Jfgeyelin's dev blog

I have been working on prototypes for games for a while now. I tried doing: a game where you rotate a shape and avoid projectiles a game where you race in between planets an isometric-real-time-chess game on an infinitely large board where you move a knight but there was always something in the gameplay that didn't feel right. Luckily, after playing  Line Runner  I finally did a prototype that deserved to be turned into a complete game. Line Runner is incredibly addictive, but there are several things that I would have done differently: the player isn't allowed to make mistakes: one mistake and it's an immediate Game Over. you play on a horizontal line. It would be better if you could move up or down. Here's what Rollin Droid (my interpretation of Line Runner) currently looks like: During the development I realized that I could implement wall jumps which allowed players to climb up tunnels and change direction. Wall jumping...

I was watching the live broadcast of the Google IO when I got the pleasant surprise of seeing PewPew 2 as the (currently displayed) recommended app. Completely unrelated, and much more importantly, Sébastien Huss has ported PewPew 2 to the Pandora console .  I've been meaning to port it to this console for a long time because it has 2 physical joysticks. I really want to thank him as he did all the work quickly, and without any of my help. It should be noted that porting PewPew to the Pandora would have been totally impossible had I used any closed component (Unity 3D, UDK, Marmelade, ShiVa3D...) ;-)

I am hosting PewPew's scores on the Google App Engine. I chose the GAE because it was free for small websites that stay under a free quota. Unfortunately for me, they recently lowered the free quota, and I started having to pay the minimum fee of $9/month. It's not much, but I want PewPew to keep on working forever, and $9 per month forever amounts to an infinite amount of money, which I don't plan on having. There were two areas where I was over the free quota: the database was too large (the free quota is 1GB), and I was using to much CPU for the database requests. Reducing the database size The database was taking more than 1GB because I never deleted any of the submitted scores/replay. I wrote an handler that erased the lowest scores. Erasing ~400k scores cost me approximately 4$. If you have a database with tens of millions of entries, doing operations on them can become expensive! The handler could only erase 1000 entries at a time before timing out, s...

When writing this post I often wrote "iCon" instead of "icon"... Damn you Apple. Anyway I got a folder full of different icons for PewPew, and I thought it would be cool to look at the evolution. The first icon shows the classic ship shooting at an enemy, but when resized to 47x47 pixels (the original iPhone's icon size) it didn't look great. I shipped the first version of PewPew with it back in 2009, but quickly iterated on it. I simplified it and ended up with this. [Update from 2016: I still like its purified appearance a lot!] I was pretty happy with it and shipped quite a few versions of PewPew with it, but  at some point I  decided I need to make it more eye-catching: after all, I want people to download and play the game! Up to now I was using Adobe Flash (!) to create the graphics. I decided to learn a bit about Photoshop and was able to add a glowing outline and some gradients. It's interesting to note that the glow...