Archive for the 'Graphics' Category

Zurp 1.0 Postmortem

December 15th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

Last September I wrote a blog post introducing Invader Zurp which revealed a little of the back story on how I came upon this new game idea after it’s first 2 months in development. Fast forward to 3 months later and Invader Zurp had just hit the App Store! I thought it would be useful to sit down and review the last 5 months of development, kind of plan out where I want to go from here and go over the events and insights that I thought were most influential during development.

The Story So Far…

So to recap the original blog post a bit, it was the middle of the summer (2011) and I had been working my brains out on Cannonade for the previous 6 months. I was a little discouraged at that point because progress wasn’t coming quite as quickly as I had hoped. Reception from my testers (just friends and family at that point) hadn’t been as positive as I had wanted either. I still had a very clear vision of what I wanted Cannonade to be and still believed that there is a ton of untapped potential for multiplayer-only games on iOS. But there was only so much I that could do as a one-man team and testing a multiplayer game can be quite time consuming. I took the family on vacation in early July and was able to step away from things for a while. It was then that I got an idea for a single player experience that distilled the core gameplay mechanic of Cannonade down to it’s essence. Thus Invader Zurp was born. Within two weeks I had modularized the Cannonade game engine, re-written the graphics sub-system in OpenGL ES 2.0 and had a working prototype. And it was fun! I found myself on very long “testing” sessions playing even after I had verified my fixes. I seeded the first alpha version in early September and wrote the introductory blog post. Then began the journey of finishing the game and kicking the darn thing out the door. (more…)

Invader Zurp Progress

October 27th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

Above is some footage from the current Invader Zurp alpha (apologies for the bad exposure). As you can see, things have come quite a ways since I released the first video! There are a lot more visual effects, 5 music tracks from Monte ‘Trance’ Emerson, a new gameplay mechanic, an in-game currency system and tons of other little advancements. I must say that I feel like things are progressing quite nicely! I still have a ways to go though and so I am going to continue cranking away with my head down until it is finished.

What are your thoughts on how development is going? Let me know in the comments. Also, a huge thank you to all of my testers who have given me invaluable feedback on all the builds thus far.

Caster for webOS

October 6th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter


Want to buy Caster for webOS? Click Here

Caster History

Much like Amit Singh and his Hanoimania, I regularly attempt to port my friend’s game Caster to as many platforms as I can. Because of some good language and API choices upfront (C++, OpenGL 1.X, SDL, etc…) the Caster codebase is very portable. That portability combined with its relatively humble (for these days) performance needs has lent the (currently still unified) codebase to easy porting. This multi-platform journey began many years ago before Caster was even released. Caster was still in early development when Mike approached me with the idea of maintaining a concurrent Mac build. At that time Macs had not yet moved over to x86 processors and so the most difficult part of the process was reverse engineering Valve’s Half-Life model format (which Caster uses for animated character models). The Half-Life model format was a binary, in-memory format utilizing offsets which meant that while loading it was quick and simple (just read it into memory, no processing whatsoever) it was unfortunately dependent on little-endian byte order to work. Other than that and a couple of other issues, the Mac port was really straightforward. So before release, Caster was solidly supported on both the Windows and Mac platforms. After release another guy helped out with the Linux port of Caster and so at that point we now had the major desktop operating systems covered. Over the years we added slightly different versions for the desktop platforms to adapt them to specific distribution avenues like Steam and the Mac App Store. The first port that required major reworking was iOS. That adventure was chronicled in my post Caster for iPhone: A Postmortem. Mike and I had the opportunity to give a presentation about what we learned at GDC Austin ’09. Later on as the Android and webOS mobile platforms took shape, I started to look into porting Caster to those platforms as well.

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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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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.

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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Cannonade 0.5.9 (Primer) is now seeded

May 23rd, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

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: [email protected] and I will reply with instructions on how to get onto the Trac server, Testflight list and tester forums.

Cannonade 0.5.8 is now seeded

May 9th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

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: [email protected] and I will reply with instructions on how to get onto the Trac server, Testflight list and tester forums.

Cannonade 0.5.7 is now seeded

April 25th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

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: [email protected] and I will reply with instructions on how to get onto the Trac server, Testflight list and tester forums.

OpenGL Game Optimization for iOS

April 22nd, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

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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