Obliteration Fire TV Conversion WIP Thread (It's Out!)

jonmulcahy

My last thread on converting A Long Way Home to the fireTV while adding gamepad support really helped me keep up the motivation to get it done, so I'm doing the same thing for Obliteration.

Obliteration was made over a few weeks in time for the original iPad launch, and over the years has been ported everywhere. This is the original launch video for the iPad.

Over the years the game has slowly been upgraded: gamecenter was integrated, it was ported to Android/Win8/Nook, and a universal widescreen version was released. This is the current app preview, not much has changed:

I was looking through my back catalog to see if I could port anything else to the FireTV, and 2 games came to mind. Z is for Zombie and Obliteration. I ultimately chose Obliteration because of it's one button gameplay, perfect for people who only have the little remote. I also wanted to give it a proper update for desktop devices.

Over the past week or so I've been hard at work. I had to completely redesign the main menu to support both touch/keyboard/joystick controls. I also redesigned the scoring system, using a custom font to display the current value. I'm testing the waters with iAP on the FireTV, so I had to implement an unlock system so people can play the first 5 levels for free and then be prompted to unlock the remaining 30. Over the past 2 days I've been redoing the detection system. The previous method actually constrained the size of the explosions, and sometimes caused issues with the building pieces themselves. The new method is a hands off approach which should be even more accurate.

Implementing joystick controls has been the hardest on the level select screen. While the look of it has not changed, the entire logic behind it has been rewritten.

No videos of it running on the TV yet, but I tested it out last night and it was awesome. I'll hopefully get one tonight.

Braydon_SFX

Really enjoyed your other thread, Jon! Can't wait to see this one on the FireTV!

jonmulcahy

quick preview of the game, just showing the updated artwork, new menu and the additional bomb type. I'm submitting the game tonight.

jamie_c

Looks great, I love the hand drawn graphics. It's really fun porting and playing games on the FireTV. I've done one of mine so far.

I read the other day that Apple is expected to release a new AppleTV next month with a store and SDK. Sure would be great if Gamesalad games could be ported to that as well (if it happens).

jonmulcahy

@jamie_c said:
Looks great, I love the hand drawn graphics. It's really fun porting and playing games on the FireTV. I've done one of mine so far.

I read the other day that Apple is expected to release a new AppleTV next month with a store and SDK. Sure would be great if Gamesalad games could be ported to that as well (if it happens).

I imagine that it wouldn't be much of a change to support the AppleTV SDK. It'll be running some version of iOS, and we already have joystick support...

jonmulcahy

and submitted

this game was supposed to be a quick port, and I ended up spending 2-3 weeks on it. I redid the menu system, added an in game store, redid the sound effects, most of the graphics and added 10MB of new artwork. Now I want to port those changes to iOS and Android.

MentalDonkeyGames

Really cool looking game. Well done!

neoman

Nice! I love the doodle graphics and the music ...

jonmulcahy

Got a FireTV? Download Obliteration for free today!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product?ASIN=B012L5O9RG&redirect=true&ref=mas_ty