In the App Store the icon is your only bait. Developing a good icon takes a lot of time and effort. We had an especially hard time capturing what we wanted to say with the Omegapixel icon. I don't think we hit the nail on the head with the Omegapixel icon, but I thought I would share the journey we took to get there regardless.
Omegapixel's original graphics consisted of simplistic bright shapes on a black background. They lent themselves to a simple and easily recognizable icon:
When the graphics evolved, we tried using in game elements as part of the icon:
After trying a bunch of combinations, we decided to focus on the ship and the Omegapixel:
At this point we liked the general idea, but the ship didn't popped. Everything bled together when scaled down. We experimented with drop-shadows, colors, contrast, and thickening key lines:
The ship in Omegapixel is controlled via a virtual joystick. The touch screen is not well suited to joystick like input and it is hard to get right. Omegapixel was built using cocos2d so we had the option to use SneakyInput, but we opted to roll our own code.
We've received a number of questions about the input code that we used, so I've decided to publish psuedocode of the implementation:
Sketchshare had an amazing run even though it was rather short. Sketchshare was a great app; he was the kind of app that would allow you to work collaboratively when you most needed to. Unlike most sketching apps, he had usefulness above and beyond drawing a doodle.
I remember when I first met Sketchshare. @abitofcode had announced his birth on Twitter and the cocos2d forums. As I got to know Sketchshare, I was jealous that I had not built Sketchshare, a complement to his parents, @abitofcode and @creativewax.
Sketchshare's removal was sudden. When I heard the news I could not believe it. Sketchshare was so young, but that short life was lived wonderfully. Featured by Apple, adored by critics, loved by fans. The amazing art that his existence facilitated will be missed.
Sketchshare has been taken from us by Apple. This is not a time for us to grieve but to remember that we do not know how long our apps have on this platform. We must live and develop accordingly. As developers it will always hurt when our apps are taken away. As users the pain is just as real.
Sketchshare will be forever missed and I hope that someday I will meet him again. I am thankful that I was given the chance to have know the app named Sketchshare.
We are currently developing our next title, but we are also working on another Omegapixel update. In addition to bug fixes and other small improvements, we are going to add a new upgrade to the mix. I have a number of ideas floating around in my head, but I want your feedback. Please vote in the poll below and help us decide which direction to go in.
If you have any upgrade ideas or other thoughts you want to share for future Omegapixel updates (more missons, game modes, etc), please leave a comment. Thanks!
Since we finished our Ludum Dare entry, I have been playing a few games per day. I am up to 68 games rated so far. I only played entries with a browser or OSX version, so I've skipped a lot of submissions.
One of the things I've noticed while browsing the games is the overwhelming number of submissions based on three interpretations of the theme: Ants, Planets, and Little People. This LD's theme, "Tiny World", was tricky. It wasn't hard to come up with ideas. It was hard to come up with clever ideas. We came up with ideas that matched each of those three interpretations.
Ants that need to be sorted via a magnifying glass;
A space entity flying around eating planets (ala Galactus);
Little people living inside the walls who rely on human's for food but need to avoid detection.
It isn't bad to pick an obvious idea and run with it. How you run with it is important. I just wish there was more variety. Anyway, enough ranting. Here are a few of my favorites so far:
Ant Command: I was tired of ants by the time I ran into this one, but the mood felt just right. The game didn't have a ton of depth, but I feel like the seed of something really cool is right below the surfae.
Tiny Timmy & Big Bill: This one made me laugh. You control Tiny Timmy & Big Bill at the same time, collecting things as you go.
Deconstructorium: A mad scientist shrinks himself down into the world of molecules. There is a clever mix and match system for adding and removing power ups. The game feels a bit repetitive at times, but could be polished into a really great game.
Boxed In: A really fun platformer. The controls are a bit complex as you control both your character and the box you are inside of. The complexity is part of the charm.
Cage: Did an excellent job at evoking an emotional response.
Predicament: Excellent mood, graphics, and story. A very well rounded entry.
Asylum: You are trapped in a padded room. The intro goes on a bit long but that just caused me to jump against the walls repeatedly which is probably what would happen if I were really in that room. The game turns dark and gets interesting after the intro. Good execution.
Memento XII: Another stunning entry. Great story telling.
Faelanx: I was impressed by the sheer amount of game here. It gets a bit repetitive after awhile.
I am sure there are a ton of other amazing games in the 1402 submissions, but I haven't had time to get through them all yet.
Four Hats was just picked as #13 in SlideToPlay's A Year of Indies: The Very Best of Under The Radar! They choose from over 200 games that they have featured in their Under The Radar segment over the past year. I feel like there is a joke about yellow submarines somewhere in that.
Play it and let us know what you think. You can get directly to Tiny's World here.
MONDAY 4:30 PM (67.5 hrs, 4.5 hrs remaining)
Sorry for the neglect! Haven't updated the blog because I have been in a race to pack as much game in as possible.
Where are we?
We are done! Well almost. The game and everything on our todo is finished. There are little warts here and there in various browsers that I will work on cleaning up in the remaining hours. Every game requires twice as much time to polish as it does to get working, so I will also work to pack in as much polish as possible in the remaining time. Despite all of that, if we had to submit right now we could.
SUNDAY 9:45 PM (48.75 hrs)
48.75 hrs?!?! Yep. We are participating in the jam which runs for 72 hours. One more day to go!
Where are we?
Toph finished recording the music. It is epic.
Steve finished the animating and all other art assets.
Sal finished all the game mechanics and world building.
The only thing left is polishing up cutscenes and adding the credits.
We should finish tomorrow with plenty of time to spare.
SUNDAY 4:30 PM (43.5 hrs)
All the big art assets are done. Only minor polish left in the art department.
Still waiting on music and the bits of polish related to adding that in.
The game is playable, but the start and finish need scripting.
Will post another video soon.
There will be a game by the 48 hour mark! We are in the Jam (since we aren't working solo) so we have an additional 24 hours beyond that. That should give us plenty of time to polish things up.
SUNDAY 1:15 PM (40.25 hrs)
All the character animations are done. World map is laid out. Things move around in it. Next up polishing the mechanics and making the world feel full.
SUNDAY 10 AM (37 hrs)
Oh hey there. We are awake. Steve woke up pretty early and has been back at animating. I slept a bit longer. Oddly I couldn't fall asleep at 3:30 AM despite being tired. Go go go!
SUNDAY 3:30 AM (30.5 hrs)
Steve called it a night about a half hour ago and I think I am going to do the same. I made it a bit later into the night than I expected. Cori brought me a Rooffbeer and the sugar kept me going.
I am still getting work done, but I know I will be much more focused and productive after a quick nap. Tomorrow we should be able to start whacking things off the checklist pretty fast and hopefully the first draft of the music will come in.
Tomorrow's Todo (and by tomorrow I mean when I wake up):
Intro scripting
Credits
Character transitions
Final character animations
Dialogue bubbles
Character shadoes
Fountain animation
Clean up site wrapper
Polish z ordering and collision box crude until its purtty
Music & SFX
Tree shadows
SUNDAY 1:45 AM (28.75 hrs)
Bam!
SATURDAY 9 PM (24 hrs)
Woah! It's been 24 hours. So far this jam has definitely been tougher than the last Ludum Dare. It took longer to settle on an idea and work out the details. I am working with an unfamilar framework. I came into Friday with no sleep due to the Omegapixel launch.
I will be very happy to have the extra 24 hours afforded to the Jam. If we were wrapping up in 24 hours like the main comp, then we might be in trouble. With 48 hours left on the clock I think we will be in a good place.
SATURDAY 7 PM (22 hrs)
Naps are awesome!! Sal here. My brain had completely stopped functioning due to sleep deprevation. I was fighting and fighting with my tools and things were devolving into fits of insanity. One nap later and we have a solution. We are moving ahead with building our little world.
SATURDAY 5:00 PM (20 hrs)
Steve Here. Sal is stuck, time is ticking away and nothing is getting accomplished. I've heard swear words... lots of them. He's asleep now. Maybe it'll help.
In the meantime, I'm still building this idyllic little small town. Haven't gotten to the actual Tiny Tim character yet. That might be next...
SATURDAY 1:30 PM (16.5 hrs)
We have backgrounds:
Other parts of the world are starting to come together as well.
And now it's lunch time!
SATURDAY 12 PM (15 hrs)
Things are starting to take shape. After lots of work with no real visual feedback everything is starting to come together. You still can't tell exactly what is going on here, but here is some video anyway:
SATURDAY 9:30 AM (12.5 hrs)
Back up and at it. More words after coffee.
Saturday 5 AM (8 hrs)
So about "Tiptoe Through The Tulips"... We are working on recording (at least) two versions of the song for the game. Toph has most of the arrangement done and will be recording and producing them tomorrow (or today, however that works).
I am about burnt. Still working, but this will likely be my last post until I get up from my inevitable nap. Here is a quick screep caputure of where we are:
SATURDAY 4:45 AM (7.75 hrs)
Steve is crashing for a few hours before resuming work on the world assets. I am going to attempt to power through for a bit to get all the new animations loaded in an looking good.
SATURDAY 4 AM (7 hrs)
Here are a bunch of the walking animations:
SATURDAY 3:16 AM (6.25 hrs)
Taking a snack break. Pizza. Icecream sandwiches. Cranberry Juice.
Game logic is coming together nicely. Glancing over at Steve and it appears he is well into animating. We will post some gifs in a bit.
SATURDAY 1:30 AM (4.5 hours in)
With our idea settled we have been slowly building up the base of the game. Right now the actual gameplay is a box moving around in a wrapped world. Nothing great to look at, but we should have something soon.
Here is some in progress art to hold you over...
Map of the world:
Outline of character:
I've been working in CraftyJS which I have only built a few quick prototypes with before this jam. Not knowing the API like the back of my hand is definitely slowing me down compared to working with cocos2d. Having to read the source to make up for missing documentation is also a source of some pain.
FRIDAY 11:59 PM
When exploring different ideas to match the theme Tiny Tim came up. And then he came up again. And again. We tried as hard as possible to get away but then we played this song:
AND we were hooked...
So our Ludum Dare entry is "Tiny's World". Tiny Tim is playing Tiptoe Through The Tulips on a street corner to the object of his hearts desire. She rejects him and his music. After she leaves a passerby is infected by his tune. You control the passerby wandering around the world infecting the world with Tiny's music.
Later Steve can come up with some catchy way to describe it...
FRIDAY 10:45 PM
We have been tossing ideas back and forth and are very close to something. Will post an update soon with our projects intent. Some of the ideas we discarded:
Search for things with a magnifying glass
Giant person smashing things
Tiny people living in walls
Murderous rampage on the It's A Small World ride
Eating planets
Big fish in a small pond
Fairies
Shrink Rays
Spaceman on a tiny alien world
An entire game only a few pixels wide
Agoraphobic man never leaves home
FRIDAY 9 PM (It's go time)
The theme is Tiny World. Let the brainstorming begin!
FRIDAY 8 PM (-1 Hour)
Ludum Dare is upon us once again and within an hour we will have our theme. We will be posted updates and playable demos as we build whatever it is we are going to build. Keep checking in for updates and also follow us over on twitter: @Tacograveyard. Totally pumped!
We are participating in the Jam rather than the main comp because the entire Taco Graveyard crew will be in on the action:
Sal - hacking code together
Steve - making the pretty
Toph - musician extraordinairre
We also have Cori & Denise with us to help during the brain storming phase.
We've decided that we will wait to decide what tools we are using until after we hear the theme and come up with an idea. Some possibilities include Unity, CraftyJS, some flavor of cocos2d, or pygame.
Hello, Steve here. Well, surprise, we have a new game out! We hadn't planned on releasing it for another week or so as we are working on a new game over the weekend for Ludum Dare. Somewhere there was a mix up and Apple has it out now. So, download away!
The game is OMEGAPIXEL. Sal started working on it as we wrapped up FOUR HATS - he had an idea for a very Atari-pixel level game with a simple gameplay mechanic of switching places with this white pixel as you try to keep it out of harm. A few months and a bunch of work later, we have a full game - I redid the art in a more NES-pixel style, added a storyline, we added levels and bosses and powerups, a ton of twists on the teleporting mechanic, Chris Negrini did the soundtrack for it with some chiptuney Metroid-meets-shoegaze stuff. And now it's out!
So what is OMEGAPIXEL? Well, you play as Mohawk Jones, and your job is to protect the Omegapixel. You smash through enemy ships, defeat aliens and destroy large planets to keep that pixel safe. Of course it gets trickier as you go along, but I won't spoil the twists.
The game is free, we do have some in-app purchases if you like the game and want to power up your ship right away. There's an in-game currency as well so you can enjoy the entire game completely free, but for a buck you can access more, right away. If you like it.
I've been spending more time with Unity. I understand the basics. I can prototype a game in a few hours. It is a powerful tool that lets you build 3d games before you understand the nuts and bolts of 3d.
After my first day with Unity, something bothered me about it. I thought I disliked it because it was too high up the stack of abstractions. I thought I disliked it because it was too much point and click and not enough code. Since then I've decided that Unity is a good introduction to the topic. You can start with Unity and then work your way down the stack. You can build things by dragging and dropping components, but you can move on from that.
After reading this post by Jeff Atwood, I realized what really bothers me about Unity: no source. Documentation is good, but nothing beats the source code. I referenced the cocos2d source countless times while building Four Hats and Omegapixel. I've even hacked the source when I felt like I needed to for the project. Neither of those are options when using Unity.
I have developed software using the Microsoft stack: C#, .NET, MS SQL Server, IIS, Windows Server, etc; and I've developed software using an Open Source stack: Python, Django, MySQL/Postgres, MongoDB, Apache, Linux, etc. I like the ideals behind Open Source, but I am not a zealot. I prefer an Open Source stack not for any idealogical reasons, but because having the source code available is a tangible benefit. Unity suffers the same drawback as a Microsoft stack.
Unity is a powerful tool. It is a tool that we will use if it fits the projects, but it will always have that one thing holding it back. No source code.
I built another simple game prototype using Crafty. My goals when building this prototype were:
Gain more familiarity with Crafty in the lead up to Ludum Dare
Test out animations
Load animations from TexturePacker output
Test touch input for mobile devices
Test cross browser viability
The prototype was a success in regards to all the goals above, but I think the best thing to come out of the prototype was a pile of notes on the differences between Crafty and cocos2d. I'll share some of them here.
Transitioning From Cocos2d
When you spend enough time with a particular framework you start to think in its terms. Here are a few points that will give a head start someone moving from cocos2d to Crafty:
Origin: The origin is in the top-left instead of the bottom-left. This should be familiar to anyone used to web development.
Anchor Points: The anchor point is in the top-left of a sprite, not at its center. The anchor point is not adjustable. This bothered me enough that I whipped up a little component that adds an adjustable anchor point. There might be a better way to do this, but here is the code I used:
Asset Pipeline: If you use cocos2d, then you likely use TexturePacker (and if not, what is wrong with you?). You can continue using TexturePacker with Crafty by changing the data format of the output from 'cocos2d' to 'JSON'. I recommend that you also disable 'Allow Rotation' and 'Trim'.
Flipping: 2D objects have a flip method but once an object is flipped you can't unflip it. I created another component that provides flipX and flipY methods that can be used to flip a sprite back and forth:
Scaling: I didn't see any methods or properties for scaling a sprite in the documentation or the source. I may write a component and post it in a future post.
Tags: Tags are a great way to attach extra information to cocos2d nodes without much hassle. Onlarger projects you should probably create components that properly incapsulate the data that you represent with tags, but for a quick prototype tags are priceless. Here is a component for adding tags:
Gameloop: Most cocos2d games have a gameloop in the form of a scheduled update or step function. To emulate that pattern in Crafty you can use the EnterFrame event. EnterFrame does not pass the time since the last event, so you will need to jury rig your own step event:
Aside: Touch Input
Crafty will treat taps as mouse clicks but the event handling code does not properly handle all touch events. This bit of code does convert touch events to mouse events:
BUT touch events have different data than mouse events. This conversion is not enough for touch events (in particular touchmove) in Safari. This also ignores the fact that multiple touches can be passed in a single event.
I added a quick hack so that single touches would work as expected:
More work is needed to add proper multitouch handling.
The Prototype
The prototype feels like it could be a fun little game after a serious round of polishing. Caveat: I didn't test this on a wide array of platforms so it may explode on you. And without further ado:
