Obliteration II - Development Thread

jonmulcahy

I've decided to start a development thread for my game Obliteration II. This is the sequel to the game Obliteration which I had created for the launch of the iPad.

I've been on a break from development since I released my last game A Long Way Home. And I wanted to do something fun. I always wanted to make a bigger and better sequel to the game, using everything I've learned in the past 2 years.

What will be different in the sequel? A lot of things.

- There will be a ton more levels. The first game had 35 levels set across 7 stages. I want this game to have 100 levels across 10 stages.
- A Random Level generator - This was something I wanted to add to the first game, but it would have required a complete rewrite. This will allow you to quickly generate a level and blow it up.
- Survival Mode - See how many randomly generated levels in a row you can destroy without failing.
- There will be a ton more buildings. The first game had 24 different building types. I want double that in this game.
- There will be more interactive controls. The first game had a plane that was flying in a static circle and you tapped once to drop a bomb, and again to explode it. In Obliteration II you use a joystick to fly the aircraft, and have two buttons, one to drop the bombs, another to explode them. So you have the ability to deploy a few bombs before you explode them all, or one at a time.
- Gamecenter. In Obliteration GameCenter was not integrated until a year after the game came out. Obliteration II will launch with leader boards for the each stage.
- Detailed Artwork. Obliteration was all hand drawn by me, which I think gave it a unique style. I don't have the time to do that again, especially with the size of the game I want it to be (buildings and locations). So, this game will all be vector art sourced from professional artists.
- Better music. The music in Obliteration was made possible thanks to GarageBand. Obliteration II will have real background music.


That's all I can think of for now. I've been working on the game for about 2 weeks now and it's already coming together with the test artwork I have. I'll have a preview video up this weekend.

I'm still trying to decide if I should release it for free with 10 levels with a $.99 IAP to buy the rest of the levels. Or should I just release it with all 100 levels for $.99? What are your thoughts on this?

I also plan to release this on Android, the Kindle Fire and the Nook at the same time.

Here is a review of the original game which is currently available in the iPad, iPhone, Android Market, as well as the Kindle Fire:

App Surge

Hey John,
I loved the original Obliteration. It was a ton of fun and I'm happy you're making a sequel.

About the 10 free levels and $0.99 IAP vs. $0.99 full game, I have the same type of problem. The game I'm working on right now will have 100 levels and I don't know which one to do!

Best of luck,
Henry Abrams

quantumsheep

I'm certainly looking forward to this! I have the original on my Mac, and, if you'll excuse the pun, it's a BLAST to play.

See what I did there? Did you? Did you SEE?



Anyway, it all sounds very groovy! I'd warn against making it *too* complicated vis a vis the controls. The original has that 'simple' gameplay that proves incredibly addictive. Not sure how complicating things will make things better, but I'm sure you know what you're doing!

Any advice I give concerning IAP is going to be skewed. I'll just say that I'll buy it on day one at full price.

Good luck with it sir!

QS :D

jonmulcahy

yea, it is a fine line to make the game better with out overcomplicating it. one of the biggest requests in the original game was to control the plane. it's using a very simple control method, similar to mini squadron.

I'm still torn on IAP. I want to get it into as many hands as possible after A Long Way Home got screwed, but I don't know the general publics thoughts on IAP. Time will tell I guess. I've put a poll out over on touch arcade, but not too many responses yet.

Philie

I say release it for free, with the IAP to unlock more levels. Users will get their hands on it, love the game, and be bummed out that they beat all the levels, but they loved it that much, that they will pay to unlock the rest

quantumsheep

"I'm still torn on IAP. I want to get it into as many hands as possible after A Long Way Home got screwed, but I don't know the general publics thoughts on IAP. Time will tell I guess. I've put a poll out over on touch arcade, but not too many responses yet."

I can certainly sympathise...

Why not release the game as normal, and then see how it does? If it does great (fingers crossed!) then no need for IAP. If it's not performed to your expectations, make a second version with IAP.

I know I'm probably in the minority, but whenever I see a game that's free, I imagine 'oh, it'll have IAP in it'. I then see it *does* have IAP in it, and despite it being free, I don't bother downloading it.

Case in point, there's a new Judge Dredd game out on iPhone! Great! I go to iTunes, and see it has IAP.

I LOVE Judge Dredd, ever since I was a teenager. But I'll be ****ed if I support this kind of thing.

That's just me though!

QS :D

3xL

@sheep

The problem with most freemium or iAP games is that this is not mentioned in the info. Maybe if they put "try the first ten levels free" or something indicating it, it will get a better response.

jonmulcahy

yea, it's something I'm really torn about. I'm coding the project with the expectation of releasing it with IAP, so even if I don't, I can quickly make a lite version that upgrades.

I didn't get too much work on it today, and yesterday I realized I have some scale issues, the attacking craft is the size of a 3 story building window , so I need to do some adjusting. The controls are smooth as butter on the iPad2, and the game is humming along nicely at 30MB of ram so far, but I expect that to go up as I add some buildings.

3xL

Ah I see. Let me know if u need music. My next game is gonna be free with iAP. So it will advertise it self

jonmulcahy

It's been a few weeks so it's time for an update. I've been mostly spending my time tweaking the physics, tweaking the control system and working on the buildings. I've got 7 buildings sliced and diced and in the game already, with 35 buildings sized and ready to be sliced up into explodable pieces. I'm also still sourcing more stuff to blow up. I think the game is looking really good.

When I started making this game there were rumors of the iPad3 having a retina display, so I worked with the assumption it did, which made a huge difference. This is one of the buildings from the game, non retina is on the left, retina on the right. I'm glad I put the extra work in ahead of time.



Here's a quick screenshot of the onscreen controls. On the left is the control stick which you use to fly the ship around. A drops the bombs and B explodes them.
The background and ship are just test art to give the game some personality when testing:



That's it for now!

jonmulcahy

I've got 42 buildings so far, here they are. These are right out of their raw vector form, I'm going to be tweaking a lot of the colors on the green buildings to give them more personality, but it's really coming together.

beefy_clyro

Gotta admit I'm gonna miss the hand drawn and coloured in vibe but this is going to look so much more professional. Huge difference in the retina version as well from above

jonmulcahy

yea, the hand drawn stuff is just too much work for me right now, i don't have the time. Maybe Obliteration III

jonmulcahy

Still plugging away at this one. It took a long time to get all the buildings sliced up into retina displace pieces with each section being divisible by 4. Right ow I have 53 buildings, and each one is split up into up to 30 pieces. Today I spent some time working on the level director that I use to construct the levels based on table entries. There are 7 possible positions a building can be in, before today each position could only support 7 buildings. Right ow positions 1 and 2 can support up to 30 buildings, I'll be expanding that to 53 tonight. I have to keep an eye on performance as I expand this. This one actor has 7 different rule sets (ones for each position) and in each set there will be 53 nested if statements.

So that is where it stands right now. I think I'm going to aim to have 60 total buildings across as many levels as I can think of. At least 100, but with 60 buildings, I'm sure I could come up with 200 maybe.

With leader boards and gamecenter achievments, all I need now is for iPad retina display support! (and more motivation)

jonmulcahy

I had a set back tonight, I spent a good 3-4 hours building my level director on friday, and today the project wouldn't open. sure enough, removing that actor's xml file from the project fixed everything, so I pulled an old copy of it and got back to work.

When I was doing this, I was also trying to find a way to make my life less painful as well as improve performance, and I'm glad the corruption happened. I went from having hours and hours of work left to do to completing it from scratch in 1 hour.

it's nice when things work out like that.

quantumsheep

Still plugging away at this one. It took a long time to get all the buildings sliced up into retina displace pieces with each section being divisible by 4. Right ow I have 53 buildings, and each one is split up into up to 30 pieces. Today I spent some time working on the level director that I use to construct the levels based on table entries. There are 7 possible positions a building can be in, before today each position could only support 7 buildings. Right ow positions 1 and 2 can support up to 30 buildings, I'll be expanding that to 53 tonight. I have to keep an eye on performance as I expand this. This one actor has 7 different rule sets (ones for each position) and in each set there will be 53 nested if statements.

So that is where it stands right now. I think I'm going to aim to have 60 total buildings across as many levels as I can think of. At least 100, but with 60 buildings, I'm sure I could come up with 200 maybe.

With leader boards and gamecenter achievments, all I need now is for iPad retina display support! (and more motivation)

That's great news on the improvements that tables have brought to the game.

Looking back over the thread, I noticed you outline the control scheme.

Could you give us a few more details as to the player movement/bomb behaviour?

I was thinking an option might be to use relative touch controls. Or perhaps have just one button instead of A and B. Tap the button to release a bomb - tap it again to detonate, for example.

Looking lovely!

Cheers,

QS :D

EDIT: Baaaaah - re-read the original post and saw you wanted several bombs to fall and then detonate. Silly sheepy!

LeonardDeveloper

looking good, You should ad a tiny touch of "Doodle" Just for a bit of Nostalgia about the old game