nooskewl, games, and me

One of my all-time favourite game-clones, HappyWordZ, now has an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch port. It’s waiting in Apple’s review queue. This game is a blast to play when a lot of people are competing for high scores. Hopefully that will be the case with this version.

This version is not complete though. I plan to add local play and local high scores and statistics, Apple Game Centre support, and my friend Ramon (of Monster RPG 2 and others fame) has said he will make some improved graphics.

Here are some screenshots from my iPhone. Don’t let the simplicity fool you, it really is fun. The lack of documentation is a concern that I will address also. Actually, why not write it up here, then I can just copy and paste it into the game:

• You can make up to three words. Two vertical, from top to bottom, and one horizontal, from left to right (at the bottom).
• Words must be made in sequence, last letter to first.
• Point values vary per letter based on frequency of occurrence in the word list (see “Scoring” from the main menu.)
• Your name for high scores must be 5 characters in length.

The past week I’ve been working on a level editor which will be used for parts of our new “top sekrit” game. I’ve made a lot of progress in the past few days. There are two major features I still want to implement (that I can think of): add/remove layer and a macro tool (search this blog for meditor2, it has a macros feature). For followers of this blog, I’m releasing a binary of the editor in it’s current state (for Windows).

ashedit-0.2

I wanted to try and make a nice glow shader today, since I failed before at making a good glow effect without shaders. I used the Allegro 5 shader addon and OpenGL/GLSL on my macbook. The code is a bit goofy, since in my copy of Allegro 5, I’ve only added shader support for the iPhone port, and so there is some redundant code here, but I just wanted to get it working. The code and a video is attached.

glow.cpp

While Monster 2 has a special place in my video game memories, that hasn’t stopped me from moving on to new things. Actually, we’ve been designing a game for a few months now. Art changes have led to a rewrite which started a week ago. I’m pretty pleased with what I’ve got done in a week. Things are going smoothly.

In tradition of this blog, here’s a video of some progress. There are some things to note about this video. First, it was shot by me pointing my iphone at my ipod’s screen, so it’s neither clear or steady. Second, the level you see here is a concept level, and not only that, it’s repeated 4 times. There is no collision detection (that’s next). What’s neat about it is that the level is 4096×4096 unique pixels, which would consume 16MB at 8 bit color. They way it is though, the level can be 1 000 000 x 1 000 000 and the tile textures will only consume 1MB per layer (and some of that is wasted, which I’m just realizing I can probably fix to an extent). Hope to have more progress soon! (Oh how embarassing, a glitch at the end! :P)

It has been a hard 2 months or so for me. I wanted to make that perfect release of Monster RPG 2, with every annoyance I ever had with the game fixed. Well, I did slay most of the problems… however I realized that the game will never be perfect and I could keep working on it forever if I so desired.

That is not my plan though (but I’ve said this before, this time I’ll try and mean it). The few issues that bother me that remain, are very minor. I really did fix almost every little detail, down to obnoxious pixels that I could find in about 5 play-throughs. That’s where it ends.

I want to place Monster RPG 2 in my completed games pile now. If there are big bugs, show-stoppers, I want to fix them, of course, but feature wise and artistically I think it has come far enough. I’m very happy with how this game came out. Enough thanks can’t be given to the people who helped.

tl;dr; — Time to move on to the new game — yes, it’s already been planned and work has begun. Hope to post here again in, oh, approximately 2 years with news of our great new creation.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been adding OpenGL 2.0 ES and shader support to the Allegro library which Monster RPG 2 uses. The code is not yet available, but will be part of the 5.1 branch of Allegro once Allegro 5.0 is released.

Currently I’m testing the OpenGL 2.0 ES support by using it on capable devices in our game, Monster RPG 2. The update will be available soon, if all goes well. Below is a short video that shows the difference between a couple of the effects in the game when using OpenGL ES 1.1 (first) and ES 2.0 (second). I don’t want to lead anyone on to thinking that I’ve added a lot of enhanced effects to the game for ES 2.0 capable devices. The fact is the two effects shown here (the fade to blue, which is subtly different in each version, and the battle transition) are possibly the only noticable changes you’ll see (that are due to shaders). Shaders are used in a few other places but the same effect is accomplished in a round-about way for ES 1.1 devices.

It’s been a couple months since we released Monster RPG 2 in the App Store. The team all agrees, that even though it wasn’t a huge business success, it was a personal success for all of us and we would (and plan to!) do it again. During this time we’ve had a lot of suggestions from people on how to improve the game, and we’ve listened to most of them and actually implemented the suggestions as well as our own new ideas. Another release (possibly the last feature-release, but I’ve said that before) is forthcoming. The latest suggestion we had was to increase the size of the buttons used in battle for attacking and other actions. Tony drew me up a nice button frame, and I copied the old icons inside the frame to give the result below. This is not set in stone yet, I still have to hear back from Tony on whether he is going to redo the inside bit of these icons. The larger icons are great to play with, so thanks to the person who suggested it! Have fun and keep on gaming!

Monster RPG 2 is a pretty challenging game. Because of that, I’ve written a cheat program to help those who are in desperate need of it. Here it is, for OS X and Windows:

m2-cheat-osx

m2-cheat-windows

So… the 1.3 update is being tested now by Tony and myself. I hope it to be ready within a week. It’s a pretty neat update, lots of bonus stuff in there… but don’t take my word for it.

There have been a number of reviews of Monster RPG 2 in the past week. Some good, some not so good. We knew we were taking a risk releasing a retro style game to a hip market. We feel it’s an awesome product, so the not so good reviews don’t bother us. Do yourself a favor and try the demo, and see for yourself.

It’s easy to get lost in the App Store mayhem and plummet off of the charts. That’s exactly what M2 has done. We had a nice ride. We were featured in “New and Noteworthy” on iTunes. We had a tremendous amount of positive support from people on the Touch Arcade forums. Now things have settled down. We want everyone who is a fan of the M2 genre to get a copy of the game, so we’ve been giving out promos a lot. Now we’ve put the game on sale for a week ($1.99 now, was $2.99).

I don’t know what’s next for Monster RPG 2 or the Monster RPG series. I have every intention of making a second sequel to the original, but after our “top sekrit” project we’re working on now. I’m happy with the success of Monster RPG 2, and I don’t think it’s going to go away just yet.

To summarize: Update coming soon. M2 a hit with some but not everyone. M2 on sale this week for $1.99.

I dreaded the day this would happen. There is a serious bug in the version of Monster RPG 2 currently in the App Store. Luckily, it won’t affect most users, and for those it does affect, there is hope. The new update I’m working on will stop this from happening and even repair games where this bug has occurred. Let me explain.

The bug itself is sneaky: During scripted scenes (cut scenes if you will), auto save is disabled. The problem lies in the fact that in this case, the player is “descriptified” a moment too early, allowing auto save to kick in and save the game state while you’re standing on a submarine, which happens to be cut off by invisible walls from the rest of the level, leaving you stranded and able to walk on water.

The fix is simple. Since there is only one position where the game could be saved in that causes the problem, we check save states for that position and modify them to move them out of the sea and onto the docks.

The fix? Well that just involves saving the “descriptification” of the player until he reaches a safe spot, which always happens unless they die (or give up as it were). If they die and give up, there is no problem, as the player object is reset before starting or continuing a game.

So to wrap up, if you find yourself stranded on the docks, don’t delete your save states, don’t panick, and have some patience. I’m doing my best to test this update and get it released as soon as I can. In the meantime, you have the option of starting a new game, complaining to me in the comments, or just plain waiting it out. Sorry for the bug, I will and always do my best to not create any, but once in a while one slips through. I’ll try even harder from now on.