Week Nine / Day One

Another tiny hiatus from development work, but I was tasked with driving my cousin's car from Las Vegas to the Poconos. She is in the Navy and is being stationed in Virginia, and wasn't up to making the drive solo, so I flew out early in the month and did some of the harder driving back. It was an awesome trip and a great experience, and I can't wait to do it again soon, albeit on my own. However, it is time to dive back into development and get Chromovis finished.

When I started this morning I made the following list, which I'm pretty sure is the major work left to do:
- Final ship and planet artwork
- Animation for ship destruction
- Music
- Complete 'About' section with proper credits
- Add some sort of 'Thanks for Playing' banner with update plans at the end of the last level
- Add a parameter to the level loader and inputs to allow camera zoom to be tailored to each level
- Fix User Defaults for iOS 4
- Tune gameplay
- 20 full levels
- Create game/studio website and press release

There really isn't that much. One thing I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do before the initial release is test on any other hardware, which is bothersome but I'm not too worried. My phone is the lowest version anyone should be trying to play on (standard 3G), and it runs great. As long as it doesn't run too quick on the 3GS or the 4G, everything should be fine. Getting user defaults to work for iOS 4 might be a bit of a pain, but it is one of those things I'm going to have to learn eventually, might as well get it working now.

The longest part of this list is building 20 good levels, with tuned gameplay. Luckily when messing around with the parameters for Kepler's equation of planetary motion I found a sweet spot (which, for the interested when dealing with units of distance in the double digits seems to be a universal gravitational constant of .01 with masses of both bodies being around 30-50) that tailors pretty well to a smooth enjoyable gaming experience.

I moved the tutorials around a bit, and added some more. They are now divided into two sets, the first of which simply introduces gameplay concepts, including the dead planets seen below which I added today:



You can also see the corresponding level input file to get an idea of what actually comprises a created level. The second set of tutorials teaches the player a few of the basic moves that can be done with the ship when trying to solve puzzles. That way the player gets a feel for how to play, and is then introduced to the mechanics which gives way to more advanced abilities.

As you may have figured out, the level builder is not on that list above, and that's because I don't think I'll be finishing it before initial release. To just get a basic set of 20 levels out shouldn't be too difficult, and it was going to be quite rough as it is, definitely not something I would want to release in its current form. Depending on the reaction the game gets from players I'll decide whether it will be worth completing.

On that note, I began working on levels today as well. The first is called 'Line Rider', as the player needs to zig zag their orbit down a line of planets towards the goal. The second is called 'Kepler's Gauntlet', a mix of planets orbiting in and out of each other that the player must traverse in order to reach the goal. You can see shots of each respectively below:



The last thing that needs to be done is getting a website together. Right from the get go I would like to support players via a website, listing bug fixes, version changes, future projects and maybe high score lists a little later on. At the minimum I need something that will launch alongside the game to give myself a bit of a professional online presence.

I'm pretty sure that is it for today. I think this week will be mostly about tuning and getting levels created, as I think I can finish everything else besides the website in another week. Things are getting close, so keep with me.