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[bluescrn]

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:

[K1lo]

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

How long did it take you to develop?

[shao]

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. ..

[bluescrn]

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

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)

[K1lo]

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?

[bluescrn]

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.

[bluescrn]

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