Photics: Revisions - Course Correction

Photics · February 2010

Hi! This is my first post! I'm starting out by detailing my journey. Today, I start with a good idea. What will happen from there?

This is a copy of what I put on my website.

At my site, you can see the illustration of what I'm aiming for.

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It all starts with an idea. There's a vision in my head... a space-shooter video game. I've been wanting to make a video game based on my book Photics: Revisions ( ). With the iPhone and GameSalad, there appears to be a road to victory, but can it be done? I'm not sure, but I'm going to document my progress. The more I research the matter, the more confident I become. Yet, the idea to make "Photics: Revisions - Course Correction" is not new. That idea has been bouncing around in my brain for years. Has technology finally caught up to fantasy? Do I finally have the tools to make my dreams a reality?

When I first had the idea for PR:CC, I was looking into XNA. Could it be possible to actually make a game for the XBOX 360 and PC? Well... it was possible... but it was just too hard for me. I tried messing around with 3D graphics programs and a complicated programming language. I didn't have much success. I ultimately gave up on the project. I felt that Flash was an easier platform to work with. But that was also too cumbersome. With ActionScript 3, I felt lost. I felt like I had to start over with each upgrade. It was discouraging. My idea was pushed aside.

But recently, I've had some success with mobile development. Google Android sparked my interest in game development. Thousands of players joined up to try Guild Wars: Conquest ( ). Why couldn't I achieve similar success with the iPhone? The bar is raised higher in that market. But with a copy of GameSalad and my Mac Mini, perhaps I should try again.

Since it's going to be primarily for the iPhone, I realized that I had to make a few adjustments to the controls. Yet, I'm still not sure if my control scheme is even possible.

Photics · February 2010

Question #1: Can I use the accelerometer in my game?

Yes - http://gamesalad.com/wiki/how_tos:gsc_iphone_controls shows how to do it. There's even a video tutorial that makes the process seem ridiculously easy.

Question #2: Can I have directional fire, with the click of a mouse or a touch on the iPhone?

I don't know. I'm still researching the matter. I don't know if my controls are going to work. Considering this is primarily for the iPhone, I might have to drop the cross-hair or figure out a really creative way to make it work. (I think I'll make the cross-hair appear when pressed, not constant like before. That might solve the problem.)

Question #3: Wait a minute, how is a $99 program going to handle something complicated like radar?

Apparently, it's not that complicated. http://gamesalad.com/wiki/how_tos:create_a_minimap shows how it's done. Except, it's referred to as a mini map.

Question #4: What about health bars and power ups?

That information is available too... http://gamesalad.com/wiki/how_tos:gsc_health_bar ...and I could probably modify it to add some cool power-ups. Do it in reverse to power-up the main gun.

Question #5: Can I have user preferences? What if a user doesn't want to use the accelerometer? What if they'd rather have an on-screen controller instead?

I'm not sure. But if so, I have room for it at the bottom right of the screen.

I'll have to work on graphics and I already have cool music selected. That's the majority of the heavy lifting here, but GameSalad seems to have resolved a lot of the challenging parts. I'll just have to figure out how to make the asteroids/enemies, character interactions, game presentation and make the game fun/pretty. The Space Rocks example included with GameSalad is close to how I want the Asteroids to react. I'll probably have to do some more research on camera movement, as a lot of the action will happen off-screen.

Today was a big day. I went from feeling like this project was impossible, to becoming incredibly motivated. Yet, the main question remains... can it be done? Yes, of course! A better question is... can I do this?

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If people seem interested in this story, I might keep this thread updated.

So, after that, hello GameSalad world!

scitunes · February 2010

everything you have asked about can be done. the wiki is helpful and if you ask specific questions and give examples of what you are doing, people will give you a lot of help on this forum. I would recommend that as you get going with GS start a forum post for one specific question at a time and make sure the topic heading is specific. If you do this you will find a bunch of people willing to help. Good luck and welcome to GS!

quantumsheep · February 2010

Please do keep us up to date with what you're up to - I think it'd make fascinating reading to see how you progress and overcome the challenges ahead.

To be fair, I think that all the stuff you've listed *can* be done. Please take some time to look at the templates and examples made by the GS and forum guys and gals. They will serve as a useful guide as to what you can do (indeed, I'm using CodeMonkey's joystick demo as the foundation for a project).

Good luck to you! Hope you get to make the game you want!

And welcome to the forum!

Cheers,

QS

Photics · February 2010

Actually, I answered most of the questions by looking at the wiki and reading the forums.

There's even links to the wiki in my post.

I didn't see directional fire though.
...and I'd get a lot of errors looking at the wiki too. It was as if the links changed too.

One of the ideas of this post is to look back and laugh at what was once hard. I remember having to do character movement with Flash... it was hard. XNA... it was also hard!

Photics · February 2010

OK, I'm still in the research stage, but I took another look at the "Canon" example. It is fairly close to the type of shooting that is to be used in the game. The only main difference is that the cannon is stationary. In PR:CC, the fighter will fly around. That seems to be one step closer to solving the problem mentioned in question #2.

Today, I'm working on backgrounds. It's harder work that I expected, but I'm happy with the progress. I thought about using images from NASA, but instead I created something unique with Photoshop. I think it looks great, but the file size is larger than anticipated. The 1024x1024 image (PNG-8 with 64 colors) is 541 KB. At first, I didn't think a 10 MB limit would be an issues, but now I'm starting to think otherwise. Plus, to give my game value, I think it should have levels.

A new challenge is to think of other types of game levels, while keeping the game under the limit.

I read and watched some more tutorials too. Tshirtbooth does a great job at creating video tutorials. I wasted some time trying to figure out what screen recording software he used... but then I realized I should probably focus on making my game.

I didn't have much success with iPhone development. I felt like I wasted money on registering as a developer and buying a Mac Mini. But now that I'm learning about GameSalad, I'm more optimistic.

Photics · February 2010

Today I mostly worked on graphics. I seemed to get better quality if I used somewhat larger graphics and then shrunk them down. This might be good or it might be bad. It might lead to a performance hit, but my most sprites are 10K or less. I was impressed by the size of the main character. The 128x128 fighter is roughly 3K. That's like nothing. I had two sizes of my fighter (128x128 and 64x64) but it seems that my character looked better if I let GameSalad handle the scaling. When I get to the testing stages, I might have to revisit this issue.

Yet, this has me wondering about the iPad. If I simply make all my images larger, maybe I'd only need one version of my app. I've seen how the iPad increases the size of iPhone apps, in order to be compatible with the existing library. Will the iPad take advantage of the higher-res graphics? I don't know. For improved sales, I'm thinking it's probably better to make an iPad version.

I also experimented with controls today. I've been messing around with the Space Rocks example. I think that the round collision detection and rotation will work great with my main character. I haven't been able to master rotation though. I pressed left and the character spins at weird angles. I was trying to get my character to turn in the direction it's pointed, but I couldn't get it to work. Space Rocks has a slightly different control scheme than my game. Space Rocks uses thrust. I suppose I could switch my control scheme to thrust, but that might be weird for those using the Accelerometer.

Heh... it seems that I've been working so hard on my game that I forgot to eat. I suppose I should go and do that first.

Photics · February 2010

Today I created the capital ship for my game.
There's preview artwork at my website...

Photics · February 2010

I'm starting to get more confident with GameSalad. Why? It's because I just made a really impressive thrust effect. With a 3K image and the particle effects, the screen lights up with a glowing flame.

It reminded me of Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away...
"I HAVE MADE FIRE!"

I could tell it was a good effect because I kept playing with my game... flying around the screen... watching the cool trails of flame. It was nice!

I'm worried about particle effects though. I don't know what kind of performance hit this is going to cause. I did manage to find a way to save some memory. Instead of having two effects for each thruster, I just combined the two ship thrusters into one image. This also made the math easier to understand.

Photics · February 2010

I'm still hard at work on my project. The more I learn about GameSalad, the more interested I become in finishing my game. That means I've been writing less. Although, today, I hit a bit of a wall. Since I created the graphics from scratch, I figured that I would be able to do the sound effects too. However, the job of a foley artist is more challenging than I thought.

At first I was off to a pretty good start. I created fairly realistic sounding thrust. (Although, realistic is funny for a space shooter. Realistic sound effects in space could be no sounds at all. Heh... but that would make for a pretty dull game.) I tried playing around with Positional sound, as dynamic sound effects make for a more engaging experience. Although, it didn't work out the way I had planned. The sound was just stuck on one side, not the way I expected.

So, I did it mathematically...
25/(abs( game.Fighter X - self.Position.X )+abs( game.Fighter Y -( self.Position.Y -350)))

That's the volume for the main thruster of the capital ship. The thrust sound gets louder as you fly closer to the rear engines. I'm really impressed with the way GameSalad works. It really does make game creation easy. It also has a lot of options. With GameSalad, you don't have to know programming...

...but knowing math helps a lot.

It would be nice if the effect was in stereo, but that's good enough for now. Considering the main objective is to defend the Capital ship, it's nice to be able to hear it.

I spent a lot of time getting the gun sound just right. I think it's pretty good. I have two different versions... one regular and one power-up. This is important as I'm thinking of incentives for people to buy the game. I realize that I'll probably need a "lite" version and a full version of the game. With that on my mind, I'm getting frustrated. The pressure of standing out in the App store is often on my mind. I'm working hard on this game, but will it be successful?

With my game nearing completion, I'll likely to find out soon.

Photics · February 2010

I'm almost done with my game. Wow... it was pretty cool to actually hold my game in my hands... the graphics were so sharp, so beautiful. It was a great experience... heh... until I tried to move around. The accelerometer controls didn't work out as expected. I'm thinking an on-screen controller might be a better idea.

Getting the GameSalad viewer was tricky, but I got it to work. My iPod was too new. I had to upgrade my SDK. That wasted about two hours.

Everything else is done... I have a cool title-screen, instructions, power-ups, levels, great sound effects, awesome music. I'm going to improve the controls and then I think I can launch my game. I've made a list of people on this forum that were helpful and/or friendly. I think I might send them promo codes... but that can't happen if I don't get my game online, so it's back to work for me.

quantumsheep · February 2010

great stuff - thanks for the updates.

Might do a postmortem on one of my games at some point

QS

Photics · February 2010

19 days... that's what it took to go from rough sketch to submitting my app to the app store. I'm really impressed with GameSalad. Now, the waiting begins. Will my app be approved? I've had some trouble with Apple in the past, so I'm not certain of what will happen. However, I think my game is pretty good. When I found myself testing longer than I needed to, that's when I realized that my game was fun.

I'm going to wait until the game is approved, then I'll launch a "lite" version.

What was the hardest thing about the project? - It seems like there was always some technical hurdle. Once I figured out how to do one thing, there was something else to learn... controls, getting different actors to interact, radar vs minimap. There were many spots where I could have just given up. Staying determined is important. Testing was also a lot harder than I thought. On the Mac, my game played great. When I tested it on the iPod, it was horrible. I spent two days tweaking the game to be fun on the iPod.

What was the easiest? - The particle effects and physics are amazing. My next game is going to focus more on this. GameSalad made it really easy to add some great effects... like collision detection and thruster effects.

Photics: Revisions - Course Correction

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