Very nearly done

Today I have finally submitted Helium Boy for review for the Apple appstore. I'm slightly ahead of schedule because I cheated a bit with the last two levels. I was really bored with level design and didn't feel that I could make them very interesting so I made them rather short.

So next week I'll be working on a trailer and try to make sure it runs on as many Android phones as possible while waiting for Apples review team. I also need to fix support for the touchpad on Xperia Play, but that turned out to be quite a hassle. You need to use the NativeActivity class, which is only supported from android 2.3, for it to work so I have to make two versions and change some of the code structure.

Looking back at the blog I realised that I have only been working on it for about two months now. It feels like forever so I was rather suprised. Even with the original version (of which there is little left in the game) and the Wii port I made a few years ago, I still haven't worked on it for more than 5-6 months in total. While the game is hardly massive or even very good, I have to say I'm a bit proud considering the short development time.

Almost done

I just need to make two more levels and then fix the iphone version and then, after five and a half years (or three months depending on how you count) Helium Boy will finally be done. Hopefully I'll get it out by mid october.
Anyway, here's a quick video:

I can't decide what to work on

So I started working a bit on helium boy. In my last post I said that I would still focus mostly on GMC though. However, shortly after I posted that I started working full time on Helium Boy and set up a schedule that I have followed pretty rigorously. I have made a couple of new levels and the game is nearly halfway done and it's set to be released in about a month and a half. I'm getting extremely tired of doing leveldesign though and this weekend I started on a new game... I really want to finnish a game soon so I can release something; but I kind of want to work on all three games at the same time

As I mentioned in my last post I've started porting/remaking my old game Helium Boy to Android. Yesterday I did a little update to the main character, and I'm really happy with the results. It's starting to look a lot less like hideous programmer art, so it's nice to see that I've improved a bit in the last five years at least.

The new version obviously doesn't use any lighting, which I think I'll skip altogether in the remake. It also has 30% fewer triangles. If I manage to update the rest of the graphics in a similar fashion I think the game might look rather nice in the end, though that's quite a lot of work and then I still have to make half a dozen levels or so before I can sell it, and I'm prioritizing GMC right now.

Something new and something old

I've finally bought a new phone! One that actually works and let's me install stuff, and only crashes when there's a bug in the code. With an Xperia Play I also have an excuse to make more traditional games that uses a DPAD, though I might be limiting my market somewhat as the games won't work nearly as well with an onscreen gamepad.

As for the something old; the game in the picture is my old game Helium Boy that I've started porting to Android. I originally made it over 5 years ago when I was studying, and dear lord the code is a mess! It was originally made in Ogre3D, then when I started coding my engine a few years ago I ported it to this engine and released a version for Wii homebrew; however I barely touched the code back then and the engine has changed so much that it was almost as much work to update it to the current version, and even more work to try to clean it up.

I'm not really sure what to do with it. I think the game is pretty nice and works decently for mobiles, even with an onscreen gamepad, but I'll probably want to redo most of the graphics before I release it. And of course I have to make more levels and stuff, which I'm already supposed to be doing for Project GMC, so it'll have to wait.

Summer Edition

I've just released Trouser Trouble Summer Edition for Android. Woho. It turned out rather shitty though and is really just a shameless attempt of milking more money from the game; there is very few new features and little new content... I was planning to do a bit more but I got really bored with the project. In total it just took about two very slow weeks, but considering how little work I actually did I probably could have finished it in half the time. There are some new features though; you can now pull up skirts, but it didn't turn out very well so it's just available on some levels, and you can also pull off bikini tops on the beach-levels.

I'm also starting to realise that I really need to get a new phone. Whenever a game is bigger than a couple of megabytes it constantly fails to install on my phone, and the phone crashes randomly every now then; not exactly an ideal development platform...

I just realized that I hadn't updated my blog in ages, so I thought I might as well wright something. Basically I've just been playing games and watching TV for the last two months and enjoyed my unemployment, but I've finally started doing some creative stuff again.

About two weeks ago I started moving over an old half finished game, Project GMC, to Android. It works decently with an onscreen gamepad, and quite awesomely on an Xperia Play, though I probably need to optimise it a bit to get it running with a decent framerate on older phones. I'm not really sure what to do with the game now though; I'm pretty much done with the porting, and the android version of the engine now has almost all the features from the windows version. However the game itself is a half finnished mess, and I'd have to make lot's of content before I can release it, and I don't really have a vision for the game.

So instead I've started working on Trouser Trouble Summer Edition; basically I'm just going to milk the franchise by releasing an almost identical game with some different graphics, and watch the money roll in. I'm working on some small gameplay additions, but mostly I'll just be making new textures. Hopefully I'll be able to push it out in a week or two.