Spencer Nielsen

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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Spencer Nielsen

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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Spencer Nielsen

Apple gets a lot of flack over its curated app distribution model. No matter what your opinion on the subject is there is no doubt that for Apple’s model to have any sort of success it needs to be the only commercially realistic distribution avenue on the platform. This leads many people to jailbreak their devices for a variety of different reasons. Lets examine just the motivation of wanting to personally use non-App Store approved apps. The argument is then almost always framed as a dichotomy. I can jailbreak and get access to apps that Apple cannot or will not approve but risk damaging the device, violating warranty/support expectation, losing the ability to directly update to the latest OS version and introducing instability. Or I could keep my device in a stock configuration that will ensure stability and a clean upgrade path but miss out on some truly awesome and useful jailbroken apps out there. People don’t often remember that there is actually a third way to load apps onto your iOS device that has its own set of unique pros and cons. Apple fully supports loading apps on stock devices outside of the App Store through its developer program.

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Spencer Nielsen

I have decided to give names to all of my alpha updates going forward. I have chosen to follow a movie theme naming convention. I am therefore proud to announce the “Primer” update (Cannonade 0.5.9). Aptly named, this update finally adds the timeline scrubbing feature! This feature allows you to pause and restart the game at any point in the past by dragging the timeline slider and hitting the play button. Perforated glass doors quickly shut and you hear the low hum of time travel occurring in the background. Once the universe has temporally moved to your desired point the doors open and you can watch history repeat itself!

Complete Changelist:

• Bumped engineCompatibility to 0.5.9. (this means all games previously created by versions <= 0.5.8 will be deleted)
• Got the timeline scrubbing working!
• Added a neat glass door progress indicator when you jump through time.
• Moved auto-camera to only be active during opponent’s turns.
• Did a top to bottom redesign of the cluster menu
• Added basic OpenGL lighting to blocks.
• Added an initial pass of the intro sequence.
• Moved the castle picking view to one-quarter height up.
• Used glPolygonOffest to correct decal the friction splatter.
• Changed the editor so that it moves the camera to the half-height everytime the blocks change.
• Baked the current levels and fixed some bugs related to baking.
• Added history grabbing functionality.
• Fixed a lot of bugs related to observing various points in the timeline.
• Modified the project so that I could submit a dummy IPA to iTunes Connect so I can keep my identifier (I hope).
• Made a new Pad+Phone based experience.plist.
• Changed the level’s info format from a serliazed file to an NSDictionary/plist.
• TONS of changes aimed at making it easy to integrate art.
• Removed the individual block textures now that the atlas is working everywhere.
• Pulling demo/intro values into the experience.plist.
• Initial demo intro game type implementation.
• Added a dummy account loging pragma (LOGINASAORENTEST1).
• Minor tweaks.

Alpha Testing List

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

Spencer Nielsen

The focus of this update is the new in-game tutorial! Now when you first launch Cannonade if you have never run through the tutorial it will prompt you to do so. The tutorial level is meant to teach new players how to use the battle interface and get them some target practice with the fundamentals. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think!

Complete Changelist:

• Bumped engineCompatibility to 0.5.8. (this means all games previously created by versions <= 0.5.7 will be deleted)
• Initial implementation of the tutorial game type and level.
• Made some menu refinements and added a “Wiki/File A Bug” menu option.
• Made it so that you are prompted to run through the tutorial if you havn’t before on that device.
• A few quick menu sound effects.
• Added detailed statistics gathering.
• Fixed lots of little simulation execution bugs.
• Tons of leak hunting.
• Added friends info to the game server packets and cleaned up the server code a bit.

Alpha Testing List

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

Spencer Nielsen

For the past week I have been working on creating a gameplay tutorial mode for Cannonade. I am pretty pleased with how it has come out! There are still enhancements to be made and polish to be applied but I think it is good enough to put into the next seed. It is meant to explain the interface and get you some basic gameplay practice before you go up against real people online. It reveals the interface step by step, explains how you use it and lets you get some hands on experience with each concept as it is introduced. If you have never completed the tutorial before then it is the first thing that runs when you launch Cannonade. Previously the only way to figure out how to play was to just press buttons and experiment around after you had already entered a game with a real person. Hopefully by adding the tutorial I can help teach people about how to play the game before they play for reals.

Spencer Nielsen

The two most note worthy changes in this build are SPEED and WEAPONS! After spending two days on physics performance optimization and a week and a half on graphics performance optimization Cannonade now runs a lot faster on both the iPhone and the iPad! There are still speed gains to be had but the framerate difference is like night and day. Thanks to your voting, in this build we also have the debut of the Gravity Bomb, Fire Bomb and Friction Bomb weapons. They still need to be tweaked and balanced but they are still fun to play with. Give them a shot!

Complete Changelist:

• Bumped engineCompatibility to 0.5.7. (this means all games previously created by versions <= 0.5.6 will be deleted)
• Did a lot more investigation into physics performance. Content with how much I have for now.
• A HUGE graphics performance related commit.
• Added the Gravity Bomb, Fire Bomb and Friction Bomb weapons.
• Added powerSlider tuning buttons
• Added a block override fade timer
• Added all sorts of neat effects to the gravity, fire and friction bombs.
• Added a new lava island level to design around the !FOGENABLED and NONBLENDEDLAVA speedups.
• Initial “connection-less” Game Center implementation. Initial support for key-based communication (added libcrypto.a)
• Added a label toggle button in game and removed the reticle label fade.
• Reworked the visual styling of the shootMenu.
• Abandoned scrolling on weaponScrollView because UIScrollView is too buggy.
• Added BlockAttachements.
• Added CANNON_IMPACT and BLOCK_POOF emitter types.
• Tweaked Gravity Bomb effects.
• Removed old levels.
• Fixed a bug where resetCollisionFilters was not being called (killed replay).
• Extended ASGlassButton to handle corners.
• Fixed some ASGlassButton issues that were causing uneccessary redraw.
• Added a biased decal shape as a hack until http://aorensoftware.dyndns.org:8000/TRAC/ticket/145 gets fixed.
• Refined convex sweep tunnel protection even further.
• Added convex sweep querying to block movements as well.
• Added LOCALMODELVIEW so that we don’t stall OpenGL everytime we need to read/update the camera matrix.
• Added more benchmarking oriented functionality and updated libbullet.a.
• Tweaked build settings and switched compilers to llvm-gcc4.2.
• Fixed the editor back into working shape.
• Fixed cull and texture state for projectiles until they get their real objects.
• Fixed big in terrain removal code that was smashing memory.
• Fixed some block label override bugs.
• Fixed key loading.
• Fixed projectile state dirtying.
• Added an in-game fps counter.
• Added server games auditing to the ADMIN_MENU.
• Checks first before copying into history now.
• Misc bug fixes.

Alpha Testing List

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

Spencer Nielsen

For the past month or two I have been lightly seeding to Cannonade to testers. I have gotten the strong impression that the “fun” of my game was unfortunately getting lost in the low framerate. There is a certain reaction in the human brain that I am trying to evoke by making the blocks explode and collapse in physically realistic ways. However, when the framerate is too low the perception of motion is lost and so is my core game mechanic. I first spent a lot of time optimizing the execution of the Bullet physics engine and found a significant speed increase by tweaking compiler settings. I found that the execution of the physics simulation on iOS devices was very strongly locked to CPU performance. Now the time had come to start attacking the performance of the graphics engine. I was hopeful that I would be able to find even more significant speedups in this area because the graphics engine was custom written by myself and I could also employ device specific optimizations to take advantage of specific strengths or avoid specific weaknesses. Many of the techniques I tried out were nothing that hasn’t already been done before but I thought it would be worthwhile to document my experiences executing them in my specific situation. These are the results of a week and a half of aggressive performance benchmarking, exploration and experimentation. It goes without saying that my results are very data set specific and so they could perform better, worse or the same when applied to a different iOS app.

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Spencer Nielsen

the one that gets the most votes below!

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UPDATE: Voting is now closed! Looks like it was a 6-way tie! I have decided to deal with this by designing 3 of them, the Gravity Bomb, Fire Bomb and Friction Bomb. Check out their debut in Cannonade 0.5.7!

Spencer Nielsen

Even though many of you already know about my current project (I have also written a few blog posts about it) it is time to officially announce it and give it a quick introduction. The first project that I have chosen to work on since going indie again is an iOS game called “Cannonade”. It is a turn-based physics game with an emphasis on multiplayer and creativity. So far I have the core engine up and running. I have chosen to use the Bullet3D engine for physics simulation because of it’s general support and stability, iOS support and iOS performance. The rendering and effects engine, UI, networking engine and everything else I am writing from scratch myself. I am basing enough crucial functionality on iOS specific components (like UIKit and Game Center) that I can say with good confidence that it is going to be an iOS exclusive (although some parts of the engine may make it to other platforms). It is currently in early Alpha and there is a lot of game design and asset creation left to do. Things are still very malleable and everything is still placeholder (please keep that in mind when playing test versions and viewing screenshots ). I have a comprehensive testing plan, work schedule and timetable which I am hoping will ensure that Cannonade becomes a polished, high quality product by the time it hits the App Store.

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