We’ve got a working game!
The video shows off some of the basics, but there are a lot more things happening behind the scenes here. The game now run at 60 FPS on both the iPhone and iPad, although we’re still optimizing performance for Android devices.
After a few more tweaks we’ll be ready to start sending off beta copies to our lucky friends who have liked our Facebook page. Check it out!
We’ve been hard at work making:
We’ve had some great success with our UI, and the game is getting very responsive when manipulating characters and objects in the editor. We’re already about 20 levels in. Levels take a while to generate due to the need for extensive user testing and thought in terms of how and when to introduce new elements and concepts to make the game easy to learn and fun to play without ever getting boring.
See our latest UI changes in action:
We’ve made some changes to the design document, it now has a focus on special objects that the player should try to collect as they choose a path. this will help steer players on beginner levels and add extra difficulty for advanced ones.
We’ve come a long way and are now getting actual UI elements created and implemented for the game. We have made all of the UI based off of the LCARS system from Star Trek, with a few of our own modifications. These were designed in Illustrator to work for both iPhone and iPad, then brought into Photoshop for additional effects.
After adding effects in photoshop, each view was then exported as a web page with slices over all of the images. This allowed us to have a nondestructive workflow where we can easily change things and then push out the changes through the chain with minimal effort. These web pages are parsed and turned into XML UI files which work natively with GAIL to define object positions, active areas, etc.. Every graphic is exported in greyscale and is then colorized in game based on button states and other factors.
The final result looks quite good and we will work on animating each view.
Our artist, Raymond Mungai, has collaborated with another one of our artists, Devron Sternke, to produce the following characters. We chose 5 different characters based on their eventual game characteristics (speed, mass, maneuverability) and then created 5 unnamed characters around them.
These characters were drawn on paper, scanned into photoshop and cleaned, brought into Illustrator for full vecorization, and then turned into color as well. The results gave us some very high quality scalable images that can be used throughout the game.
We’ve made some significant progress in our game development!
Now that we’re into the meat of our project, we can talk a little bit about the architecture of the project. We’ve gotten a lot of experience with what to do and what not to do when designing a level based game. Since we’re using Thothonegan’s GAIL (www.idcprojects.com/gail), our game will run cross platform on iPhone, Android, Mac, PC, and Linux. Due to this advantage we decided to build the editor for the game INTO the game itself.
See a preview of what we have so far:
With renditions of an early UI, this view shows some of the basic gameplay elements. The square in the bottom left and the paint splatter looking thing in the upper right are the spawn point and goal, respectively. You simply tap and drag your finger to choose both a direction and power, then release to make the rocket take off. as it flies, it will interact with gravity fields of different planets.
Each item on the screen has a list of properties associated with it, which can be overridden for a specific level. This allows us to create basic elements, and then override the defaults with special values (like different pictures, gravity, mass, and special powers). It’s a powerful system that uses LUA scripting extensively and now we can offer our game editor that we used to create the game (minus a few special tweaks) as an in app purchase (or reward for winning the game).
We’ve gone over potential mock ups and have a preliminary design for our app icon! While the final version will likely differ slightly, we have most of the main elements here that wil be in the final version. Now to share:
We’ve begun development of Rocket Frogz! We found that there were not any games for the iPhone and iPad that are gravity based space games that are simple and easy to play.
We took that concept and designed a game around it. We wanted a simple game mechanic that was incredibly easy to learn and very fun to play. The game design document has been completed and we’ve started work on artwork. We have silhouettes of our main characters and rockets and some of the planets and special objects that the players will interact with.
