Archive for the 'Achievements' 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 is on the App Store!

December 15th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

Aright it’s here! Invader Zurp, the project I have worked so hard on for the last 5 months is now for sale on the App Store! I want to thank all my wonderful testers for all their time they put into playing it and even more for the thoughtful and productive feedback that they so lavishly furnished on me. I couldn’t have done it without you!

Check out the gameplay trailer here:

Now Go Get It!

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.

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.

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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