January started off with quite the busy schedule and it hasn’t let up yet. So much to do so little time! Viva la Turret has turned out to be a critical success and people are enjoying it so that’s great. Coming right off the heels of that I wanted to update Tilt to Live HD with Game Center support. It came, and we screwed up (again) :[. There’s a bug with the scoring that cropped up after I added a last minute fix to a less serious bug involving double vortexes. We do have a thorough test plan for our releases, but given the small amount of features/fixes in this one we didn’t exercise all of them. Hah, the code goblins struck again.
What’s funny is there have been moments throughout the year when I look around and realize how freaking awesome things are going. I feel like we’re on a roll and it’s like racking up a crazy combo in some shooting game. Release done and shipped. BAM. Release done and shipped. BAM. ANOTHER Release done and shipped. BAM! That is usually the very moment a dreadful thing occurs. Usually involving HD. And it’s already live and tanking our reviews. It certainly takes the wind out of my sails.
No developer wants to be seen as someone who writes ‘buggy software’, so it’s something I’m striving to improve. So what am I working on as of late?
One Man Left
We’ve got an update in for Tilt to Live HD submitted this past Friday to fix the scoring bugs. We’re also wrapping up testing on Viva la Turret HD and it’s proven to be pretty fun, yet still feel slightly different compare to the iPhone counterpart. Also got some other stuff in the pipeline for Tilt to Live that may or may not come to fruition.
Blitzmax
So I decided this year to make more time to code outside the daily projects of OML. Every few nights I’ll get back into the swing of Blitzmax and started poking around with a game framework I had written for it years ago. It was written when I was in college and it shows. It’s very ‘academic’ feeling when using it. I was pleasantly surprised at how flexible it was, but there’s a lot of tedious code to write to get a ‘blank project’ up and running. I guess back then I had oodles of time, haha (not). I also got it compiling on OS X, so having two clients on different OSes talk to a windows server with minimal fuss was a neat thing to see :).
I think my next steps will be to rip out the WxWidgets integration I did back then, using Brucey’s module. I had originally intended to code in an integrated editor with the game Unreal Engine-style, but recently decided against it for simplicity’s sake. I’m just going to fork the current codebase and create a dedicated editor out of it while having a ‘game’ branch that is hopefully more lean and mean.
Misc Dev
I haven’t begun any actually coding yet, but I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a 2D editor using Cocoa/Objective-C and OpenGL. I’m currently working on some preliminary stuff for “Game 2”, and intend on trying to keep it mostly C++. With that said, writing an editor on the Mac using Objective-C would give me the bonus of re-using a lot of the game code in it for handling things like rendering, input, etc. It wouldn’t be difficult but I guess it comes down to time. Cocoa seems like a really nice UI library, but I’ll admit I’ve never done much of anything in UIKit beyond hooking up an OpenGL view to the window and going back to XCode, haha.
Where as, if I were to just leverage the code I had written in Blitzmax with WxWidgets I can kind of hit the ground running in creating editing tools for Game 2, as well as making the tools cross platform. The drawback being I’m using 2 separate code bases and 2 separate languages. Although, I think I’m just blowing that out of proportion since a Cocoa editor would most likely be a fork anyway. It would certainly provide me the freedom of just messing with the internal model of how objects are structured since I wouldn’t be concerned about game code. When doing editors in the past I found trying to get relevant data out of game objects to manipulate in an editor went against a lot of the encapsulation and designs in place for the actual game. So this may be the better long term route.
Cocoa? Blitzmax? Jury is still out on that one. I also don’t think I can make a fair judgement until I actually try coding some basic tool using Cocoa UI on the Mac. And why Blitzmax? Well, it’s just that I happened to code in it for years so I’m using what I know. And it’s nice. Too bad there isn’t a good native mac editor for it. I use Blide (running in a Windows XP VM) for Blitzmax coding.