nooskewl, games, and me

A second update for Monster RPG 2 is on the way. We’re redoing some of the graphics, and adding an (optional) onscreen d-pad/button input method. Obviously this is a pretty big change, so most of the time spent on this update will be on testing. This games code is so large and has so many branches, that it basically requires a thorough play-through for any major changes, and that’s what I’m doing now. Two actually — one with the d-pad and one with the old tap-and-go method, to make sure nothing was broken in the upgrade.

I know everyone likes pretty pictures, so here are a few showing off the onscreen d-pad/buttons. Note that I have increased the size of all of the buttons since taking these shots, making playing much more comfortable. As you can see, you can place the buttons on either the top or bottom of the screen simply by touching the top or bottom third of the screen. As you can also see there are two “button themes” to choose from.

Sort of a spectacle, sort of a favor-asking post. Our wonderful artists Tony and Ramon have put together (well, I helped a little) 3 advertisements for getting the word out about Monster RPG 2. If you played the free games on our website, are a fan, and would like to give something back, we would highly appreciate it if you put one of these on a website of yours with a link to one of these sites:

Sort of a spectacle, sort of a favor-asking post. Our wonderful artists Tony and Ramon have put together (well, I helped a little) 3 advertisements for getting the word out about Monster RPG 2. If you played the free games on our website, are a fan, and would like to give something back, we would highly appreciate it if you put one of these on a website of yours with a link to one of these sites:

http://www.monster-rpg.com

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monster-rpg-2/id358610619?mt=8

And finally, here are the ads (click for full size images):

Anyone who is on the fence about buying Monster RPG 2 can now try a truncated Lite version available in the App Store. You get to play up to the first boss (yay!) which is about three percent of the game (OK that’s not a scientifically derived number). Here’s the link:

Monster RPG 2 Lite in the App Store

Now that Monster RPG 2 is in the App Store, I get to relax a little, but not too much. I get to finish up some side projects and things, and soon get working on our new Top Sekrit project.

On a related note, I wrote a very short perl script for making the downloadable daily sales reports from iTunes Connect readable. Here it is:

$headers = <STDIN>;
chomp($headers);
@headers_a = split(/\t/, $headers);

@values = {};
my $i = 0;

while ($line = <STDIN>) {
	chomp($line);
	@values[$i] = $line;
	$i++;
}
@totals = {};
for ($i = 0; $i < $#values; $i++) {
	@values_a = split(/\t/, $values[$i]);
	for ($j = 0; $j < @values_a; $j++) {
		if ($values_a[$j] =~ m/^[0-9].*/) {
			$totals[$j] += $values_a[$j];
		}
		else {
			$totals[$j] = "XX";
		}
	}
}
my $final = "";
for ($i = 0; $i < $#values; $i++) {
	for ($j = 0; $j < @totals; $j++) {
		$final = "${final}${totals[$j]}\t";
	}
}

@values_a = split(/\t/, $final);

for ($i = 0; $i < @headers_a; $i++) {
	if ($headers_a[$i] =~ m/Units.*/) {
		print "$headers_a[$i] -- $values_a[$i]\n";
	}
}

Tony (If you don’t know who Tony is, he did a lot of the graphics work and playtesting for the iPhone version of M2) created a trailer video for Monster RPG 2 (The new title, since monster.com grabbed the “Monster” name — it was inevitable). Check it out here:

Trailer on Youtube

In other news, Apple is now processing my personal->business account migration, which should only take a couple days. I just mailed the forms asking permission to use the app store/iphone image branding, and that will probably take a week optimistically. During that time I’ll continue to bug test (last pass was excellent). If all goes well Monster 2 could be on iPhone in two weeks or so.

So the cat’s out of the bag. We haven’t been sitting around doing nothing the past 6 months or so. We’ve been porting and improving Monster 2 for a commercial release on the iPhone. The status is that the game is in a 100% usable, finished state — well, at least we hope so, though we still plan to do some more testing in case there are bugs. In the coming months we will be submitting the game to the Apple App Store.

In other news, Nooskewl should soon be a real, legit business with it’s office in Canmore, Alberta Canada, at my house. In addition to that, an all new game is in the early planning stages. More on that when it’s finished, yuck yuck. Anyway, these are exciting times for us. Thanks to everybody who supported me and the team for the past few years. We hope you like the iPhone release that we’ve painstakingly prepared for you!

For more information on the iPhone version, see the site we created for the game.

The upcoming new year and a tradition for friendly competition contributed to the beginning of a casual contest to create the best (virtual) fireworks display on http://www.allegro.cc (link.) Here is my contribution. It took maybe 30 minutes to an hour to write and another hour to debug the shader. It is using Allegro 4.9 and runs only on Windows, but you can compile it yourself on other platforms by removing the HLSL shader code. Enjoy and all the best in the new year!

The Fireworks demo

My web host does not have an md5 sum program that I could find on their server, so I needed to find a script to do it for me. I found this site which had a program that looked good at a quick glance. Only problem with it was that it tries to read the whole file into memory before performing the md5 hash.

This was a problem because the file I wanted to verify was about 5GB in size. So, not knowing any Ruby beforehand, I hacked the above script into the 9 liner below. It is useful to me for checking that my backups of my web hosting are correct after I download them. It is, however, very slow!

md5.rb

This months issue of Linux+ in Poland has a review of the game Monster. I have not yet been able to read the article (It’s in Polish and I need approval from the Magazine before I can start distributing it), except to notice the screenshots and the “2/5″ at the end which I assume is the rating. The December issue is going to have an article on Monster 2, which fares much better rating wise. So if you’re in Poland and a fan of the games, check out Linux+.