Last week I participated in another Game Jam. This jam was not related to Libgdx but I could focus in my spare time on my entry. Time was really short (1 week). But… got something playable that shows promise for a future game. The theme of the Jam is to win by losing. And that is quite a hard assignment.
The name of the game is Psirens and it is a 2D Defender style game.
The enemies are sometimes fleeing when you are shooting. The key to the game (that was the intention) is to overload your laser or shield or crash into the planet and then trigger a set of explosions. The blast radius will trigger a set of blast radii of the enemies that exploded due to the ship and those blast radii should lead to a cascade of explosions reaching other ships.
As in true Retro Arcade fashion… When you reach a certain score threshold you will be awarded another ship and you could continue your weird battle against the aliens.
Unfortunately I had 30 minutes left in the jam, so I had to wrap up quickly and the fun gameplay part needs to be refined in other types of Game Jams.
It’s my first so happy that it is playable and looks good.
Found a load of bugs already. But too tired to continue.
The Game is called Slashed Corporate Corpses and is some pun after the Unity disaster. I feel for those hardworking Indie Game Developers and this is how they can blow off some steam.
Screenshot
I will update this post with some details about how it hold out against the rest of the submissions.
After the release of Valleybomber I thought it would be nice to make a multiplatform remake of my most downloaded app, named Topotablet.
Here is the proof (hmmm it’s dutch!):
Topotablet Google Playstore
It’s a topography game that let’s you find cities all over the world. The time is ticking though, so hurry!
Click on the image above to visit the store to donwload it. It’s free!
The development was done in many stages, and it will be used to show how a LibGdx game is actually made.
The old version is IOS only, and is somewhat different. I will release the same version when IOS 13 has found it’s way to a lot of people. I know that if I submit this update the Apple reviewing people will be very strict on a lot of things. And then it will take ages before I pass the review.
My trusty macbook air has reached 876 of the 1000 supported charge cycles so I am going to replace it with a brand new battery to prevent it from failing. Luckily those batteries are easy to find and order.
I thought my MBA (Mid 2012) wasn’t eligible to run OSX Mojave but it is included in the compatibility list. So that gave me thinking. How many years has this laptop left. It runs as smoothly as I bought it. Well I cleaned my SSD (small 128GB SSD). Upgraded to OSX Mojave (took almost an hour). It is a great little machine and the keyboard is better than the butterfly keyboard on the more recent Macbooks. So I think it deserves a new lease of life (at least for a possible 1.5 years before a new MacOSX will be released).
The second thing I wanted to do, was to upgrade the SSD. It always bugged me that I had to clean files on a daily basis. So what was possible? And more importantly, can I still find parts for that particular model? Well I did find it and it works great!
So I followed two of these guides (actually performed the two upgrades in one go) with the help of iFixit.
As you can see, the battery is still in fairly good shape, although you can see some bulges. The plastic where the screws are placed were so brittle that they fell apart. Probably from 7 years of those cozy warm batteries.
This is really a simple upgrade, only make sure you don’t loose any screws! And take it slow, why would you rush this?
After that it was selecting a wifi point, wait very long before the repair screen comes up (so don’t worry). Don’t forget to partition the disk before restoring the OS (the restoretool wont see the disk until you do). The tool complained that a direct restore from Timemachine was not possible , so I did a fresh install.
When I bought this, it had OSX Lion on it (wow thats old), so it will be recovered with that OS version. After that I needed to upgrade Lion to Mountain Lion, because the App store does not function properly on Lion. I was very pleased that after that step Mojave was visible in the App Store. So that took about an hour to get that OSX version on the system again.
Final Step : Recovering my Timemachine backup and fixing Applications
Ok, recovery did not work at the beginning, but I knew it would once Mojave was installed on my system.The only thing was that all Applications that have a deep integration with the system broke. IntelliJ, Appcode, Webstorm,Filezilla. Reinstalling repaired everything in mere minutes. So JOY!
Here are some stats to prove it worked! And surprisingly the SSD write speed has improved from 280MB/s to 480MB/s ! How nice!
And look at that cycle count! It is one again! Hurrah!
After almost three years of development. A point and click adventure completely made from scratch. If I remember correctly it started with this starter template on Ray Wenderlich… Wow! This template project still exists ! You can find it here.
I really enjoyed making this game, but at the end I worried that I would not be able to publish it. For this game I used Cocos2D Objective C. That was abandoned in 2014 and does not have the best support for the latest hardware (All iPhones with a notch are problematic… please Apple get rid of that!).
The right corner shows my latest game
It’s an attempt to create a classic point and click (pixel-artistic) adventure game. It is intended to have multiple short adventures for the casual gamer and will get more releases in the future. Well enough talking… It is universal so you can play it on all iPhones and iPads that can run iOS 8. See for yourself because……..
On my bugs todo list there was still ONE bug remaining. It had something to do with touch. Bugs are mostly easy to solve, but touch bugs are a … little touchy. I will describe the bug in detail. When you select an action verb like ‘Look At’ and you wanted to look at something in the gameworld, but you changed your mind and you wanted to walk to somewhere else, you would stick to the ground as if your soles were nailed to the floor.
Dave will die if can’t walk
Eventually it was a boolean that was unnecessary but blocked walking around.
The Lost Adventures is finally getting into a releasable state. Major bugs are solved and game assets are polished to the max. The only task remaining is testing it on a variety of devices that can have a lot of different sizes. Over the years I collected quite some iDevices. The Lost Adventures is a universal compatible game targeting iOS8 till current iOS version (now 12). I discovered that the game didn’t run smoothly on the lowest specced device show below, and that’s the iPad Mini 1. In the last post I mentioned that this was a problem in the A* algorithm I used. It was really slow and not optimized. Now it runs OK on that iPad. On all devices I get a decent framerate! And the game is compatible, I still need to check for memory leaks though!
I was testing on an ipad Mini 1 and saw there was a noticable lag when the pathfinding had to do its work. I always knew this was not optimally coded. It also was a lot of code, and a lot of code is hard to optimize. So I integrated another AStar implementation into my game that runs much faster. To notice the lag more evidently I zoomed my map out for a factor of 4 to reach a far away target tile.
Astar was bogging down my FPS
Now it runs smoothly on low end iOS 9 compatible devices like the iphone 5 and ipad air and up.
I am going to the gruesome phase of the final push towards the Apple App store.
It is fun to make a game, but it ain’t fun to get all the other assets in the game in order to get the approval of Apple to submit a review request.
That is what I call : Icon Hell!
And hell it was…..
When I started making this game I had the icon assets managed by Cocos2D. This is nice, because with a small number of icons you can get a releasable archive. This was always messy of course, but it worked. Then Apple started with a mechanism called Icon and Launch Assets. This is nice because dependending on the target version you can provide icons from iphone4 until the latest iphoneXS Max.
All is well, all icons and launch screens of various sizes dragged in.
When you have pixelart it is better to make each icon look it’s best
But I knew I wasn’t done. You have to edit info.plist a number of times. Got this error first (did not expect a first time right).
So i scoured the internet and I tried to insert this into info.plist :
When I validated my project (Xcode 9.4.1), I got a valid archive message!? Was this my lucky day?
Nope, I sent the archive to apple for real now to let the validation happen on Apple’s servers.
Then I thought… Icon-76@2x is the correct icon size for that?
After validating a load of times, I discovered that CFBundleIconFiles does not help me at all providing the correct icons.
I removed these completely and started looking for answers on the big bad web….
After many hours and countless stackoverflow suggestions I found a stackoverflow post and it mentioned something about the Target Membership.
This is how my Icon Asset settings looked before I corrected it :
This can be found in the side panel of the Assets folder
This was some remnant of the Cocos2D setup ( I know I should move towards a new framework 🙂 ). So i selected the correct target membership (what’s this for anyway? ) And now it looks like this.
I was certain this was the correct format so this was definitely an improvement. But one validation gave me this :
This was a lot easier, because of the support of iOS 7 I needed to add the following xml to info.plist
CFBundleShortVersionString corresponds with Version in the Xcode label and CFBundleVersion corresponds with the Build label. That was a head scratcher too! I think Apple will never name things as they appear in the GUI.
A lot I invested in creating dialogues because it is one of the greatest gameplay features in Point and Click adventures alongside puzzles.
My characters lacked believable mouth movement and that bugged me. So after I found the right software to do this, I added lipsync to my point and click adventure engine. But I needed to invest a great deal in tooling to be able to support a quick pipeline of voice recording files to in game voice acting.
I have lip-syncing for over quite a few months, but I finally made it stable in the last weeks.
I recently started adding some youtube videos recording the progress of the game and ‘LipSync’ is the first episode…. Here it is :
