Author: Cody

Alpha v1.0 is here! And actually, this will probably be the last alpha build. Once I get one last major piece in, we will officially be in beta. Starting to brain storm names. Right now I’m thinking “S BAT 2 GXO: The OS”. Stands for Super Blue Alpha Turbo 2 Gaiden X Origins: The Omega Saga. Let me know what you think. I’ll probably be dropping the Prototype 03 naming convention on the next release. Also, I’m heading to A-Kon this weekend. I’m going to start showing off the S BAT 2 GXO: The OS and see if I can get some useful feedback. As always, changes are listed below.

• New/updated artwork added from Stark Design.
• Code cleanup and performance tweak for wall enemy.
• Resolved issue where walls could spawn on top of each other and get hung up.
• Nerfed spawn algorithm so enemies don’t spawn as quickly.
• Bomb’s are now generated more quickly.
• Laser towers will now be destroyed if two soldiers hit them (changed from ten).
• Fixed issue where the beams would sometimes not load and appear as a solid white texture.
• Fixed issue where selectors would stay on the screen after a game ended.
• Fixed issue where bomb progress bars would not reset after a game ended.

Added new awesome bomb feature!

• New bomb feature.
• Bombs will charge by killing enemies. Bombs can continue to be charge while they are in use.
• Bombs are activated by tapping one of the four bomb buttons at the bottom. Bomb must be charged to be able to activate. The indicators will light up when the bomb can be used
• Bombs work more as a power up. When a bomb is active, the player ships will instanta kill any enemy it touches. The enemy must be the same color of the bomb that is active.
• Multiple bombs can be activate at the same time
• Performance tweaks to spawn algorithm

This is the soldier phasing update. I kind of like it so far, it was a quick fix to the design flaw where a player could block indefinitely. Timings for phasing and animations are all works in progress.

• Added soldier ability to phase out to get around obstacles.
• Soldiers will charge up their phase ability when they are being blocked by an object. You can tell the level of charge by how much the jitter.
• Once soldier is fully charged, they will phase out. When phased, they can still be harmed by lasers and will still hurt laser towers, but they will pass through any obstacle.
• Soldiers will exit the phase state after a set amount of time and as long as they are no longer colliding with any objects.
• The charge also has a cool down.

Pretty minor update. Mainly cleaning up few small bugs here and there.

• Rewrote the color selector logic so now it works properly with Brian’s artwork.
• Resized spawn grid so it is now properly centered.
• Fixed rotation problem with the soldier factories, they should now face the correct way.
• Fixed rotation on laser towers so now they match what Brian initially planned.
• Added in Z ordering defines to make it easier to track z order of sprites.

Saweet! First update with first revision of REAL artwork. I skipped posting alpha v0.5, so here are the updates for both. Please give me any feedback on game play mechanics you hate or like. I think most, if not all of these changes are for the better.

• First revision of real artwork.
• Circular health bars have been disabled. The will be added back, this is only temporary to test first revision of artwork.
• New fancy selectors.
• Can now change the color of ships individually.
• Can now change the color of the laser towers by “bumping” them with a player ship.
• Resized laser towers
• Limited player movement so you can now longer go to the edge of the screen. This was done in preparation for adding some other features to the edge of the screen.
• Enemies will no longer change color after they spawn
• Soldiers factories and soldiers will now path to the nearest laser tower instead of picking a random one.
• Soldiers groove constraints are now calculated differently. If both towers are active in a pair, then you can push a soldier back to the midpoint between those two towers. If only one tower is active in pair, then you can push a soldier all the way back to where the deactivated tower was. This helps eliminate a bug where soldiers would get stuck on each other when changing direction.
• Soldiers now move 50% slower
• Enemies will now spawn ever five seconds instead of every one second
• Can now have a maximum of 25 soldiers, 4 soldier factories, and 2 wally’s on the screen.

More performance stuff. Switched particles to use a triangle strip with a scrolling texture instead of individual particles. The thought was that alpha blending additive particles was killing performance on the 3G. I didn’t want to go this route cause I thought it would be more limiting with visual appeal. I’m rather pleased with the results. While I loose the ability to tweak particles individually, I can now get a lot more particles on the screen. It’s also got me thinking of adding some sort of 3D effect to the strip, but we shall see. Need to talk to artist….

• Laser particles are now drawn using a triangle strip with a scrolling texture instead of individual particles
• Now actually batches items in the sprite sheet to a single draw (I thought it was originally doing this, but I was wrong… <_<)
• Combined menu buttons into main sprite sheet so now it only loads the one sprite sheet plus the four textures for the triangle strip
• Added performance timer read out on the bottom to try to get better feedback from 3G users

Man, even though this is a minor update, I completely overhauled a bunch of systems. I’m trying to get this to be playable on 3G. I’m now running at 55-60fps on my 3GS and every once in a while drops to 50fps (originally I was running at 30fps). If the 4G and iPad people really like the cubic bezier lasers for the laser towers, then I’m thinking I can just detect the device. So for the 3GS or lower gen, they will use linear and everything above can use cubic bezier. The 3G’s just don’t really have the horse power to run collision detection on 10 cubic bezier lines…

• Now removes nodes from the scene instead of leaving them in the tree and just making them invisible.
• Reworked cubic bezier drawing algorithm, much faster than it was before.
• Switched the laser towers to use linear line to path the particles instead of the cubic bezier.

Sorry for the delay. Updated the provisioning profile so it is no longer expired. This one will last until next year. I didn’t realize the expiration was linked to the certificate. In other words, you shouldn’t have to ever worry about updating your provisioning profile again. I have officially beat Portal 2 single player and co-op, so now I should no longer be distracted… Although Brink comes out May 10th… so that may be a distraction.

I’m going on hiatus for a few weeks after this update. New computer parts get in tomorrow and Portal 2 is coming out this week… so yea, I’ll be doing that… Also, I know the provisioning profile is probably annoying you saying it is about to expire. Apparently I have to wait for it to expire before I can actually renew it. So expect a new profile on the 20th.

• Upgraded to cocos2d v1.0.0 rc1. They say performance is a little better than v0.99.5 but I didn’t run any test.
• Added circular health bars to laser towers, soldiers, soldier factories, and wally.
• Added color selector to ships to choose which color to go to instead of cycling colors. Just tap on the ship to bring up the color selection.
• Added scoring.
  • 10 points every second while towers are still alive
  • 100 points for each soldier kill
  • 200 points for each soldier factory kill
  • 300 points for each wally kill

Minor performance update to v0.3. Chris pointed out to me that it runs at 20fps or less on a 3G. On my 3GS mine went up from 30fps to 60fps when running the start screen. It idles around 50fps with all enemies and towers on screen and will spike down to 40fps every once in a while. Since I can detect the device in code, I’m thinking that I will target 3GS to hold 60fps and any device lower, I will scale graphics back for it. Hopefully, StarkDesigns can do some tricks with the artwork to use less sprites on the lasers, cause that is what is really killing performance right now. I don’t think it’s too many sprites on screen, I think it’s calculating the position along the cubic bezier for all the sprites that is loading it down.

• Switched cubic bezier control points from 50 to 10. This gave a huge performance boost and the lasers look just as detailed.
• Re-factored some small chunks of code to try to get more performance.
• Overhauled how collision layer mask work to help filter out collisions better.
• Set chipmunk to step at the same rate. This was suggested in documentation to give better performance.
• Rehashed chipmunk space based on chipmunk documentation recommendations.