Site maintenance and more Solitaire Siege

29/03/2009 by admin.

Hello again,

  I’m a bit late again, I know.  Sorry.

First thing to mention is that the main website (www.badbumble.com) may go down for a couple of hours during Monday night 30th March (from 23:00 – 01:00 GMT) as my web hosting company is doing a bit of maintenance to the servers.  It should all come back up again without any problems (fingers crossed).

  Also, in this blog, I’m just going to be talking about Solitaire Siege as everyone working on Lucky 7 is working on this project (Dave is still hammering away at the code for Shuffle Blocks) so we can try to get some cash coming in as it’s expensive buying all the development kit and software, plus the cost of running the website for so long without bringing any money in is starting to hit me now, so I need to do something to start the cash coming in for us.

  My leg is a lot better now and I can stand on it for almost a full minute before the pain gets too much and I have to move around to get rid of the pain.  It’s also means that I can actually do some game work now as well.  I have to keep stopping at regular intervals or my leg play up a bit, which can break your concentration when you are in full flow, but it’s good to be doing something again and day time TV was destroying my brain.

Weekending 29/3/09

Solitaire Siege:

   The big news at the moment is the new iPhone game which I started to talk about last week called “Solitaire Siege”.  I’ve just set up a page on the main site which I’m going to be adding to each week (hopefully) and the plan is to get the game completely finished in the next 3 to 4 weeks, which should be do able as I would say that the game is about 50% - 60% complete.  It does depend somewhat on how long Apple takes to approve my iPhone development licence, but I hope to get that next week so I can start testing on the real hardware and not just on the iPhone simulator.

  The current build is (very) playable at the moment, but only about 20% of the features are in there at the moment, but even so, I spent 3+ hours playing the current build yesterday without realizing it.  So once all the other features are in, it should be really, really fun to play and after all how many card games do you know where you can call for an air strike to remove cards for you?

  There’s still a fair bit of work to be done on it and a lot of polishing up as well so the game will look as good as it plays, but it shouldn’t be that big a job to do.  At the moment I’ve done all the background gf/x for the levels, but if there’s time (and file / memory space) I’m also going to do variations of the levels as well so there’s more variety to the levels.

  The playing cards will also get a clean up as well.  They look nice on the iPhone now (I’ve had to make mock ups of the game screens and copy the pictures to the iPhone to check that the size of the cards are okay and that they are readable), but I think I can make them look a bit better before release.

  I’ve also got to look at doing some particle effects for the game so when you use any of the weapons (Flame Throw, Rocket Launcher and Air Strike spring to mind), you get to see the effect actually in game.  I’ve just drawn some bullet holes for the screen so when you take damage, you see bullet holes appear in the glass.  It’s a nice effect and should be really atmospheric when the sound effects are added.  So basically, the vast majority of the game is done, but as you get close to finishing a project, you start to think about little things that would be nice to add to the game, which all takes time, but it just adds that little something extra to the game.

  Well I think that’s everything for this week and I hope everything will get back to normal again for next week in regards to the time I write and publish these blog entries.

  One last thing, if there’s anyone that’s reading this who may run an App site, if you would be interested in doing an early review of Solitaire Siege please feel free to get in touch (mike.moore@badbumble.com) as I would like to get some publicity going for our game as the iPhone is flooded with new apps every day, it’s almost impossible to been seen.

  Thanks for reading and have a great week.

Thanks,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

Posted in Solitaire Siege, Current Game Development, Blogroll | No Comments »