Promo trailer by Mr Jack
Video (almost) direct from the iPhone by Mr Jack
Video of your game is kinda of a must have promotional tool but unfortunately there is no simple, sensible way to capture video from the iPhone. The earlier videos I posted where taken on a digital camera - but the quality just isn't there, even with a tripod and I don't fancy forking out for a flashy camera just to do that. Another alternative is to run it in the simulator and use software which will capture video from the Mac screen, trouble is with a game like Alien Swing that uses a lot of accelerometer control that doesn't quite work either. Still, making video can't be that hard, can it?
So I saddled up with OpenCV, and started capturing the screen with glReadPixels. Hmm... there's two problems here. The first is that the iPhone port of OpenCV doesn't include the video codecs needed. Bah, problematic, but not that critical - I can capture the screen, write it to the iPhone's flash memory and then knock a command line tool on the mac to convert from this raw data into a sensible video format. Which leaves problem number 2: it's slow. Really, painfully slow. glReadPixels will capture the screen just fine but it knocks the frame rate down to an unplayably slow speed.
The solution: delta compression. We're fortunate in that most of the time most of the screen is unchanging in Alien Swing, this means I only need to capture and store the changes from the last recorded frame and save them off - a process known in the trade as delta compression. So, after a fair bit of effort I have video recorded from the iPhone device with the game running at 60fps (except during screen transitions and when it saves the captured data off). As you can see from the video below, it's not quite there yet - I've a few glitches to iron out - but the video should give you a decent impression of how the game plays.
Release date confirmed by Mr Jack
Alien Swing has passed review at Apple and will go on sale on Friday 5th February.
Needless to say, we're rather excited!
Submitted! by Mr Jack
Alien Swing is now with Apple for review. The plan is that I'll spend the next week and half getting a good looking website and some promo videos together and generally trying to pimp it to App Review sites and on iPhone forums before release on Friday 5th February.
Although that, of course, depends on it passing review nice and quickly.
And we’re there… almost by Mr Jack
222 check-ins and a lot of days later Alien Swing is now ready to submit.
Except Apple's site is down for improvements so I can't...
A few screenshots by Mr Jack
I haven't updated much lately, what with Christmas and New Year. Here's a few screenshots so you can see how the game is progressing:
Screenshots of game in progress
Personally, I'm loving the look Rich's art is giving to the game.
Ever onward by Mr Jack
Hmm... haven't updated for a while; but we've got a lot done. The arts started going in and now I've put in some of the scoring, life-tracking, and frontend code and you can begin to see the final game emerging from the fog. A lot of my time, though, has been spent doing stuff that appears behind the scenes: a tool to pack the art images into larger texture pages and convert them into a ready to use format (which makes more efficient use of memory, and loads and displays faster too) instead of painstackingly doing them by hand, support code for the frontend and other menus, a system for recording video direction from the iPod. All of which is needed but doesn't make the game look obviously different.
Concept Art by Rich
Here are some concept art sketches for the central character, which we will try out in-game and see which 'fits' the best. Each is intended to emanate a tongue, rope or tractor-beam from which to swing by. As well as the visual fit of the character, the choice may effect the range of background environments that we can use.
I'm not going to tell you which one my favourite is.
Early view of characters
Fast Fast Slow Slow Fast by Mr Jack
Well, the promised tweaking hasn't happened yet, instead I got caught up in developing a level editor (in C# no less, making that three C-languages in one week) and investigating various technologies such as OpenFeint and text rendering options. So for most of the last week nothing obvious happened with the game. However, with the newly christened Level Editor harnessed up and ready to roll another 10 levels have gone in the last twenty four hours along with a range of new game play features, a (very) stand-in frontend end and the seperation into two game modes.
More excitingly I today travelled up to discuss artwork with our artist for the project (and my brother) Richard Aidley; getting the first of the art in should really make a big difference to the game and clarify some of the design decisions yet to make. I also dropped in on my pals at Strawdog Studios and had a look at where they'd got with Space Ark on XBLA since I was working for them earlier in the year.
It's a sad truth of working in the games industry that you're not going to like every game you work on, but Space Ark certainly wasn't one of those. It was a joy to play, and with plenty more polish and tweaking since I last played it, it's got even better. The games I've enjoyed the most have always satisfied one of two things, either they've been complex, cerebral games with interesting tactical depths like Civilisation 4 or Age of Empires II or games which provide the simple joy of elegant controls and satisfying movements like Tony Hawk, SSX or Indestruc2Tank. Space Ark slots firmly into the later category with a simple bouncing mechanic combined with in-air aftertouch and a perfectly balanced collecting system that is both accessible and rewards extreme skill with staggering scores. You can find a video of the game much as it is now on YouTube here, and - for those interested in the development process - the original pitch video Paul put together here.
Space Ark is chalked in for release early next year. If you have a 360, keep an eye out for it.
Another day, another OS by Mr Jack
Today, yet another piece of hardware turned up in the form of an Acer Revo, which we picked up for just £145. It's not a throbbing powerhouse by any means: running just a 1.6GHz Atom, with 1Gb of RAM and a 160Gb HDD; but that's plenty to do what we want - specifically run the perforce server. It's also utterly silent and draws less than 20W: perfect for an always-on machine. That price comes with a couple of catches though: no sensible installed OS, and no optical drive - which has meant spending the afternoon learning enough about Ubuntu to install it from a USB, get SSH running and transfer the Perforce database over from the MiniMac.
"Just a 1.6GHz Atom, with 1Gb of RAM and a 160Gb HDD" I say! When I first learnt to program it was on a ZX81, it had a 3.25Hz (not megahertz, not gigahertz, just plain ol' hertz) processor and 1K of RAM. We, though, had the upgrade allowing a huge 16K of RAM! You did have type gently though, or it'd come lose and crash the thing... The first HDD we had, when I was about 14 or 15, was a 20Mb beast - we couldn't see how we'd ever fill it. How fast things change!
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Twittering away
- Man, capturing video from the iPhone device itself shouldn't be this hard. Still, almost there: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-RpVoqh8KA
- And we're proud to announce that Alien Swing has passed review and will be released on Friday 5th February.
- Alien Swing is now in submission.