Archive for December, 2013

Interview by Indie Games News

Sunday, December 15th, 2013

I was recently interviewed by Indie Game News.

You can read the full interview here.

Dave asked me some good questions such as “What are your proudest achievements?”, “What developers have inspired you?”, and he also garnered my thoughts on the “Indie Bubble” thing that is being talked about a lot at the moment.

It was a fun interview. Enjoy!

Titan Attacks mobile – Developer Diary #8: Jupiter and Titan!

Tuesday, December 10th, 2013

I made good progress since last week as I added in the whole of the Jupiter and Titan worlds.

Note that the backgrounds throughout the game are still placeholder and don’t have the fancy animated scenery of the original game yet.

I also made the Titan centipedes work and coded critical hit functionality on the enemies, which is quite cool.

Here’s a video!

New Features in Detail

– Added in all Jupiter graphics, animations, enemies, bullets, levels.
– Made sure the lurching enemies on Jupiter don’t fire when off screen.
– Added in all Titan graphics, animations, enemies, bullets, levels.
– Made centipedes and pods work on Titan
– Finished behaviour bass class loose ends
– Got Critical Hit working

Next up

– Bit more work on gidrah and entity base classes.
– Laserbrain! (this controls the enemies that fire lasers on Jupiter)
– Animation loose ends
– Bosses
– Player tank upgrades

Titan Attacks mobile – Developer Diary #7: MARS!

Thursday, December 5th, 2013

I’m back and the game is progressing well!

Since the last update in August I finished and shipped Spooky Bonus and it was a smash hit on the casual download portals!

Spooky Bonus’s success was a big relief for me because the reason I made it this summer/autumn instead of finishing Titan Attacks mobile was that I had completely run out of money and was rapidly going into debt. I couldn’t be sure how much money Titan Attacks mobile would in the current mobile market, and I had to bet on a safe win – and that win was Spooky Bonus.

Anyway, the good news is that I’m only working on Titan Attacks now until it’s done, and I expect that to be mid-January.

Video!

I made a quick video talking about the various Moon enemy behaviours I added and showing off the Mars world with the “Galaxian” style enemies. Take a look:

New Features

Here’s some more detail about the work I did:

– Square Rotation behaviour done. Can be first seen on level 24 (Moon world)
– Random behaviour done. Can be first seen on level 37 (Moon world)
– Lurch behaviour done. First seen on level 31 (Moon world)
– Divebomb behaviour done First seen on level 36 (Moon world)
– Verified all moon anims/sprites/enemy bullets work correctly and that levels are correct.
– Read in hotspots file which defines off-centre handles for the x/y coords of sprites. This means that the alien bullets and bombs appear and disappear at the correct y coordinates for example.
– Made Total Multiplier (an internal number) and Multiplier (visible to player) affect the starting position of enemies.
– Added in all Mars graphics, animations, enemies, bullets, levels.
– Galaxian behaviour done for Mars. Was quite a lot of work to get right! Cas used Yakly degrees (0-65535 for a complete circle) in a 16:16 fixed point number format to calculate all of the angles quickly (this was important for slow PCs back in 2003), but my engine didn’t support those. Now the port uses Radians, Yakly degrees, and plain old degrees. Crazy!

Next Up

– Titan Graphics and centipede behaviour
– Finish loose ends in the gidrah (enemy) class and behaviour class
– Laserbrain! (this isn’t as exciting as it sounds.)
– Animation loose ends (support a few extra XML animation commands)
– Bosses with turrets and health bars
– Player tank with all upgrades