14/06/2009 by admin.

Hello,

  I hope you are all having a good week.

It’s going to be a really quick blog today I’m afraid as I feel really ill at the moment and I think I’m going to go straight to bed for an early night and try to shake it off.

  It’s been a fairly poor week all round this week I’m afraid.  The best part of this week is that I’ve been playing around with a new engine called Unity (www.unity3d.com) and it’s great.  I’ve already bought the Main part of it and I’m looking at the iPhone add for it now.  After using the Torque iTGB, I wasn’t expecting that much from Unity to be honest seeing as TGB is basically as simple as you can get (or so I assumed), but Unity is 1000 times better from what I can see.  Within 20 minutes I had a large textured terrain covered with trees and grass that blows in the wind and I was able to run around it.  All this with just watching a couple of little videos of the site to get me started.

  I spent yesterday trying out the iPhone module for it and that is also really, really nice as well.  Some of the demos are really impressive and you can even try the iPhone game without even sending it to the iPhone, you just use the iPhone to control the game and the MAC sends a (reduced size, but then enlarged so it looks a bit blocky) video feed back to the iPhone, which is really handy for when you want to try the control system out without having to constantly build the app in Unity / Xcode.

  So I’m really thinking now that once the games I have planned for the iPhone using iTGB are done, I’m going to move over to Unity for doing iPhone stuff at least.  I’m still going to be using TGB for Lucky 7 as that game is almost finished and it would be daft to not finish it as it’s a smart, fun game.

  Also, Unity allows you to build your games for the web, so don’t be to surprised if in the future, you start to see some little test games popping up on here.

Weekending 14/06/09

Solitaire Siege:

  I’ve spent what seems like most of this week trying to get Solitaire Siege to load up quickly.  I’ve spent about 3-4 days on this so far and I’ve got it down from around about 100 seconds, down to about 42 - 43 seconds, which is still way, way too long.  It should be loading up in under 20 seconds.  I’ve tried everything I can think of from converting as much of the gf/x as possible from PNG files to PVR files which knock the size down and can be used straight away by the iPhone / iPod with out having to mess around with them like it does with PNG files.  The down side is they can look really bad on clean / cartoon images (which is most of my graphics in the game).  If you have ever compressed a SPG file down real low, then that’s the same kind of effect you’ll get with PVRs.  It’s fine for photos, but not for nice, clean 2D sprites.  This took 2 days to do and it didn’t make any difference to the loading times, so I’m going to change them back.

  I’ve got a video of the game in action now, but I still need to look into how to convert it for YouTube.

Shuffle Blocks:

  Dave is back on course for doing the XBOX port of the code again and I’ve done a little bit more on the gf/x side of things, but with been on call this week, I’ve been going to bed early in case I get called out during the night, which really eats into your time during the week, but saying that, I’ve almost finished updating the gf/x now.  Just a few more renders to do.

  There was one problem we had this week of trying to convert the new font over for the game.  Dave spent almost two days trying to get it to go in and the fault was because I had a couple of characters slightly higher then the others, so it wouldn’t import correctly.  It’s amazing how such a stupid little things like that can cause such a huge problem =/

Well I’m afraid that’s it from me for this week as I really need to go to bed now as I’m ready to drop, so I hope you have a good week and I’ll see you next week.

Take care,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

Posted in Solitaire Siege, Shuffle Blocks, Current Game Development, Lucky 7 Development Diary, Blogroll | No Comments »

07/06/2009 by admin.

Hello again,

  I hope you all had a good weekend.  This will be a quick post as I need to go out (sorry).

It’s been a pretty good week in the end for the projects (day job has sucked thou). 

  It was E3 this week as well, which I’ve only caught the basic overview of the news this week as my Internet connection is been really slow just lately, but it looks like Microsoft had the best showing of the big three (not sure about the new camera control system thou and the kid simulator thing that Lion Head showed off just seemed to give me the creeps).  There’s also a couple of new Mario games coming out for the Wii, which will give me a reason for dusting it off =)

  I know I said that I would be spending the whole week just working on Shuffle Blocks, but that didn’t go according to plan and about half the time was spent on Solitaire Siege as well, which isn’t a bad thing at all.

Weekending 7/06/09

Solitaire Siege:

  After a lot of messing around and help from the Garage Game forums I’ve finally been able to get Solitaire Siege working on my iPod and playing correctly the way it should, it’s damn nice as well.  As long as we can get plenty of people to look at the game I’m sure it will do really nicely for us and is definitely worth the asking price.

  It’s a dead simple game to play so it’s nice and easy to pick up, play for ten minutes and then turn off, except that it’s got that one more go feel to it so you end up playing it for a couple of hours at a time and as each level is random, the replay value is really high.

  It’s going to be cheap to buy as the introduction price will only be $1, yet unlike a lot of the games at that price, it is going to be a game that you will keep on your iPhone / iPod and keep coming back to long after, even just for a quick go.

  Also because of the type of game it is, it works perfectly with the touch screen controls, which just makes the player feel more comfortable when playing the game (you don’t have your fingers covering the screen while you are playing).

  We also have a few other ideas and features for the game, which we hope to implement into future updates for the games (which will all be free of course as is the nature of the App Store).

  Isaac is currently hammering out the last couple of bugs in the game and there’s a few more little finishing touches that needs to be done be for we submit it, so I need to go through the game with a fine tooth comb and pick up all the little things that need to be polished up, little features to be added and just a general tidy up so it’s as nice as we cane make it.

  We also need to make the file size as small as possible as at the moment it’s about 14 Meg and it needs to be below 10Meg so iPhone users can download it straight to their iPhones which I’ve been told is a major plus point in impulse purchases and with the game coming out at a dollar, it definitely fit’s into that market.

  I’ve got a few ideas for saving space on some of the (in game) presentation screens, which could even allow us some added animation opportunities and added atmosphere to the game.

  The next thing we need to do is cut the loading times down as at the moment it’s taking ages to load (90+ seconds), that will go down a lot of course when we get the file size down, but it’s not going to be that easy a task to do.  Also, anything over 30 seconds (so I’ve been told) causes the iPhone to cancel the loading, so it’s pretty important to sort out =)

  My iPhone SDK has now thrown a tantrum and is refusing to build the current version of the game.  I don’t think it’s anything to do with the iTGB end, but it’s down to the Xcode end, so I’m going to have to play around again with that and try to get that running again and when it does, I should be able to grab a quick little game play video from it off the simulator for you to see (need to set up a You Tube account as well).  It’s not the first time this has happened to me this week either, on Friday night I had to re-install the OS on my iPod as Xcode refused to see it as a development bit of kit =(

Shuffle Blocks:

  Dave has run into a slight problem on the XBOX version as it uses a different compiler or something from the PC version, so they are a few things that need to be re-written to get it to work on the XBOX, but it’s getting there.

  From a graphical point of view, I guess I’m about half through re-doing the higher resolution graphics for the XBOX version and I must admit, it’s looking a LOT nicer then the original PC version, so after the XBOX version is done, the PC version is going to get the same treatment.  Even thou I’m about halfway through doing the gf/x’s it still going to take me a bit longer then a week to finish them off as the stuff that is left I think will be a bit more tricky to do (I did go for most of the easy stuff first).  I’ll upload a couple of mock ups screens next week for you to show you the difference in gf/x’s for the two versions.

Well that’s it for now folks, but if you have any questions, please feel free to post them and I’ll try my best to answer them for you.

I hope you enjoy the rest of what’s left of your week.

Take care,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

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