Blogs - zet23t

Not finding too much time and endlessly tired, I still managed to do some small progress in Pocket Defender today, the game I've been working on for so long: It's now possible to play the easy mode through, means, there's an end in the game's level. Here's a proof:

Previous screenshots with that mission report had only a "defeat" message, now it's victory. It probably needs some more information though... and I want to add the social media sharing possibility to the photo that shows a situation of the played session. The algorithm that decides which picture should be taken also deserves some more attention. But, only one step per time.

Meanwhile I am thinking about releasing this game into the wild. If you think you want to play it, despite a couple of glitches all over the place, bad performance and UX issues, let me know!

I am now back to invest all my free time into the missile defender game I am creating for Android / iOS.

I started developing this game about a year ago, but I've put my expectations really high. I am satisfied how it looks right now, but there's tons of stuff missing before I can release. Today I fixed some minor things of annoyance.

For instance:

This is the technology upgrading screen. It can be panned left/right using the touch interface but it lacked some speed - so scrolling stopped instantly when the touch ended, which felt awkward. Swiping shouldn't feel that way. So I added a velocity factor to the movement and it's now much better.

As for the game visuals, the jets missed a proper crash animation. Now they crash into the sea in the background with a splash:

I only did minor improvements today on Triple Touch for Android: I've modified the way the triangle is drawn to enable different colorization for the triangle corners:

The final effect is very feint however:

If you look closely, you can see that the lines ending in the green circle are now also a bit green. The effect is even less visible since the color transitions are now animated as well.

Besides these changes, I've did some minor performance improvements in conjunction with the text display. I am using the flash display list right now, but I should switch to bitmap fonts to improve performance further - currently I am rendering the texts on the CPU and upload the images to the GPU. That process is highly inefficient. However, I'll have to write some extra code to support bitmap fonts in my system before I can utilize these... but then additional effects will be pretty neat.

I am also currently thinking about adding some more achievements like "play 3 days in a row" to give an incentive to play again... probably not really going to improve the play rates though :(. I also should start porting the game to iOS... I think I'd get some more attention there. Astroroids for iOS was at least benefiting from the apple store featuring for new apps.

I've added a local high score in Triple Touch for Android because some people have asked for it:

It keeps track of the 3 most recent high scores and should suffice the basic needs. It's fairly simple and unsophisticated - no animations or the likes. But it works and wasn't too much work.

Additionally, I've added a button to show the credits and links to my Twitter / GPlus profile:

Maybe I'll get some additional followers this way... not sure if it makes sense to also link my indiedb profile. Any opinions on that?

I've released a new version of Triple Touch on the Android play store. It's a mere audio-visiual improvement release. A bit more eye candy like a stats bar on top that shows the amount of time left with each 3-tap. I also play a different sound if a triplet was solved in less than 500ms since that's the amount of average time you need to beat to play endlessly.

To advertise it better on the store, I also made a short game play video - but alas without sound or even music (which would be cool, but I lack music so far :().

Some more stuff I'd like to do:

• Fade in and out the connections between the circles when they appear and disappear
• Signify in visually view when a triplet was solved within the 500ms interval
• Particle effect when a triplet was solved
• Particle effect when the screen is touched
• Deformations of circles in the background depending on the phone's orientation sensors and touch points

"It's the little things which make a difference sometimes".

I've added a small visual indicator to help localizing the points to push - which can be difficult when your hand obscures a quarter of the play field. Here's what I came up with:

The Effect of this change is far bigger than I expected - it instantly boosted my scoring from 150 to 200. Just because I can see now more clearly where to put my fingers. Really neat. Going to push that update to the market real soon.