Pacifism

So!
Since my last post I got a new awesome job and thus worked less on PewPew and Rollin' Droid. An update for PewPew is in preparation though. It will feature basic maintenance stuff (iphone 5 support, sound improvements, small optimisations, etc...), and more importantly a new game mode:

Pacifism

It is inspired copied from Geometry Wars' Pacifism game mode, and even in its unfinished form it's really a lot of fun. It will be available only in PewPew 2 when you finish the 3rd Campaign (in any difficulty).

Concerning Rollin' Droid, I've expanded my ambitions and need to re-do a part of the engine because I feel that my creativity is limited. I can't simply think of a feature and quickly implement it like I could do in PewPew. The hard part about RD's engine is that I have randomly generated levels that are potentially infinitely wide and height so I can't just alloc enough memory in advance. Also, I absolutely want to maintain 60 fps with no hiccups when loading a new area, so I have to create and stream it chunk by chunk to the GPU. To top it off, I can only use integer to have a deterministic game because I want people to be able to replay each other's games across different CPUs.

Keyboards

At one point during the development of PewPew, I wanted the players to be able to enter their name for the online high scores and replays. At first I started to use the native iOS keyboard,  and for a couple of months that's all there was.

But because I always wanted to have as few OS-specific code as possible to make the porting to different OS as simple as possible, I decided to implement my own keyboard.

It was going to be a lot of boring work though, so I kept postponing for later... And then, one day, I got in I saw this:

Extract from Gunnm, a fantastic manga.

I immediately wanted to have this keyboard in PewPew, and two days later it was done. And it looked great:

custom keyboard = seamless integration.

Besides the speed gain when porting to a new platform and the code simplification, there are many other advantages to having a custom keyboard. PewPew's font does not contain all the characters, so I can show only the characters that can be entered. Also, you can have custom colors in your nickname, and by having a custom keyboard I can make it very easy for the users to specify them:

Of course, there are disadvantages to using a custom keyboard: the users aren't used to the layout, they can't copy paste, the native keyboards are likely capable of detecting false key-presses, etc... but when you just want to enter your nickname, those things are not important.

Interview

Here's an interview I gave for droidgamers.com.

Among other things, I talk about which games influenced PewPew, what it's like developing for Android, what impact does getting featured on the Android Market has, and what I think about ad-supported applications.