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[Christian Knudsen]

I think I'm going to purchase the first ever app for my Android phone...

[phubans]

Awesome! That's one hell of a compliment, thanks!

Here's an update: We're SO close to being done with this thing. Still waiting to hear back from some publishers while we consider adding cinema scenes to glue the whole game together. We're willing to release the game without these, and include them in a future, post-release update since we're all itching to get it out by now. There's also the matter of achievements. Apparently some phone platforms support this, so Dan has asked me to come up with some of these. I'm going to have to pull out my dictionary/thesaurus of puns for this task...

Other than that, it's coming soon... Very soon! I'd like to see it out by Thanksgiving (end of November). I'm sure my team is in a consensus with that. We're doing everything we can do wrap up and get ready for shipping

[DanFessler]

just some fun stuff to share...

[Uykered]

GOOD!

[phubans]

Tempted to mark this as 100%/Done, but I don't want to give people the impression that it's released yet

[poe]

Tempted to mark this as 100%/Done, but I don't want to give people the impression that it's released yet

I would wait as well, I know that I almost always check out a project once it's done so you could get some people who never checked here before; then they will buy the game when they see it's available for purchase .

[DanFessler]

been working like nuts through the weekend to plug in all the HD versions of our assets for iOS retina.  It's been a pain in the ass, but I'm looking forward to seeing all those lovely pixels in HD glory.

[phubans]

Here's an update from my end:

Apart from general testing, one thing I've been doing is finalizing the time medals. One of the features of this game is that upon beating a stage you can be awarded up to 7 medals based on your performance. There's one for collecting all of the crystals in a stage, one for finding the hidden key, one for not taking any damage, etc.

Three of these medals relate to finishing the stage in a certain amount of time, and include bronze time, silver time, and gold time. The gold time medals are usually obtained in one of two ways: 1) completing a stage with perfect precision and not making any mistakes (such as not clearing a low wall when jumping that causes you to bounce back and lose time), or 2) back-tracking with a power-up that lets you use a shortcut.

For example, some stages have breakable crates that you can only pass through if you are using the Nitroglycerin power-up. At one point in the game you'll be able to unlock this power-up for purchase in the in-game store (with crystals, the in-game currency) and then return to these stages to use it to reach areas of the level you couldn't previously or in this case complete the gold time challenges.

Anyways, the whole process of getting these gold medals requires a LOT of retries due to the precision required to clear a stage with no mistakes, so it's pretty challenging. Missing one jump basically means having to start over and try again.

In other news, I've come up with about 25 achievements for the game since one of the platforms (iOS) supports that sort of thing. Carter (the programmer) is working on implementing those now. Not sure how (or if) they will appear on other platforms, but if the game eventually releases on PC/Steam or XBox###, then I'm sure they will exist on those platforms, too.

I'm not personally one to get every achievement in a game, but I think they are a fun way to expand gameplay challenges and further reward the player, so I'm not against them, either.

[DanFessler]

Update from my end: Retina graphics done 

[JaJ]

This looks really fun! Good luck!

[phubans]

Thanks JaJ! Long time no see, and I really like the look of what you're working on, too!

[DanFessler]

Update for you guys...

So I'm up late working on compressing our images so our game is under 50MB.  (super important so people can download our game over 3g/LTE)  The problem is iPad Retina graphics are FUCKING HUGE.  It's like next to impossible to get it all to fit without making the art look like total compressed shit.  After much noodling around I've discovered something pretty silly.  The best optimization/quality/flexibility combo of compression for PNGs ends up being a simple photoshop "posterize" adjustment.  I'm dead serious.

Other methods yielded better results in some ways, but worse in others.

JPG compression + Alpha mask
great for BGs.  Also works okay for anything that has smooth gradients.  Sucks for anything that wants to be sharp.  A separate alpha mask (grayscale PNG) is needed for any transparent sprites.

Index PNG compression
Although this yielded the smallest file sizes, the results were pretty bad.  First you have to be sure your compression supports alpha channel - many programs don't.  But even if it does 256 colors simply isn't enough sometimes especially when you're dealing with large texture atlases (like we are).  Also when using atlases, you lose the flexibility of setting the quality level per image (it all must be one universal palette).  Some things want to be dithered, other things don't.  Some want more colors, some could do with less.  It's a mess.

Posterization
Turns out it's basically equivalent to setting the bit-depth per channel - and PNG compresses large areas of flat color per channel by default.  So naturally, the less bit depth per channel, the smaller the file size.  This is particularly useful for optimizing texture atlases because you now can control the quality level of each asset independently despite being on the same sheet.  Smooth gradients can receive more levels.  Painterly items can receive less.  Up to a 50% file size reduction is totally acceptable with this method.  Fun times.

[Seiseki]

Good stuff..
I've noticed that the rasterized vector stuff I do tend to be really low in file size despite quite high resolution.
I think it's because I keep a strict palette and don't use gradients. So if you can keep reusing the same colors and avoid too many gradients or soft brush strokes you'll save quite a bit in filesize.
It must be the same with posterization.

[DanFessler]

I've always known that PNG handles solid areas of color efficiently - back at gameloft and glu mobile they encouraged us to avoid dithering for this reason.  The bizarre thing to me is just how WELL it compresses.

An indexed PNG of 256 colors is roughly the same filesize as a 3bits-per-channel which is 512 colors.  honestly at this low range, index compression tends to have better results with selectively choosing the colors.  3bit Posterization allows for a *possible* 512 colors, but is not the actual number of colors.  The greatest return is yielded when you reduce an image from 16 million colors (24bit not including alpha) to thousands of colors (13824 colors for 24 levels per channel) with very very acceptable results.

example tests...

PNG source: 1474kb  (looks best)   0% reduction
PNG Index: 334kb    (best filesize) 77% reduction
PNG Posterized 24 levels: 711kb  (best compromise) 52% reduction

[DanFessler]

Hey guys, we're now opening up for a friends and family beta test for iOS devices.  We can't accept many, however, the first 5 people to make us some awesome fan art can sneak in... Or you can just ask nicely

[Quarry]

WAIT, ARE YOU THE MAD HOUSE PHUBANS!?

[happymonster]

Dan: Are you using a standard Engine? Because I think for your purposes you might be able to do a better fileformat for your art than what you describe with the PNG issues..?

[DanFessler]

Yes it's a custom engine.  By far PNG has yielded the best quality over filesize ratio with the described posterize compression method.  Though I'm open to hearing other ideas if you have them.

[happymonster]

First thing I'd try would be to separate the image into a HSL colour space. Then I'd have 7 or 8 bits for the Luminance (127 - 256 shades) so that PNG or your compression routine (GZIP, etc..) can work best over the repeated lengths and slight changes.

Then I'd pack the hue and saturation into 8 bits if possible and compress those. I've done work like this before and you can get much better results than working in the RGB space with colour space reduction.

Hope it helps..

[phubans]

WAIT, ARE YOU THE MAD HOUSE PHUBANS!?

Yes, why do you ask?