2Apr/100

How to allow user background music with OpenAL by Mr Jack

Version 1.0 of Alien Swing has no music included, but also won't let you listen to your own music while you play. Since the iPod Touch and iPhone developed out of Apple's successful MP3 playing empire this seems rather suboptimal, so one of the things I've added in the 1.1 update is the ability to listen to your own music. This is actually a very straight forward thing to do, but I spent quite some time time tracking down how to do it, so here, reproduced for anyone else who wants to do it is how it's done: During your setup process, and before you call the OpenAL initialisation code, you need to add the following lines of code:

// Allow their music to play in the background
AudioSessionInitialize(NULL, NULL, NULL,NULL);
 
UInt32 sessionCategory = kAudioSessionCategory_MediaPlayback;
AudioSessionSetProperty( kAudioSessionProperty_AudioCategory, sizeof( sessionCategory ), &sessionCategory );
 
UInt32 allowMixing = true;
AudioSessionSetProperty( kAudioSessionProperty_OverrideCategoryMixWithOthers, sizeof( allowMixing ), &allowMixing );

These functions are included in AudioToolbox/AudioToolbox.h so make sure you're using the AudioToolbox framework and including that header in the appropriate file. The update to version 1.1 of Alien Swing was submitted to Apple on Monday but it's still in the 'waiting for review' state - I'm guessing this is because they're concentrating on getting all the iPad apps reviewed ready for release so it may be a while longer.

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1Mar/100

Stumbling out of the gate by Mr Jack

Alien Swing has been on the store for just over three weeks now, and we've had several fairly positive reviews (here, here and here), we were even briefly features under "New and Noteworthy" on the US store. But sales have been... lackluster, shall we say.

Unfortunately this has meant that there's not enough money coming in for me to continue working full time on this side of the business and I've had to take on some work for other people to balance the books. This means that further developments from Mr Jack Games will be stalled for a while.

All is not lost though, with Apple's new 20Mb 3G/EDGE download limit, we should be able to boost sales a little by trimming things down to fit under that threshold and I'm working on doing just that with a few nifty compression tricks. I've alse got a plan for a sort of "lite" version. I'm not a big fan of out and out lites for games at the bottom end of the price range; but I've got some ideas for creating a series of minigames using most of the same art assets and game mechanics as for the main game and putting out a "freemium" game featuring one of these games free for download and offering others as DLC at 99 cents a pop.

Hopefully this can help spread the word and get sales of Alien Swing back on track.

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5Feb/100

Promo trailer by Mr Jack

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3Feb/109

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 up 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.

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1Feb/101

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!

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27Jan/102

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.

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26Jan/100

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...

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7Jan/102

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

Screenshots of game in progress

Personally, I'm loving the look Rich's art is giving to the game.

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18Dec/090

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.

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1Dec/090

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.

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Mr Jack Games is a tiny indie games outfit founded by games industry veteran Jack Aidley in late 2009 to develop iPhone games. Our first game - Alien Swing - is now available on the App Store.

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