future with that complete lack of traction. Not that one should actually expect to get any without a) excellent marketing or b) being featured by Apple, mind you. So shall we whip out the credit card and start doing some marketing? Weee-eellll, we were kinda toying with that idea, then we read this thread.

Marketing: What else can I do to promote?

That particularly caught our attention as the game discussed, “180”, was actually on our phone — we caught it’s freeappcalendar.com feature day, and hey it’s icon had a cartoon redhead and trolls like redheads — and it’s a puzzle game more or less in the same headspace as BallZOut, except it’s polished to a fine sheen, and as you can see reading through that thread their marketing effort was nothing short of breathtaking. End of June, that thread was; so how’s 180 been doing since? Let us check Applyzer for it’s US rankings …

… it’s #850 paid in Games/Puzzle and off the charts in Games/Arcade their other category. So BallZOut is beating it right now? Oh, dear. Let us take that as acceptably solid evidence that a big marketing investment would be at the very least fraught with peril and more likely completely ill-advised, shall we? Which leaves us with the strategy of continually updating content and features and waiting for lightning to strike in the form of somebody at Apple deciding to feature it someplace as the most rational way forward, we’d say. Which still requires setting time aside. How shall we finance that?

Well, here’s what we’re giving that a shot with. You catch a week ago we posted about this appbackr place for wholesaling your iOS apps? Yep, this evening BallZOut went live on appbackr:

See that post for full details, but briefly how this is working is that appbackr is making 40,000 future sales available at a wholesale price of 45¢; whenever any of those get sold, we get advanced 35¢, and once they’re sold we get a further 10¢ out of the proceeds, leaving the remaining 25¢ for the wholesale purchaser’s profit and appbackr’s cut for running the marketplace. At the very least an interesting idea, yes?

And not only is it an idea interesting enough to try out just to see what happens, this kicks the whole competition thing up a notch — why yes, there is an appbackr Challenge:

Reach $1,000 dollars in sales on appbackr before November 22nd and WIN!

• appbackr will back an additional $500 worth of your app
• The top 5 apps (based on dollars sold on appbackr) will get a FREE iPad

Yep, now that’s really a challenge, indeed it is. Stay tuned to hear how we do with that one!

Obviously, with me in the process of starting business and stuff, things haven’t been progressing as planned with Kobo II with regard to The October Challenge. I’ve given up on the idea of starting the pre-purchase alpha period this month, as there isn’t enough to show yet – and besides, I risk getting in trouble if I actually sell anything at this point, so that’ll just have to wait.

Anyway, I can fly around in rather nice looking terrain and fire two different weapons at the mountain peaks in the area, but that’s about it so far. Next project is adding some sound effects, I think. I mean, no sound is really boring – and I’m a sound/music guy, perhaps more than anything…! That just won’t do.

As to the Challenge, I am going to try to release a small technology preview before the deadline! The watermark in the corner actually says “GAMEPLAY PREVIEW” right now, but that doesn’t seem appropriate just yet.

Now, as I said, I couldn’t safely start doing business at this point even if I did have a product ready for release – but I suppose I don’t have to refuse the occasional donation… And I suppose I could accidentally give away a final version license or two. You never know… 😉

I am ever so close to finishing up HAckBotZ. I plan on putting it up for bidding on flashgamelicense.com within the next couple of days.  While technically I will miss the the deadline, I am still quite happy with my progress. Good or bad this will be my first ‘finished’ game, and I credit the October Challenge for motivating me to do it.  There is  something about the LudumDare compos/challenges getting a group of people working towards the same goal and posting about their progress that is quite motivating and fun.

Hey,

My game Dynamite is *almost* ready for “beta sale” but I really want to add in a few tutorial levels so people know how to play. I’ll be putting it on sale within the week for sure though! This challenge has been great for motivating me to get this done

I’ll post here once it’s available for sale!

-Phil

I finished my game last night and submitted it to MochiAds. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting for it to get approved (I hadn’t thought about this being a weekend, so far my experience was that games get approved within a couple of hours). So I probably won’t make the $1 before the end of October…

Anyway, you can play the game here: Zwarte Piet (flash)