Untitled - surviver game - wip
LAdrian
Member Posts: 237
Hello everyone,
I've been following this great community since a few months when I started working on my first iPhone game.
In the beginning the work was very slow but recently I started to allocate more and more time, working 6-7 hours a day after my full time job. It's a great joy to create something from scratch and to have complete control over the creative part, I really enjoy working on the game.
I'm working on the game together with my wife - she's painting the backgrounds on canvas, bug testing the game but also testing the gameplay.
Recently I've asked for the help of my best friend who's an 3d animator to help with the characters, he's in charge of rigging, enveloping and of course animating the characters.
I am building the game mechanics, the characters in 3d and retouch in photoshop the paintings that my wife made. I'm also doing the VFX for the weapons and all the blood.
Like the title said the game is a survivor type, zombieville and twin-blades are the closest type but it won't have zombies. It will have a few unique features that will separate it from the rest but I'll talk more about those when the release date will be closer. Also we didn't found a name yet
The game mechanics is 80% done, the Hero part in complete, the weapons are implemented and work as they should.
Style wise we are going for a combination of painted 2d background plus pre-rendered 3d characters, everything with a cartoony touch. We are going to give the blood a special attention
The artwork is a little behind but that's the easy part as both my and my friend are 3d artist. The artwork part of the Hero is still WIP and in continuous changing, most of the weapons aren't done yet and I'm still experimenting with the concept art of the monsters. Also the environments are still WIP.
The biggest problem and concern is the memory management of the engine. We are trying to make it work on iPhone 3GS and on iPhone4. As we don't have any programming knowledge GameSalad was the obvious choice but we are running out of memory pretty fast. We have our hand tied and only Gendai can help here and that's the most difficult part of the job, knowing that you can't change anything in this regard. Obviously we have been very careful with the optimization and we are still looking for ways to improve the memory usage (currently the frame rate isn't an issue).
Ok, enough talk, hope I didn't bored you guys.
Oh, one more thing, we are HOPING to release the game in november. If we aren't going to be able to do that I think the best would be to wait after the winter holidays.
I'll keep you updated with the progress and please look at the screenshots as WIP.
Critics and comments always welcomed,
Thank,
Adrian
I've been following this great community since a few months when I started working on my first iPhone game.
In the beginning the work was very slow but recently I started to allocate more and more time, working 6-7 hours a day after my full time job. It's a great joy to create something from scratch and to have complete control over the creative part, I really enjoy working on the game.
I'm working on the game together with my wife - she's painting the backgrounds on canvas, bug testing the game but also testing the gameplay.
Recently I've asked for the help of my best friend who's an 3d animator to help with the characters, he's in charge of rigging, enveloping and of course animating the characters.
I am building the game mechanics, the characters in 3d and retouch in photoshop the paintings that my wife made. I'm also doing the VFX for the weapons and all the blood.
Like the title said the game is a survivor type, zombieville and twin-blades are the closest type but it won't have zombies. It will have a few unique features that will separate it from the rest but I'll talk more about those when the release date will be closer. Also we didn't found a name yet
The game mechanics is 80% done, the Hero part in complete, the weapons are implemented and work as they should.
Style wise we are going for a combination of painted 2d background plus pre-rendered 3d characters, everything with a cartoony touch. We are going to give the blood a special attention
The artwork is a little behind but that's the easy part as both my and my friend are 3d artist. The artwork part of the Hero is still WIP and in continuous changing, most of the weapons aren't done yet and I'm still experimenting with the concept art of the monsters. Also the environments are still WIP.The biggest problem and concern is the memory management of the engine. We are trying to make it work on iPhone 3GS and on iPhone4. As we don't have any programming knowledge GameSalad was the obvious choice but we are running out of memory pretty fast. We have our hand tied and only Gendai can help here and that's the most difficult part of the job, knowing that you can't change anything in this regard. Obviously we have been very careful with the optimization and we are still looking for ways to improve the memory usage (currently the frame rate isn't an issue).
Ok, enough talk, hope I didn't bored you guys.
Oh, one more thing, we are HOPING to release the game in november. If we aren't going to be able to do that I think the best would be to wait after the winter holidays.
I'll keep you updated with the progress and please look at the screenshots as WIP.
Critics and comments always welcomed,
Thank,
Adrian
Comments
Have you tested on a device yet? Also whats your ram usage?
@chosenonestudios, Thanks. I've tested only on my 3gs, the frame rate is between 45 and 35 witch is fine, is not very fast paced action so it's ok. The ram usage on the other hand... right now is around 50-52Mb and we still need to add the artwork for the enemies, the VFX for the weapons and sound so things don't look good
Images: 23.2 MB
Sounds: 0 KB
Game Engine: 13.6 MB
Other: 14.1 MB
Total: 50.9 MB
Like I said, is the first time I'm using GS and I'm sure there are ways to optimize the game.
Btw, does anyone know that Other is?
Thanks!
Are you using the heavy hitters, I.E. spawns, constrains, timers etc.? Also make sure you optimize the audio heavily when you add it.
I dont think anyones really sure whats in other haha. I know someone on here posted that they had around 99 mgb of ram being used in other... Scary Stuff...
www.marcosriffel.com
We've been putting so much effort in this game, as many on this forum also did, I would be very disappointed not to be able to finish it because of a technical issue that I can't fix.
I have a few from all the heavy hitters, for example the bullets and the muzzle-flash are being spawned each time the user fires. On the other hand more heavy actors like the Enemies are recycled (moved off screen when they die). Lot's of timers and a few constrains. But from my understanding this should have an impact on the FPS and not on the Ram usage.
Darren.
Images should have sides of 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512, or 1024 or else the iphone will round up as far as ram goes. So an image with a side of 513 will use the same ram as an image with a side of 1024.
Dane
Thanks for the support and for the suggestions about how to optimize the game.
It's always nice to hear when you are on the right track, it gives you power to continue working
I'm trying to use 8 bit format as much as possible but after a quick test I found that the difference between 8 and 24 bit isn't that big, again was just a quick test.
Regarding the power of 2 textures, here I made some mistakes so few of them aren't the right size and it's on the to fix list.
Good luck with your games guys, I'm looking forward to see more stuff from this great community
I'll keep you posted with the updates
This is a new asset for the game. Unfortunately I can't spend more than 3-4 hours per asset so it might not be of the highest quality.
When I'll do the wallpapers for marketing I will have to add more details and improve some of the textures but until then I need to make them ASAP.
Hope you like it,
Adrian
I cant wait to purchase, Well done mate!
It really gives us strength to continue with the sleepless nights and working weekends :P
Cheers,
Adrian
I work with my wife on our games too, we put in some serious "after work" hours. Proper excited to see more wip on this, lookin great so far.
Wow.
Marc n Soph
Also, yes it looks fantastic, cant wait to see some more!
I'm starting to have problems with the memory leaks, I really hope that the next release will fix this or I'm going to start looking for alternatives.
The "other" section of the RAM usage (that apparently no one know what it is) keep growing and growing until the game crashes (at around 69mb at my 3GS). Not even loading a new scene decreases the amount of memory that "other" is eating
I'm trying to remain optimistic and to continue working
Again, I'm very glad you like the graphic style
Thanks,
Adrian
Is it puppet themed? I ask because the main character seems like he's behind a puppet 'stage".
We are working hard to finish on time. The weapons are right now our top priority and in one week we should have them ready with effects and everything.
I wanted to share with you the mini-gun I did today. It has more details than are need for the in-game look and the reason is that it's going to be used for wallpapers so it needs to look good event at high rez.
The in-game version is done but the high rez one is still WIP It needs more shader tweaks but I'll do that when I will have the scene with the character and with the final lights.... bellow is more like a "studio" render
I hope you like it and I also hope that in a week or so we can show the weapons in action
Thank,
Adrian
Good work!
Btw, does anyone knows why the particles looks so different (bad) on the iPhone compared to the ones showing in the preview on the mac? There's something wrong with the opacity and the size and also some other differences.
Thanks,
Adrian
Some Work in Progress screenshots with new weapons (not all of them though, some will be surprises :P)
Btw, the monsters that you might see in there are the with some very old artwork and we had another story in mind. We now settled on the final version and the monsters will be completely remade
Any comments and critics are more than welcomed!
btw, I found out what the problem with the particles was... I had an old version of the viewer
Thanks,
Adrian
http://www.reactive4.com/
website launching soon