Archive for the 'Indie' Category

Invader Zurp

September 12th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

So for those of you on my Cannonade TestFlight profile, you might have noticed that I havn’t seeded a build for about two months. I have a good explanation for this.

Lets rewind back to right after my last Cannonade seed build. I was on vacation at the time and had the opportunity to stand back from Cannonade and evaluate things from a different perspective. Sometimes I don’t think I seek out those opportunities to just sit and think as much as I should (just thinking sometimes makes me feel a bit lazy for not doing). At one family gathering I observed my older son playing Fruit Ninja on his aunt’s iPhone. I was aware of Fruit Ninja and knew that it was a definite App Store success. As I watched him play I thought to myself “That just one play mechanic. One. Repeated, millions of times over and over and over.” This is the typical MO of most games that are successful on the App Store. Simple, easy to pick up and well implemented with good production values. With Cannonade I am trying to break new ground on the App Store. I still believe that there could be a place for deep multi-player experiences on the App Store and I think that Cannonade is on the right track. But watching Fruit Ninja got me thinking. Did I have a single, fun gameplay mechanic that I could repeat millions of times? The core fun mechanic of Cannonade is “Knock Your Friend’s Castles Down.” Maybe I could modify that to just “Knock Castles Down.” Even knocking down dumb castles was fun in and of itself. Maybe I could repeat that experience millions of times and put out a more limitedly scoped single player experience? I decided that it would be a really fun exercise and that I would put Cannonade on hold for a few months while I brought this new single player game to market. I call it “Invader Zurp“.

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Language Aid: A Postmortem

August 27th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

Language Aid is a system-wide text lookup tool I developed and sold for the past couple of years. I recently decided to make it free and release the source code. This is the story behind it.

Rewind to 2006, I was just winding down active development of Vision, my OpenGL Window Sever/UI Framework. I had started work on Vision in college 3 years earlier and had been churning on it full-time for the previous 2 years. I had decided that it was finally time to get a job and so I interviewed around and accepted a position at Apple. I had two weeks until my start date and I wanted to do some programming for fun that was completely different from what I had been doing.

Iron Coder[0]

It was during that two week period of not yet working for Apple that Wolf Rentzsch started the (now defunct) Iron Coder contest. The way it worked was that the organizer announces an API that each of the contestants must use somehow in their entry and then 24 hours later a theme is announced that entries must also somehow incorporate. I thought it was just what I needed. A fun, small-scoped project with a little bit of competition. So the day of the very first Iron Coder arrived and the contest API was announced: The Accessibility API. Accessibility API? What’s that? Until that moment I had not been aware of it but it was actually just what I had been looking for to solve a different problem I had. I started researching it and immediately there were portions of it that were very interesting to me. Specifically, the ability for programs to inspect and copy data (like displayed text) out of other running applications was of particular interest to me.

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Language Aid 1.2

August 27th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

Language Aid version 1.2 is out! The big feature of this release is that it is free and open source! This will also be the last release supported by Aoren Software. Development has pretty much wound all the way down at this point and the source has experienced some code rot as Core Foundation has progressively become more and more obsolete and Mac OS X has marched forward.

So it occurred to me that the time has come to set Language Aid free. Anyone care to take the code and modernize it? Maybe even release it on the Mac App Store? Let me know and I can work with you to make that happen. Be sure to check out my tell all Language Aid postmortem.

Startup Grind.app 1.2 (August Update)

August 19th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

The Startup Grind.app version 1.2 has been approved and is live on the App Store! This update features some substantial re-design and refinement. The biggest change has been a complete re-design of the “Questions” pane. Now you can down-vote questions that you don’t like, redundant questions or non-questions. If a question gets to a value of -2 or lower (the equivalent of three negative votes and one positive vote) then the question will no longer be displayed. Remember, you can submit questions to the speaker far in advance of the actual event if you want.

Try it out and let us know what you think of the changes.

Startup Grind.app 1.1 (July Update)

July 20th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

The Startup Grind.app version 1.1 has been approved and is live on the App Store! There are some cool new features in this update! Try them out and let us know what you think.

Info Pane

First, we have condensed a lot of information into a new “Info” pane:

  • The complete details about the speaker and event.
  • A map of where the event is being held (touch it to go look it up in the Maps application).
  • A sponsor banner so you know who to thank for your free pizza that night (Wanna be a sponsor? Email Us).

This pane is the new hub of every event and is the pane that you now start in.

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Cannonade 0.5.10 (Wall Street) is now seeded

June 22nd, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

So you’re successful right? How successful? Let us count the ways. Let us count them by ranking you against your peers with an Elo ranked leaderboard and achievements. Remember that your worth can now be quantified and compared, so be sure to push your numbers as high as you can. “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good”. Welcome to the Wall Street update.

Complete Changelist:

  • Bumped engineCompatibility to 0.5.10. (this means all games previously created by versions <= 0.5.9 will be deleted)
  • Fixed a bug with the friction attachements that was casuing divergence.
  • Taking another initial stab at redoing the cluster picker menu.
  • Initial stab at 2X UI for the iPad.
  • Added in-game stats panes and leaderboards.
  • Designed the profile page and got initial replay functionality implemented.
  • Made some changes to speed up app initialization.
  • Added more capability to the stat gathering functionality.
  • Added “Judge” capability.
  • Added all the server-side support for interacting with judges and passing judgement on games.
  • Added more stats functionality and judge bug fixes.
  • Refined convex sweeping to only be super aggressive when dealing with the (thin) terrain.
  • Fixed some concurrent loading bugs.
  • Fixed a sound loading bug.
  • Added a pragma to skip the intro.

I described the initial set of achievements that I had come up with in a previous blog post. For this update these are the achievements that are actually implemented and currently earnable:

Boot Camp Rookie’s Luck Start A Fight With A Total Stranger Keep Your Enemies Close…
Finish Him Good Game Battle Hardened Angry Zurps
The General The Old College Try Flawless Victory LOL HAX
Peashooter Moonshot Greased Pig Heh Heh, Fire!, Fire!, Fire!
Rainbow Roll Lucky 7s Sky High Going The Distance
Pacifist One Hit Wonder Jack Of All Trades Critical Hit
Epic Fail McDuck The National Debt All Your Base

Alpha Testing List

Would you like to be one of the awesome alpha testers that help make Cannonade great? Send an email to: [email protected] and I will reply with instructions on how to get onto the Trac server, Testflight list and tester forums.

Startup Grind. The app.

June 15th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

So my friend Derek and I have this really cool event that we run called the Startup Grind. It has been great to watch it blossom into a vibrant, well attended meetup over the past couple of months. The other day we sat down and talked about ways that we could add even more value to what we think is the best free startup event in silicon valley. One thing we wanted to try out was to see if there was some sort of technology solution that we could come up with to make the networking at our event even easier and more valuable. Thus the concept of the Startup Grind app was born. First concept to App Store submission was exactly three weeks to the day. Now that you can get it in your hands, let me give you a tour of it’s main features.

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iPod Touch Server

June 11th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter


Top-down view of the Aoren Software datacenter in the living room corner.

Why, you might ask? In my case the answer is simply because it is my only alternative. In development of my game Cannonade there quickly arose a need to be able to replay my user’s completed games and validate the results with exactness. In order to obtain that level of exactness, my games must execute with complete determinism. Unfortunately the implementation of floating-point match according to IEEE754 can actually vary somewhat between x86 and ARM processors. This means that if I replayed a game that two of my users played using iOS devices on an x86-based server, the results of the replay would very quickly diverge. Thus I am left with no choice but to set up a dedicated iOS device to wait for notifications of the matches that it needs to replay and validate (a process I call judging). An iOS server you might say.

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Achievement Brain Chemistry

June 4th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

One crucial aspect of my game that I have been thinking of for a while has been that of in-game achievements. There is just something about the hormones that get secreted in your brain the first time that sound or notification goes off that hooks you like the first line. I have come up with an initial set of 40 achievements that I will hopefully have implemented by the next seed. Your challenge: tell me what you think in the comments below, let me know of any cool ideas you have for achievements and bonus points for anyone that can name all the movie, video game or cultural references below.

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When Bullets Move Too Fast…

June 1st, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

Did you know that bullets (and other quick moving objects) in video games sometimes exhibit magical properties if they move too fast? If they gain enough speed, sometimes they can even pass completely through other objects without leaving a scratch or affecting them at all! You might have seen this happen occasionally in games that have a lot of complicated physics simulation. Sometimes fast moving objects just seem to pass through the ground or other objects. Unfortunately this is not a desirable user experience and it quickly breaks the illusion the game is trying to convey. This phenomenon is called “tunneling” and game developers attempt to deal with it in a variety of different ways. I thought I would share my unique combination of techniques to deal with it that I used in Cannonade. I have not seen this specific combination of techniques explained or suggested anywhere and so I thought it might be beneficial to share what I have learned with others who might also be suffering from object tunneling woes. First lets explain how most modern game physics simulation works and investigate why this problem crops up.

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