Lack of updates because...

I am porting PewPew to the Bada OS. There is a contest going on, and I believe I have a real chance of winning a price ;-)

PewPew, step 10

At the beginning of this blog, I used to do short movies showing the progress of the game. I think it's cool to look back and see what changed and what hasn't.

Following this spirit, I made a small video showing the new game mode in action:

It features two new enemies internally called "Rolling Cube" and "Planner" :)

It looks really cool, but I still find it hard to play because my fingers tend to slip off the screen. This is because when the two ships are going in opposite directions, they cancel each others movement. Because I want to move anyway, I naturally move my fingers away from the centers of the joysticks, and thus move my fingers off the touchscreen.

There is really nothing I can do, except maybe visually notify the players that they are already moving as much as they can, and that they don't need to move their fingers further from the center. Come to think about it, it's an excellent idea. Yay. Now back to work.

One month after...

The lack of posts on this blog is due to some furious bug fixing. During this past month I submitted to the App Store:

-PewPew 2

-PewPew 2 Lite, but I removed it from the app store immediately because I had actually uploaded the full version, instead of the Lite version...

-an update to PewPew 1 to notify everyone about PewPew 2

-an update to PewPew 2 because PewPew 2 was crashing when the score table was full, and because the iPad version simply did not start. It got rejected because the game did not support correctly the orientations of the iPad...

-a second update to PewPew 2 to fix all the issues I was aware of at the time (it got accepted).

At the moment, there seems to be no bugs left on the iPhone, but the iPad version sometimes crashes when validating a score, or when editing the name... It will get fixed!

While waiting for Apple to approve the various updates, I worked on the campaign. In the next campaign, you'll fight the "Boss" once more. This time however, it's going to be a bit harder to defeat him (some cannons/turrets will accentuate the chaos).

Recently, I have been working on a new Infinity game mode called "Symbiosis". You control 2 ships of different colors, much like in the xbox 360 game Schizoid. The blue ship will be invincible to blue enemies, and the red ship will be invincible to red enemies. For now, the ships are linked with an electric field that destroys enemies. The electric field is also a spring, so one ship can drag the other ship.

Don't mind the graphics, I am only testing the gameplay.

I am far from having the gameplay done, and I am not even sure yet this game mode will ever be included in PewPew 2. Controlling two ships at the same time is really really hard, and that's why I added the spring between the ships: it helps keeping the two ships close. Still, I am persuaded that this game mode has potential.

I received a mail 2 hours ago...

...telling me that PewPew 2 is live!

Yay!

Gold

PewPew 2 is Gold! I submitted it to the App Store yesterday, and hopefully it will be accepted in the App Store within a week. It will be priced at $1.99, which I think is a very good deal considering the quality of the content :o

This month I did some beta testing on different devices (3GS, iPad), and discovered the performance on the 3GS was worse than on my iPod 2G! I lost a lot of time trying to find out what the problem was, until I finally found a post in a forum explaining that using timers to set the FPS is bad on the iPhone OS 3.0.

I also did a small trailer with iMovie:

PewPew 2 trailer from Jean-François Geyelin on Vimeo.

It was my first time doing video editing, and it was pretty fun. It's frustrating that iMovie does not allow placing the text where we want it, but overall it's still a cool and simple software.

That is all for now, more updates when PewPew 2 is live.

PewPew 2's progress

I haven't posted in quite some time now because I've been so busy with programming PewPew 2, but quite a few people are asking for news, so here we go:

PewPew 2 is progressing real well. Here are some of the new features that are currently done:

-Scores can be uploaded anytime, not just after you've played (it should have been the case from the start, I know)

-Replays are now uploaded along the scores. This will allow you to watch and admire the best players play. Also, you'll be able to show off.

-Better graphics, 3D sound, seriously optimized engine.

-2 new sound tracks.

-A 10 level campaign with a lot of diversity. And a boss.

-2 new unlock-able game modes (in addition to megagore, assault, chromatic conflict and dodge this)

-Medals. These are rewards when you achieve certain scores in one of the 6 game modes.

-6 different ships. You progressively unlock them by obtaining medals.

-Lot's of new ennemies.

I think it's enough new content for a first release of PewPew 2. Make no mistakes though, there will be updates ;-)

So what am I waiting for? Why am I not submitting PewPew 2 to the app-store? Well, I need to polish everything up. This is the step that will make PP2 awesome. I have to carefully balance everything, make sure the difficulty is not too high (I tend to do that), not to low (no worries there), that the in-game explanations are clear, that the objectives in every campaign level are also clear, etc...

One more thing... I have been busy bringing PewPew 2 to the iPad! Here are the first screenshots of PewPew 2 HD:

That's Megagore. Notice the increased viewing field.

And that? That's one of the level of the campaign ;-)

That's the splash screen. The quote comes from a review on the Canadian App Store, and I find it absolutely hilarious. I had to put it somewhere; I hope the author doesn't mind!

Fun fact: like 99% of the developers creating iPad apps, I haven't got an iPad to test it on. To find the ideal position for the virtual joysticks, I've made myself a dummy iPad in cardboard and imagined myself playing with it! Actually, probably all the game developers for the iPad have done the same thing.

OK, enough chitchat, I have a game to finish.

Volumetric lines 2

I promised I was going to do a follow up on the Volumetric Lines episode, so here it is.

Like I said, it was very easy to change from regular lines, to using volumetric lines in PewPew. In fact, I already changed once the way lines are drawn: the early versions of PewPew used SDL without OpenGL, so the lines were drawn in software using the good old Bresenham. Switching to OpenGL forced me to reduce the coupling between the renderer, and the game engine. Here is all I had to do to make the switch to volumetric lines, besides the initialization:

#ifdef USE_VOLUMETRIC_LINES
for (int index=0; index < numberOfVertex; index+=6)
VolumeLineRenderer::getInstance().renderLine(
&vertexes[index],&vertexes[index+3]);
#else
glVertexPointer(3, VERTEX_TYPE, 0, vertexes);
glDrawArrays(GL_LINES, 0, numberOfVertex);
#endif

Here are some new screenshots comparing the regular render to Sebastien Hillaire's one with different line width.

Now this is running on a PC, not on an iPhone. I previously said that I could maybe port this glowing effect to a real iPhone/iPod Touch, but it requires programmable shaders, which are only available on the iPod Touch 3G and the iPhone 3GS. I only have an iPod Touch 2G, so I wouldn't be able to test it.

Anyway, if you do not like the glowing effect do not worry, because if I do manage to get this effect to work on a real device at a decent frame rate, I would put an option to keep the classic look :-)