Development Diary

2013-03-08T03:14:00.002-08:00

Cyclomaniacs Epic is now released on Turbonuke!

http://www.turbonuke.com/games.php?game=cyclomaniacsepic

We're really proud of this, please go and try it out, and let us know what you think.

Mobile versions coming soon! :)

Cyclomaniacs Epic

2013-02-22T10:13:00.000-08:00

Cyclomaniacs Epic is now in beta testing over on Kongregate.

Finally! This one has taken way too long, and has tired us out!

Head there and sign up to Kong+ if you want to participate.

Soccer Balls 2 in development

2012-11-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

It's been such a long time since we released the original Soccer Balls game.

Finally Soccer Balls 2 is on the way, and it's coming to iOS as well.

This time we have included a team kit editor, so you can play your favourite team against any team in the world.

The characters have quadrupled in size over Soccer Balls 1, and the world scrolls around to give you much more freedom.

There are lots more things included... screenshots coming soon.

Flaming Zombooka Released!

2012-10-17T08:41:00.001-07:00

Now you can destroy zombies in fun ways on iOS devices, for free!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flaming-zombooka/id498266246?ls=1&mt=8

Flaming Zombooka iOS

2012-10-16T02:01:00.000-07:00

We're really excited about this, Flaming Zombooka for iOS is 'Ready To Release' on the Apple store..

More news soon...

Stage3D / Mobile

2012-10-08T01:08:00.002-07:00

We've been working on adding Stage3D to our engine, and it's gone very smoothly indeed.

This is only to get the games working on mobile (for the moment at least), as we don't believe there's enough compatibility out there for Stage3D browser games to be successful yet.

I've written versions of the rendering code for Stage3D, not using any 3rd party libs like Starling or Genome, so the overhead is very light. I'm using project specific properties to switch between versions, so it only compiles in the correct version of the code.

I'm creating texture pages in-game, as the graphics are mostly stored as movieclips. This way we can have full quality bitmaps for hi-resolution devices, and drop back to low resolution for older machines. Still waiting for Adobe to add in some texture compression tools though, as currently the only option we have is 32 bit per pixel, which is INCREDIBLY wasteful.

So, we've just started work on SoccerBalls 2, and this will be the first one we've developed to work on both mobile and browser. Looking forward to seeing how well it goes....

Rocket Panda: Quest For Cookies

2012-09-20T08:51:00.003-07:00

Here's a screenshot from a new one by LongAnimals and Asute:

It's a Launcher game in the style of Burrito Bison, but with a Panda!

Here's a screenshot of a development process I'm using to graph the distances the panda has flown in each successive launch. It's going to come in very handy as we balance the game for difficulty.

2012-08-21T10:47:00.002-07:00

Whoops - not been here for a while - a bit too busy!

TurboGolf and DriftRunners 3D are released, and we're beavering away at a couple of new projects:

American Racer:

This is a solid 3d racing game with a big season of races and events to play - spinning other cars off the road, getting race sponsorship, drafting, and lots more.

80 cars in this race shown above!

Rocket Panda Launcher (working title)

No screenshots yet, but this is a sidescrolling launcher game, possibly telling the story of how Rocket Panda came to get his rocket.

Turbo Golf

2012-07-17T09:11:00.001-07:00

TurboNuke Golf - now renamed Turbo Golf, is about to go in to beta testing on Kongregate, so any Kong+ members out there, you can have a go soon.

After a long drawn out process it's finally reaching the end of development, and we're not sure it came out quite as expected, but we'll find out soon if it's any good or not!

I hope golf games are popular in the flash world, after all this !

Tokyo Guinea Pop in to beta

2012-06-19T03:32:00.002-07:00

It's nearly finished! We've got it in to private testing over at Kongregate (only visible to Kong+ users).

All the sound effects are in now. That was quite a lot of work but the results are great, we think. There are over 60 different animal sounds in there (all recorded by us). It really is quite jolly!

I'd like to say that Adobe Audition 5.5 has been great for capturing the sounds - it's a pleasure to use.

Here are some more screenshots from the 50 levels:

Road Editing in DriftRunners 3D

2012-06-11T10:57:00.002-07:00

Some images from editing the road layout in the Snake Engine.

1: Editing a billboard block:
Each block represents a stretch of road, and describes different aspects of the layout. Billboard blocks define the non-interactive scenery at the side of the (or indeed in the) road.
Lots of randomness is involved here, which makes our lives easier.

2: Placing down coins along the road:
Some columns, instead of being data blocks, can contain individually placed items. Here we are laying out coins to pick up. These are dragged around and placed in the 2d editor for ease of use, but are updated real time in the 3d view.

3: Selecting a set of billboards to use for a block:
We pre-define objects which can be used in the levels. With billboard blocks we can select individual items, or groups of related items. (eg. Group_rock_walls).
The billboard block can then specify whether these are randomly selected, sequentially, or anything else we can think of.

LongAnimals interview with Mousebreaker.

2012-05-31T03:34:00.005-07:00

Now it's LongAnimals' turn for an interview:

"After we spoke to Rob James last week, the next person to talk to seems pretty obvious. Julian Scott – or LongAnimals to those who only know his games – is RobotJam’s main games creation partner. Between them, they’ve made Cyclomaniacs, Red Card Rampage, Flaming Zombooka, Harry Quantum and loads more. With others, he’s also built Sticky Ninja Academy, Drift Runners, Pirates vs Ninjas and many, many more."

See it here on Mousebreaker.com

RobotJAM interview with MouseBreaker

2012-05-29T09:21:00.001-07:00

One half of TurboNuke (RobotJAM) did an interview with Mousebreaker.com

AM: How did you get started in flash game development?
RJ: I spent 10 years making PlayStation games and just got fed up of three year development cycles and spending a year doing the same thing over and over, so quit to have a go in advertising. I spent 4 years doing ad work from banners to 3d artwork, eventually making viral games. Having seen the number of plays they were doing, I started making them in my spare time. Just small games really."

You can read it all HERE

Hopefully the second part (LongAnimals) will be available next week.

TurboNuke Golf Items

2012-05-25T02:32:00.000-07:00

We've now decided that the golf game has mini-RPG elements in it, which means player stats are increasable, and there are items to buy and use.
We have seven or eight categories of item which the player can buy - Drivers, irons, putters, shoes, hats, balls, and one or two special categories.

Each item has stats - so good drivers and irons will increase shot power, shoes let you run faster, and others have different selections of abilities, so you can choose from more power, more accuracy, easier swing, etc.

Here's a work-in-progress version of the shop screen:

Formula Racer on Kong and Newgrounds

2012-05-19T02:03:00.002-07:00

It's always nice when this happens: Formula Racer 2012 is both featured with badges on Kongregate, and front paged on Newgrounds !

Whoo, fame and success ;)

TurboNuke Golf - Whoops

2012-05-17T10:54:00.003-07:00

Well we were going along nicely, got most of the UI implemented, club selection all sorted, shot lengths were correct, spin working, everything hunky dory.

So I decided to get an AI player in there. Cool, that didn't take long, although he's not all that accurate with his shots.
But I thought - what would it be like with multiple AI players all playing at once, so I added that as well, just for fun.

Suddenly this was a different game; it's great seeing the other guys taking their shots. And everyone doing it at the same time turns the game in to a race to get the ball in to the hole, rather than a sedate turn based game.

It turns out that it seems a lot more fun if you don't get to use the woods or long irons - you get more shots on each hole, also the camera doesn't have to zoom out so far.

And now with the manic pace of the game, all the 'real' golf game UI is just too complicated - so we pared it down to simple launcher-game type mechanics, but keeping the skill element of the shot meter.

I added some pickups and some crates to the course, and it's fun going for those as secondary objectives - the AI players can knock over the crates as well, and collect the pickups, making for a very dynamic golf course.

So - a bit of a U-turn on this game, and we're very happy with the results so far.

Tokyo Guinea Pop MiniGame

2012-05-14T11:19:00.001-07:00

As Jimp and Longanimals often do, we've decided upon a minigame in Tokyo Guinea Pop. You can unlock this by rescuing all the animals from the zoo.

Currently it seems that it's going to be a cross between Breakout, Clowns And Balloons, and Sieger. It remains to be seen how that one turns out, but it should be fun, at least.

Tokyo Guinea Pop

2012-05-13T04:31:00.004-07:00

This one is by LongAnimals and Jimp, a sequel to Bubble Guinea Pop (from waaaay back)

Here's a screenshot from Jimp's incredible opening movie:

It's a physics puzzle game, in which you have to simply click switches at the right time to launch the Guinea Pigs from the snake's mouths, which then land, blow bubbles, and cover the other animals in bubble gum. This gum protects the animals from the evil zoo wrangler.
Got it?

Anyway we don't really know how well the original game performed, as we weren't allowed to put in any play tracking, so we're taking a bit of a risk producing a sequel. However it's REALLY nice, and just loads of fun to make.

It was also an opportunity to transfer over to using deltaluca's brilliant Nape physics engine. I've been using Box2D for years and thought it was time to try something faster and better.

This should be finished in a couple of weeks, I think.

Golf Surfaces.

2012-05-12T04:02:00.004-07:00

Lovely, I've got surfaces working in TurboNukeGolf now. All the ususal ones you'd expect to find in a golf game: Tee, fairway, green, rough, etc.

They will affect the difficuly and power of the shot, although I haven't quite decided in what way yet. This all comes down to UI design and shot mechanics which I'll be addressing properly later.

TurboNuke Golf

2012-05-12T02:14:00.002-07:00

TurboNuke Golf is our latest game in development. We started making a similar game a couple of years ago (called Golf Maniacs) but for whatever reason we didn't get very far with it.

This one, though, is looking and playing really nicely, after only a couple of days work on it.

I've got some issues with the physics at the moment - I'm playing around trying to get all the different surfaces behaving nicely. That's the main thing to get right before going on and making test levels.

Stage3D software rendering.

2012-05-12T02:09:00.004-07:00

Judging from the feedback from the Stage3D game we sponsored, we don't think the Flash game world is ready for Stage3D hardware acceleration just yet. It seems that 20% of the players so far are unable to use hardware rendering. That's a lot of people!

We could make multiple versions of the game one for software, and one for hardware rendering, disabling certain features etc. but that's not really financially viable as it will increase development time.

However, Stage3D works on mobiles, so it would be a great thing to be able to use the same codebase for mobile versions of our games.
My plan was to use Software mode Stage3D for Flash games, and enable hardware acceleration for the mobile versions. I wanted to replace my existing rendering functions with Stage3D equivalents. I currently use a mixture of draw(); copyPixels(); and bitmap Fills (as well as vector rendering)

So I've been experimenting with Stage3D software rendering.

How disappointing. I'm getting about half the performance of draw() and a third that of copyPixels() from a very simple triangle renderer. So this really isn't viable. Another plan bites the dust!

2012-05-12T02:00:00.002-07:00

Welcome to the Turbonuke Development Blog.
Here we will document our development process, when we remember to!