next »

[aeiowu]

Hey guys, Mike and I released a new game earlier today. It's up on the web in Flash and also on the App Store for iPad/iPhone.

It's called Solipskier:

Flash/Browser: http://solipskier.com
App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/app/solipskier/id383281764

Anyway, let us know what you think and so forth. Post high scores (compete for reals on Kong too) and so on if you want.

[Nugsy]

I was playing this earlier. It's great fun.

[Cagey]

I looove this game. It was an instant buy for me after playing the flash version.

I'm interested to know if you guys could shed a little light on how you did iPhone and Flash development. Did you use any tricks, or just do it the hard way?

[ness io kain]

Fun game! I love the colors.
I'm pretty bad at it, though...

[aeiowu]

Awesome guys! Glad you're digging it.

I'm interested to know if you guys could shed a little light on how you did iPhone and Flash development. Did you use any tricks, or just do it the hard way?

it's actually using the CS5 flash>iPhone stuff. They didn't notice...

















Actually it was pretty cool. I can say that because I had nothing to do with the code. Joe Bergeron (http://twitter.com/wirealbatross) did most of the port for us while we worked on polishing the feel and graphics. He made an Air app that exported the graphics to a 1024x1024 sprite sheet with correlating text files for the bounding boxes and so on. There was still some tweaking that needed to be done, but this was a huge help for when we needed to 2x all the vector assets from flash for the iOS4 and iPad resolutions.

Otherwise it's all OpenGL ES wih C++ and Obj. C bits (as far as I know). The font was all done with bounding boxes in the same 1024x1024 sheet as well to save on memory.

If Joe or Mike pipe in they can talk more about it, i'll link them this thread.

[Cagey]

it's actually using the CS5 flash>iPhone stuff. They didn't notice...

Ahhh i wish that were true I do wonder if any CS5 Flash/iPhone games exist.

Thanks for that informative reply. I was hoping for some super secret Flash -> iPhone converter that I hadn't yet heard of. Only in my dreams I guess

[Matt Thorson]

This game is a ton of fun, and really original. Great work.

[iffi]

Fun concept and well-polished - I really like this! It would be a buy for me if I had an iPhone or iPad.

[WireAlbatross]

This is Joe.

I didn't find any AS->Obj-C ninja converters or anything, but I didn't go looking for them either. I just ported it straight up.

Like Greg said, I made an AIR app that loaded a SWF and dumped a PNG with MovieClip frames and a meta file with Bounding boxes and junk.

I wrote some base classes in C++ that were 'LIKE' Actionscript classes like DisplayObject, Sprite, etc. in order to keep lots of the logic, but it all ended up just being it's own system.

Mike came in and did some brilliant work making it feel like the flash version. I was struggling with that.

For some of the more complicated animations like the stars and landing snow, I just wrote a simple but effective particle emitter.

All and all it was a pleasant experience. I'm totally down with sharing techniques and insight. I'm all about sharing the indie love. Let me know if you have any specific questions. I definitely learned a lot.

xxoo
Joe

[Chris Z]

Great job guys, just bought it off the app store after playing on Kong for a while. 

[nyarla]

Hey, this is awesome fun. And I love the colour scheme and sensation of speed. The whole thing is so stylish. Very nice work!

[deathtotheweird]

yeah it's very addictive, I must have played a dozen rounds before I forced myself to stop.

[ness io kain]

My best score so far is 2,406,802. Still pretty awful; ha...
I would purchase this if I had the hardware for it. I wish I did -- it seems like there have been a lot of great things coming to the iPhone lately -- but... education is taking all my money.


By the way, I don't mean to sidetrack things too poorly, but this seems like as good an opportunity as any to ask: Did you guys have any trouble at home or at the office with the flooding?
I drove out while it was happening (I barely escaped! ), and I have not been back since then, so I haven't seen the damage for myself yet.

[team_q]

Hey Mike and Greg, this game is the raddest.

[c-foo peng]

Whoa.

This is good.

Whoah.

[aeiowu]

My best score so far is 2,406,802. Still pretty awful; ha...
I would purchase this if I had the hardware for it. I wish I did -- it seems like there have been a lot of great things coming to the iPhone lately -- but... education is taking all my money.

I hear you! We just have a first generation iPod touch that I got a long time ago. It runs the game moderately well but it was our only test device. Later in development, Joe was nice enough to cover the costs of an iPad (so he could test since he's in Florida) so between those and the simulator we sort of winged it. Sometimes I will go to the Apple store to play with stuff though, it's a fun "vacation" for us poor folk.

By the way, I don't mean to sidetrack things too poorly, but this seems like as good an opportunity as any to ask: Did you guys have any trouble at home or at the office with the flooding?
I drove out while it was happening (I barely escaped! ), and I have not been back since then, so I haven't seen the damage for myself yet.

The office was just fine, but my place had some really minor flooding. Nothing was damaged, but it's just mildly annoying. I'm actually in Cedar Falls right now because of the reported thunderstorms this weekend and I want to have tap water and showers again... This is a time when it pays to be self-employed and I can just work wherever I want!