Archive for April, 2009
Ninja Rally finally approved
Thursday, April 30th, 2009Ninja Rally almost out into the world!
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009Ninja Rally is a really sweet looking and original title I’ve been working on here at Gamesville since early January. Some people have heard me bandy the name about and asked about it. Well, it’s been rejected from the App Store twice now for some rather small and simple reasons that were easy to address, and we’re awaiting approval once again. Yet excitement has been building, so I thought I’d say a word or ten about it.
I’m really excited about this game for a few reasons:
1) It’s my first TGB title. I’ve been working with Torque for years but never had a good opportunity to use the 2D version, called Torque Game Builder. Although it came with a really large number of gotchas as an early technology, I had source code access and was able to make tons of engine modifications to make all the good stuff happen. This meant I was able to contribute a lot back to the other devs working with this technology and that always makes me feel worthwhile.
2) It’s a multiplayer game! It’s WAN playable and a surprisingly fun head-to-head experience. When I first cranked up the multiplayer with my manager after a few minutes of intense rallying and battling I could feel the adrenaline in my blood. The gameplay really draws you in, quite a feat for a ’simple’ game. Different folks even have different playing styles which totally come through in the gameplay.
3) The artwork and sounds are FANTASTIC! I used all caps there, in case you didn’t notice. My teammates Amber and Ryan cranked out all the art and sound respectively, with Ryan doing GarageBand sessions and recording fierce Ninja yells in secret corners of the building here. Amber brought a very special talent to bear on the Ninja Rally storyline, with obvious results. What made it all so special was in certain moments when we knew we had just the right feeling, and bringing it all together we just got that “wow, that’s just..awesome!” kind of feeling. Not many of those moments come out of an average day job 
4) It’s got a good story!! Just when we thought we had the project fleshed out, the Ninja story guru from on high scribed down in stone tablets what was to be the Ninja Rally story mode. We made room for it in the project plan and got ‘er done. After some editing and creating a story engine, the Story Mode added a whole new level to the game and I’m so glad we did it in retrospect.
It was a boatload of work but probably some of the most fun project work I’ve ever done. We are going to wait and see how people accept it, and where it goes. It’s very exciting to do this whole waiting thing, wondering how your game is going to hit the world after putting so much into it. I’ve been through enough death threats and one star reviews with CastleGuard to weather anything, and some people will always hate your work, but I have a special feeling about this game.
We took a few weeks of beta testing and tweaking, picked things apart and put em back together, but it was well worth it, and I feel like we created something wonderful as a ‘game task force’. Because of that, even long after the cries of HYAH! have faded from the halls of glory, I will still see Ninjas rallying in my dreams.
When the durn thing gets approved, I’ll post a link. Until then, check out the awesome NinjaRally.com site!
Framerates Upped!
Saturday, April 25th, 2009There are well over 5000 downloads on CastleGuard2 and it’s been out for one full day now. I have been receiving a good old-fashioned blodging for a couple of major issues in CastleGuard2. One is that the framerates on a lot of devices aren’t good at all. Two is that the control scheme (tilt to turn/move) is leaving a lot of people dizzy and disgusted. So of course I am addressing those things immediately. The first issue, framerates, was a potentially frightening one, as I thought it was the enemies’ AI that was the culprit, and I have already handicapped them quite a bit to keep performance up. But it turned out to be a lot of other optimizations that needed doing, and I haven’t yet needed to touch the enemies’ AI to optimize further. The bottom line is that the framerates are at least doubled, and even the slowest framerate I could bring it to is faster than the normal framerate in the original release. The framerates had felt great to me on my iPod 2G, but when I added an FPS counter in they were actually around 10-12 fps. Now, that’s as low as it gets with a ton going on. Normally it’s a little over 25fps, a very respectable number indeed.
All in all it feels so much smoother.
So, next I will turn to the control scheme and do a couple of things: I will add in a calibration option for the tilting for those who like it (and there are a bunch of you, thanks!) and I’m going to add the directional onscreen controls that most folks are clamoring for.
After that I will be dropping in the story and dialog engine I’ve been working on and get that content going.
CastleGuard2 Out, Update in the works!
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009Woot! AppStore Link
The CastleGuard2 Game has finally been approved. It’s out for free, as it’s meant to be the update to the original application. I’ve been hard at work on the next update, here are some sneak peeks, enjoy!
CastleGuard2 Submitted to AppStore
Thursday, April 16th, 2009I wanted to post quickly to let everyone know that I did get the 1st update out finally… but not as an update, as a new application. It turns out that I submitted the first CastleGuard application right before they added some new requirements, and the unique ID that is once and forever belongs to the first application is not updatable.
My solution is to release CastleGuard2 as a new application. Its gameplay is completely different anyway. It was meant as an update originally however, so I’m going to pre-release it for free. Sometime in May when official release comes it will go up to a normal price. This free period is to be fair to everyone who bought the original and are expecting an update.
If you would like to see what it’s going to be like, check out the CastleGuard2 link at the top of the page! I put up a work in progress version in a web player.
Enjoy!
New Update 1 Photo Gallery
Friday, April 10th, 2009Here are 26 shots from the new update. I am having a bit of trouble submitting the update as the bundle identifier for the original is now an invalid format apparently, I’m trying to work with Apple to get it sorted.
The new update includes a single multiple-area dungeon, 3 new monster and AI types, powerups, doors, ‘flavor text’, and 3 different boss creatures. It took a long time to get an optimization pattern for building a -well -performing dungeon, and I probably still put too much into the areas which might make the game chug a bit sometimes. I’m working on it though, and am going to put a good chunk of time aside in the coming months to make the technology much more robust.
The way I created area transitions means I can add many many content areas without affecting the performance of the game. I will probably scale back the number of active creatures as well to give more room for trap designs I have created. The story/quest engine is designed and roughed in as well.
I’m definitely keying in on the various tricks for performance optimizations while trying to run a nice 3d game on the iPhone. I have a lot to learn yet no doubt. My goal is to make a fun and rewarding short and long-term experience for users while not frustrating them. Into that mix some story telling and vicarious combat experiences, and hopefully you will find that 20 minutes have gone by and you’re still having fun 
I will update as to the release situation when I hear back from Apple. Until then, enjoy the gallery!
These are live screenshots from the actual device, so they’re in 480×320 resolution. Keep in mind that when viewing on a large screen they will look pixelly
Move Controls Finalized.. and new Dungeon!
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009It’s been an awesome night of coding on the game. I finally hooked up the accelerometer on the iPhone to the turn function, and moved the Forward/Back touch areas to the convenient right side, getting rid of strafe for now. I also added in a pan cam up/down touch area, because the outdoor scenes (there are 3 of them in production) are pretty to look at. I linked up zoning triggers so you can jump from scene to scene.
I also had a lot of fun working on the first dungeon, and added in a rudimentary dialog/story/quest system that now needs lots and lots of data. I kind of overshot on a few areas for the first update unfortunately. I will end up scaling back to one dungeon and one outdoor area probably so I can get this update out the door.
During my lunch break yesterday I worked on a basic avatar customization system. It will probably make it into update 2.
One of the other more interesting things I’ve begun to look at is multiplayer. It won’t be for a few months yet, but this will definitely grow into a multiplayer technology.