I've just released v2.0 of Rogueship...

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From planet to planet, the Hansa Star Guild can do little to deter the menace of pirate raiders who pillage and plunder trade ships with rising impunity. Even the Regulators are helpless against the enormity of the threat as the enemy’s ranks grow beneath a black banner of fear, violence, and riches.

Rampant Piracy! is the first Rogueship update to be submitted to the App Store. Along with bug fixes and some UI polish, this update introduces six new encounters depicting the effects of piracy on the trade markets, and a new gameplay mechanic in the form of “badges” you can earn for defeating pirates or smuggling contraband. Also look out for new pirate art.

New encounters include:

- Trade Market Besieged
- Smuggling Ring
- Weapons Cache
- Pulse Charge Snares
- Rampant Piracy!
- Extortion Racket

Read the rest of the release notes and download Rogueship now from iTunes.

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The update means I now have some additional promo codes to give away if anybody is interested in picking one up in exchange for providing me some feedback on the game.

I've also uploaded a demo video:





Thanks!

.travis.

[R O G U E S H I P]

Hi there,

I'm happy to announce the release of Rogueship, a retro-gaming sci-fi trading sim available in the App Store as of today.

iTunes Link:
itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rogueship/id324321518?mt=8

If anyone is interested in reviewing the game or ad hoc testing future updates, don't hesitate to get in touch, either by PM or emailing [email protected]. Thanks! I'd be happy to hear any feedback, be it good or bad. We're just a two-man team, and hope you enjoy our homage to classic sci fi gaming.

R O G U E S H I P



DESCRIPTION:

“Per aspera ad astra”. That’s what the contract read, and it was the truest lie you ever signed your name to.

Hoping to make your fortune through interstellar trade and adventure, you became a free agent of the Hansa Star Guild in exchange for a small starship and some big debts. Now you must master the tradeways of frontier space and make a name for yourself at any cost...

Rogueship is a space trading simulation set in a sci-fi universe where you play an upstart starship captain running galactic commodities between planets, fighting pirates, alien hostiles, and staying one step ahead of guild regulators. Invest in ship upgrades, risk everything by smuggling precious contraband, buy low, sell high, and struggle to survive in the chaotic age of space.

SCREENSHOTS: (click for full size)









FEATURES:

+ Single-player, turn-based 2D interface

+ Randomly generated maps and encounters

+ Simple, addictive trade management

+ Balanced risk- and planning-based gameplay

+ 10-15 minute long games

+ 9 planets, 9 commodities, and 16 encounter types

+ Online leaderboard

GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW:

Rogueship is the perfect coffee-break game, combining core strategy with a simple interface and evocative futuristic universe. Easy to pickup and play, the game is designed for short bursts of devious starfaring where you live or die based on your ability to manage calculated risk. It’s a throwback to a time where games were played at a higher level of abstraction, where strategy was more important than tactics.

Randomly generated galaxy maps, randomized encounters, and the erratic pulse of the commodities market make every game of Rogueship a fresh challenge. Highly replayable and capricious, you will experience the rush of victory or the grasping pain of death in the Rogueship universe as a new story each time you play.

Unlike sprawling space epics that try to do a little of everything, Rogueship concentrates on the struggle of interstellar commodities trading. This makes Rogueship ideal for anyone seeking a short, replayable strategy sim. With a simple interface that’s natural to the iPhone, you’ll exploit planetary needs while timing your trades to the fluctuating galactic market, and stay ahead of game events bringing unexpected downturns and windfalls.

For the criminally enterprising, the black market offers contraband trading and tempting rewards to smugglers in it for either a quick profit or a prosperous career. The crushing arm of the law, however, waits to strike in the form of Guild Regulators, relentless enforcers working for the galactic trade cartels.

Yet many other dangers await the rising star-trader. Space pirates ply the tradeways seeking rich cargo loads to pillage, but if you defeat them in battle you can claim a bounty from the guilds. Intruders are alien life forms lurking in the uncharted reaches of space. They feed on Astra and will attack passing spacecraft, but if you can defeat them you’ll find valuable xenotech to sell.

CONTACT AND SUPPORT:

You can read more on the Rogeuship website at www.rogueship.net, where you’ll find developer diaries, release notes, game aids, news, and more.

Rougeship is being actively supported with continued development. A number of minor and major upgrades are already in the works for 2010. Buy it now before the price catches up.

If you have any feedback, gameplay questions, or features requests don’t hesitate to email us at [email protected].

Website: www.rougeship.net
Leaderboard: www.rogueship.net/leaderboard
Release Notes: www.rogueship.net/release-notes
Blog: www.rogueship.net/category/blog
Twitter: twitter.com/rogueship

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Thanks for reading, and I hope you get a kick out of playing.

App Store:
itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rogueship/id324321518?mt=8

.travis.

A lot of people hate on Dreamhost, but I use them for my personal blog and haven't had any major problems. Support was decent during outages, and I generally have more than enough freedom to work on their servers. Performance isn't great, but it's not terrible either. Of course, it's dirt cheap and they're always pushing out promos for new sign ups.

Postscript: If you're building a site in Rails, heroku.com is pretty much the best thing since the invention of the wheel. Hosting starts at the price of free (5mb storage limit), and with that you get one-click deployments and a tremendously knowledgeable support staff.

If your business model relies on being the first mover in a gold rush, and you're worried that some other bearded fellows with picks and pans will reach the river before you, well you'll probably die poor and confused at the bottom of a ravine.

The iPhone is a crowded market (just like any lucrative market), and a rush by Flash developers will not overwhelm App Store games market, assuming the developers even start porting their products in large numbers to begin with. Visibility in the App Store has been a recurring problem since its inception, and a few hundred+ Flash developers more or less will not impact the fundamental issues there.

Basically, your game will prove lucrative if you position and promote it correctly, and it will fail of you don't.

There are not very many full time iPhone games developers and shops, and those that do exist have usually come over from another platform with existing brands and fans. That said, I can't imagine that the work it would take to bring over existing Flash games wouldn't be a net success, especially if you already have some popularity you can leverage toward promoting the port's release.

This reeks of exploitation to me as well, and I'll join the chorus advising you to leave. An internship should provide the environment and/or training for you to advance your skills from amateur to professional levels, and this doesn't sound like what you've been given.

Confrontation may be hard, but you'll earn more respect from people the sooner you learn to stand your ground, and others won't treat your talents and work with importance or respect until *you* treat them that way first.

I wouldn't make a big deal of the talk, just calmly and as simply as possible explain your reasons for terminating your current arrangement. If they respond with emotional appeals or anger, you know they were probably trying to manipulate you or at least do not view the relationship very professionally. If they respond with surprise and panic, they are probably good guys with poor management and finance skills.

Finally, you can always offer to contract with them if they grow desperate, though of course you'd want to raise your rates.

On that note, one of the things I think anyone should ask before going into a company is: "how many months can the company continue operating off money in the bank and no profit?" If you have any suspicions or even curiosity about a company's solvency, this is a good question to ask. Any solid company will give you a reasonable answer, either with a reliable number or else an explanation of their funding strategy.

I think this depends on your priorities. Some hosts are very reliable, some are very fast, have excellent control panels, or have great support. Of course, they usually sacrifice in some area also. The trick is to decide on your priorities and pick a host on that basis.

I can say that pair.com has amazingly responsive support staff and decent scores across the board elsewhere.

Built on online leaderboard for an iPhone game, then extracted the core code for a lengthy blog post about the process.

Online High Scores for iPhone games

Then I slept for a couple of hours.

Someone should sue Jeff Atwood for his own disapproving post on the matter. These sound like the kind of people who could definitely use some more enemies.

I keep a regular personal blog at www.travisdunn.com, devoted mostly to subjects of interest for other programmers and web developers.

Game- and project-specific palaver gets relegated to respective brochure sites and the questionable repartee of twitter.

Anyway, props to Aquin for this consolidating thread. Come to think of it, maybe there's a way to syndicate the collective tigsource blogmind, perhaps through yahoo pipes, bloglines, or some notably slicker aggregation service? I think we'd all be interested in such a feed, to judge by this thread.

The easiest way to attract a partner, be they programmer or otherwise, is to make sure that you yourself are bringing something valuable to the partnership.

Wordpress++. It sounds like you're the ideal user for a blog/CMS combo. The less time you spend worrying about building your website, the more time you have to actually work on your games.

Darklands!

You continue to retire and replace your adventurers for as long as you wish to protect medieval Germany from pagan cults.

Civilization had the surprisingly good pacing trick of ensuring that the player was always waiting for something to happen. The rollover progress of various game tasks from one turn to the next is almost rhythmic. It's a great answer to the question: how do you pace a turn-based game?

Lemmings. 'nuff said.

In addition to Xion's comments, the sprite's also missing pedals; even stationary pedals might be enough to help trigger the association in our brains.

Dead tree project management++

I've always used simple hardback notebooks as my design doc, journal, sketchbook, spreadsheet, and technical spec. One notebook per game, although I treat my notebooks like a wiki (revisions are tracked by sophisticated tricks like using ink to redact the text!!!), and so they eventually contain redundant information. At the end of a project they'll be a mess, so they're definitely a living document and tool more than anything else, but that's the point.

http://www.goproblems.com

This is a decent resource to get some practice in the lateral thinking required.  Be sure to play games to re-inforce said strategies. 

Sweet; I wish everything in life I've had to learn came with puzzles! They're certainly an asset when studying chess (which, I see, has almost 0 transferable tactical skill - the whole game feels like the polar opposite of Go in regards to empty/occupied space).

How about you release the source code, but it's password protected and unlocked by a code the player receives once they've beaten the game. :p

Seriously, though, I think Snakey has the right idea, and that harvesting the source code for tutorial content would probably have a greater overall benefit in promoting your game, without what will likely turn out to be extra support work necessary to maintain the source for public consumption. As a long term strategy, you could eventually roll the tutorials into an ebook and sell that.

The game of Go. Or more accurately, strategy and tactics within Go, since the rules are trivial.

Nice concept and vibe! Although I too didn't realize I was looking at a bicycle - I thought the sprite was a drafting tool of some sort. It might be nice if the maps were more dynamic somehow; I had the impression that the player was just tracing an image more than trying to navigate a game board in any way.