Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length

 
Advanced search

1411196 Posts in 69314 Topics- by 58380 Members - Latest Member: feakk

March 18, 2024, 06:29:29 PM

Need hosting? Check out Digital Ocean
(more details in this thread)
TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsSkyriders
Pages: [1]
Print
Author Topic: Skyriders  (Read 4142 times)
bluescrn
Level 1
*


Unemployed Coder / Full-time Indie :)


View Profile WWW
« on: October 04, 2012, 06:00:58 AM »

Edit (13/10/2012) - Game is now released! - Available on the App Store (iOS), and Google Play (Android)


Well, I never really got around to blogging my progress during development, but I did tweet screenshots fairly regularly that some of you may have seen, either on Twitter or via the ScreenshotSaturday site. Or you may have seen it at the last TIGJam UK.

It's an into-the-screen mix of platforming+racing, with a colour-switching collect-em-up element, inspired by classics from the past such as Trailblazer, Sky Roads, and STUN Runner. It's primarily aimed at iOS and Android, but I may also release it on PC later.

It's getting very close to release now, and I've just been through through my Dropbox public folder, and found a whole load of in-development screenshots, and written up a 'The making of Skyriders' blog post, showing how the game progressed over the 7 months or so that it's been in development.

The game is written in C++, using Marmalade. It's almost a one-man-project - except for the music (by Dustin Kulwicki - www.kwixmusic.com), and a little bit from an artist help to make the alien in the ship look better. Other than that, I've done all the design, code, art, and most of the tools+tech.

There's a trailer, too:



And the obligatory Greenlight page: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92916662

And of course, a couple of screenshots:








« Last Edit: October 13, 2012, 05:42:16 AM by bluescrn » Logged

K1lo
Level 1
*



View Profile WWW
« Reply #1 on: October 04, 2012, 06:40:11 AM »

That looks really nice, I've given you a +1 on Greenlight  Wink

How long did it take you to develop?
Logged

shao
Level 1
*



View Profile
« Reply #2 on: October 04, 2012, 01:17:02 PM »

I like the smoothness with which it moves, as a suggestion I would have liked to be thematic tracks, such a planet like Mars, a city etc. ..
Logged

bluescrn
Level 1
*


Unemployed Coder / Full-time Indie :)


View Profile WWW
« Reply #3 on: October 04, 2012, 02:32:58 PM »

That looks really nice, I've given you a +1 on Greenlight  Wink

How long did it take you to develop?

Too long, really...

It's been about 7 months semi-full-time (theoretically full-time, but with depression/procrastination issues, and a small amount of work on another project)


I like the smoothness with which it moves, as a suggestion I would have liked to be thematic tracks, such a planet like Mars, a city etc. ..

Unfortunately, I'm not much of an artist... I'm no good at actually drawing/modelling things. I'm aware of my limits, so I've made as much use as possible of tools to help create my assets (SpaceScape for skyboxes, Genetica for some of the textures, and a lot of Photoshop effects for the fonts and UI elements). And of course mostly-code-generated geometry for the tracks.

Now smoothness is something that I can do! - a fair bit of optimization work has gone into the game, to keep it running at (mostly) 60fps on an iPhone 4 (and 60fps with antialiasing on a 4S/iPad2 and above)
Logged

K1lo
Level 1
*



View Profile WWW
« Reply #4 on: October 04, 2012, 11:14:33 PM »

My primary language is C++ too, although I hadn't heard of Marmalade before. I had a good dig around their website but I'm curious what your impression was using it in a project - would you use it again?
Logged

bluescrn
Level 1
*


Unemployed Coder / Full-time Indie :)


View Profile WWW
« Reply #5 on: October 05, 2012, 01:40:44 AM »

My primary language is C++ too, although I hadn't heard of Marmalade before. I had a good dig around their website but I'm curious what your impression was using it in a project - would you use it again?

This is my 2nd project with Marmalade, the first was Little Acorns

I use Marmalade just as a platform abstraction layer. It keeps me away from XCode and ObjC, but I write my code mostly-from-scratch in C++ and GL ES. Marmalade handles platform-specific bits such as initialization, input, audio, suspend/resume, and so on.

It generally works well - and being able to build+deploy from a Windows machine is, for me, a huge advantage (as I've been using Visual Studio for maybe 15 years or so)

I'm likely to carry on with it, but it's had a few problems that keep making me reconsider. The big one at the moment is iPhone 5 support - you can't submit iPhone 5 (1136x640) apps without using Apple's latest SDK, but we've got to wait for Marmalade to update to that and release a new version. That's taking a while (longer than Unity and Flash/AIR, which have to do the same thing)

But there's also been times that bugs have gone unfixed for quite long periods, and there's very little support on the forums (and the Marmalade forum software is terrible, no 'edit post' or way to subscribe to threads).

There's been signs that things are improving in that area - they held a free Developer Day at their offices a couple of months back, which was very useful, and they've talked about replacing the forums. But they do seem to be a fairly small team working on an increasingly large and complex product.

For me, still seems better than the alternative (dealing with XCode/ObjC, and Java/NDK on Android), and keeps almost all my development work on a single platform. But it's very frustrating at times when you're just waiting for a bugfix or support for the latest iDevice, and you can't do anything to speed up the process.
Logged

bluescrn
Level 1
*


Unemployed Coder / Full-time Indie :)


View Profile WWW
« Reply #6 on: October 13, 2012, 05:42:03 AM »

And it's (finally) out! - available today on the App Store and Google Play (added links to the first post)

Technically, this counts as a Ludum Dare October Challenge success, although it feels like  a big cheat there, as it's mostly coincidence that it went on sale and made it's first $1 in October Smiley
Logged

Pages: [1]
Print
Jump to:  

Theme orange-lt created by panic