Click here to view the video on YouTube.

It’s a mixture of tunnel flying mechanics (press to go up, release to go down) and classic aracde shoot’em up.

The basic idea is that everything is generated using pseudo-random numbers, so alien graphics, their movement patterns and the terrain can have infinite variations.

In the regular levels, every time you play, the levels are the same, but as they are procedurally generated, there can be an almost infinite number of them.

In the random levels, every time you play you get a unique set of levels, with their unique set of aliens and terrain. This gives more variety to the game.

The game also supports Game Center for Highscores (only in the regular levels).

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

My new game will be out soon. It’s a mixture of tunnel flying mechanics (press to go up, release to go down) and classic aracde shoot’em up.

The basic idea is that everything is generated using pseudo-random numbers, so alien graphics, their movement patterns and the terrain can have infinite variations.

In the regular levels, every time you play, the levels are the same, but as they are procedurally generated, there can be an almost infinite number of them.

In the random levels, every time you play you get a unique set of levels, with their unique set of aliens and terrain. This gives more variety to the game.

The game also supports Game Center for Highscores (only in the regular levels).

My newest app, Cards Table has been released. You can download it here.

It’s similar to my piecepack app but with regular cards instead. You can use it to play almost any card game or solitaire. It doesn’t enforce rules, it just simulates a card deck and a few other pieces so people can use the iPad to play any game.

More screenshots:

There is an option now to shuffle all the cards, this way, you can save a layout for a game and randomize all the cards (including or excluding jokers). I’ve also included a layout for the popular Solitaire game.

Another change is that when you turn around a group of cards it will now turn around as one, so that the top card will be on the bottom. This is a change that I will also apply in the piecepack app as it can be a bit confusing although there is less of a problem as there are less card like games…

The ads won’t be very intrusive and will give you all the chance of supporting my work. Eventually I will add payed versions of my games without ads.

Recently I got an excellent review for my piecepack app asking for a similar app for a standard deck of cards.

“This is an awesome app. It does everything you could want it to do for a Piecepack app. I just wish there were an app this good for regular cards! I really love the semi-snapping feature – when pieces are close to each other, they kind of snap together. And the save and load table layouts is perfect. I can’t think of anything to add. Perfect!”

So I got to work and yesterday submitted it to the App Store. It uses the wonderful public domain images from Byron Knoll and works pretty much the same as the piecepack app. I even left the dice and pawns in just in case they turn to be useful in some games… the piecepack coins became just regular markers which can be used for scoring.

More screenshots:

I’ve released my latest update to Vector Star Brawl. The update adds iCade support for one or two players (and 2 player games work really well this way!).

I’ve also added full support for the upcoming Gamedock controllers, so the game also plays on an external display.

Note that in order to use an external display you need to have an external controller (iCade or Gamedock). At this time, touch controls are disabled when using an external display.

Here’s a short video demo of my upcoming boardgame app: piecepack

Coming soon to the Apple Appstore.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The app is designed to let you play boardgames that use the standard piecepack set of pieces. The piecepack is a game system (think of the standard deck of cards) which can be used to play many board/card games.

With this app you can easily manipulate the pieces, move them, flip them around, rotate them, shuffle them… You can make boards and move the pieces on them, or you can play card-like games with hidden hands.

It also automatically saves the current layout, so you can continue games whenever you want and you can also save your layouts for future use. These files can be shared using iTunes or the app can open them directly from the web or Email. It’s great if you design a game for piecepack because you can offer the rules plus the piecepack app file for easy playing.

The app is going to be free. I might add more features in the future (more pieces, expansions and maybe online play)  and release a new payed app, but this version will always be free and already has a lot of features.

Screenshot at 1/3 reslution with antialias. 1/2 should work fine in most cases

The update to Vector Star Brawl was accepted today. It corrects some problems with GameCenter achievements and adds an important feature, especially if your iOS device is older: an option to lower the screen resolution.

Now there’s a button on the main screen to toggle between 4 settings: Full resolution (the maximum supported by your device, so retina for devices that support it), 1/2 resolution (half vertical x half horizontal), 1/3 and 1/4.

I decided to make this change after playing the game on an iPad3 and realizing it can’t run the game smoothly enough with full retina resolution.

People with an iPad2 shouldn’t have to use this option, although the game is a bit more fluid in some situations at 1/2, especially when lots of enemies are on the screen. Also people with devices older than the iPhone4S might want to give it a try.

Of course, the lower the resolution is, the bigger the pixels are. It’s actually funny to see the game running at 1/4 and no antialias. It makes it look a lot more retro… but it’s harder to distinguish the ships when the screen zooms out. Even then it is playable…

A more reasonable setting like 1/2 with antialias on is not that bad and the smoother movement makes up for it.

Anyway, I think it’s really cool that you can dynamically change resolution like this on the fly. If this works for bitmap graphics it can be a fast way of getting a retro look that’s consistent across all the objects in the screen and where you’re actually simulating a low res screen… but from what I’ve seen, the system doesn’t apply antialias when reducing the resolution of a bitmap image so it may not look very nice at all… it may be worth experimenting with..,

Now that my first iOS game is done, I wanted to explain a bit about why I decided to make this game and why I made it the way it is. Just to explain a little bit about what went on before and during development…

I’m a big fan of retro gaming (it wasn’t called retro when I was a kid, of course) mostly because those are the kind of games that were done at a time where graphics weren’t too powerful and so you had to focus on gameplay. I’m specially fond of vector games such as Asteroids, and many of the other games of its time… The technology behind those games was very different and used monitors that worked in a totally different way, actually drawing all the lines instead of drawing a raster image with horizontal lines like normal TVs do. This meant that there weren’t any pixelation problems. The resolution was perfect…

Of course, a vector game in a regular computer monitor (or iPad screen in this case) will not have this advantage… My intention with this game was to come as close as it was possible in this type of screen.

That’s why everything in Star Brawl (except for the logo screen at the start of the game) is drawn in real time using lines. The only liberty I took was to use lines of different thickness which wasn’t possible in real vector machines.

So, that was the first design decision: Everything in the game should be made out of vectors and calculated and drawn in real time, to keep the spirit of the old vector machines.

Then I had to decide how I’d draw the vectors. I basically had two choices: Hardware accelerated OpenGL and Software rendered CoreGraphics (the Apple library to displaying any kind of graphics on Apple devices). OpenGL would have been faster but in the end, after doing an early demo with both, I decided to use CoreGraphics.

The first reason was because it supports nice curves and line anti-aliasing (which makes all lines smoother) while also supporting shadows which I use to give the “glowing” effect. In the end I almost didn’t use any actual curve because it was just too slow… but the lines still look very nice…

The second reason was because I kept reading online that Core Graphics was too slow for gaming, so after a few demos where I saw it could be done, I decided I had to give it a try… Just to see if it was possible…

In the end, the game works, although it’s not as fast as it should have been with such simple graphics. I do think it’s smooth enough, at least on my iPad2, especially considering it has particles made out of many small lines for the smoke and the explosions, but with OpenGL it would have been smoother… There was a point during development where I had to limit what I was putting in the screen so it wouldn’t slowdown… And it’s funny because I tried to optimize all other calculations (gravity and collision) until I realized they were taking like one tenth of what the actual drawing was taking…

So… I just had to draw less lines which basically meant limiting how many aliens were on the screen at once in the Challenge Mode.

Last… why another space dueling game?

There was a game I used to play a lot in the 90′s. I still have it on an old PowerMac 7100 I used at the time. It was a small freeware game about space combat. The one thing that it had that I hadn’t seen in any other game of its type was a large play area and an auto zoom feature that would zoom in or out as the player ships approached or got farther away from each other. If you flew far enough, sometimes the ships would become so small it’d be hard to know where they were pointing. Actually this same mechanic was later used in the excellent Smash Bros. games from Nintendo…

But it was so cool to have so much space to fly around in, it actually was the thing that made the game fun. Most 2 player games of this type either limit you to the size of the screen or use some kind of dual screen mode. I don’t like either much…

So I wanted to make a similar game, but this time using realistic physics (the ships in that game flew more like a plane would) and with a few more features like landing on objects… (Yep. Space Lander is also a favorite of mine). I actually used the same mechanic to handle landing in both Star Brawl and in my first mac game Space Garbage Men which I wrote more than 12 years ago…

So there it is… a little bit about Star Brawl… the game I guess I basically made because I wanted to play it… I’m not sure how many will like it, but I’m satisfied it is exactly what I was looking for… Maybe if someone else really likes it too I’ll have to add online play to find a worthy opponent…