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And so it continues. Added two new features which I have very mixed feelings about. Please give me feedback on them. I’m mixed cause while I can see value in them, they are also VERY distracting for the core I had built everything around.

Also made first attempt at recording emulator. Came out decent so I’ll try to post in-dev videos every once in a while from now on. Better than screenshots ^__^.

I’m going to let these features sink in a little this week and focus on up-converting artwork for retina display this week. Majority of stuff is vector art, but I’m worried re-texturing is going to be a nightmare… That’s what I get for targeting my crappy 3GS, sigh… And I keep telling myself I’m going to get a 4S. I’m hoping up-converting artwork will force me too get it next weekend ^__^.

• Mobile towers now act as repeaters for base towers. In other words, if a mobile tower is being touched by a beam, then it will add a new beam of that same color. If you get in the corners you can fire up to five beams at the same time. Langevin had this idea. While it’s kind of cool, it’s very very distracting. Makes the easy patterns cake. Makes the difficult patterns more difficult…
• Added enemy drops. When you kill an enemy, there is a chance it will drop an item. To pick up an item, just touch it with a mobile tower. Items will expire if they are not picked up. They will start to blink when they are close to expiring. Currently there are only two basic item types, 1) health (blue circle), this will add one health to a tower with lowest amount of health, 2) points, these are basically free points, they range from 500-2500pts and are in increments of 500.
• Added better score inflation. Enemies now count for more each kill. Left over time in a wave counts for more. Now has a wave multiplier, each wave you complete adds one to the multiplier. In other words, enemies in wave 1 are x1 points, wave 2 are x2 points, wave 3 are x3 points, etc… This applies to item pick ups as well (picking up 1000 point item drop in wave 3 will net you 3000 points).
• Tweaked some touch logic which I think will be better.
• Removed sound effects… They were first draft… <_<

Not a lot done this week cause of LDI. Hopefully after this week things will settle down at work so I can focus more on the S BAT 2. Managed to crank a bit to get some cool new stuff out though.

• Emission Generator now has an attack animation. I think it’s pretty saweet. I’m going to save posting a screenshot for next #screenshotsaturday.
• Emission generators will now attack three base towers instead of all of them taking one damage. This is per emission generator. So if you don’t destroy three generators before the wave timer is up, then seven of the towers will take one damage and one tower will take two damage (3 generators * 3 damage = 9 damage total, 7 towers * 1 damage + 1 tower * 2 damage = 9 damage total). The attack animation will indicate which base tower it is hitting. It will attack towers with the most health. Each emission generator can only hit a tower once. So if you have two towers left, the generator will only do one damage to each (it won’t do two damage to one tower and one damage to the other).
• Switch the health bar to hopefully indicate health much more clearly. I want to add an animation for each icon for when you loose a point of health.
• Now have sound effects! Added prototype menu clicks and polarity switch. The sound effects volume is operational in the options menu.
• Fix a bug where the background music would stop playing if a track completed while the game was paused.

Man on man, work work work. Between PRG and this I’m dying. Almost got everything I wanted in over the weekend. Spent a lot of time prototyping stuff that I thought would be brilliant and then throwing it out, cause it ended up being awful. There is a lot of stuff, but it’ll all be pretty minor from your stand point. And in other news, uploaded first binary for IGF submission! I had to screenshot to commemorate the occasion.

And here are beta v1.7 changes:

• Darkened the white enemy health-bars to make them more visible.
• Enemies will now shake more the more damage you are doing. In other words, the will shake harder if you are hitting with two beams as opposed to one.
• Base towers now shake over an interval after being hit, before they’d just shake for one frame and wasn’t very noticeable.
• Base towers now spit out a little steam when they git hit.
• Redid artwork for path sprites. They are now thicker, more color agnostic, and have endings. The endings make them look much more polished.
• Created death animation for barriers, it’s very subtle, but more natural then them just disappearing.
• Barriers will now display as part of the spawn animation instead of popping in after the generator finishes it’s spawn animation.
• Emissions are no longer destroyed by the wave timer, only generators are affected by the wave timer.
• Now randomly selects a background music track to start with on start up. I realized I forgot to mention to IGF that there are three tracks, so now it randomly picks where to start in it’s cycle. The cycle is, “Bango’s Jig”, “Cowboy Coder”, “Welcome to Emission Control”.
• Upgraded SDK to iOS5. I hate apple by the way, I do not understand the concept of sync for some reason, upgrading is always a nightmare.
• Fix issue with z ordering on pathing sprites.
• Fixed hit detection issue with barriers.

Tweaked the website over the last week. S BAT 2 now has it’s own fancy page. Added an about page as well. You will also notice twitter and youtube icons to link to twitter and youtube accounts at the top right. In other news, I submitted for IGF 2012 yesterday! I’m pretty sure nothing will come of it, but worth a shot. Gave me a concrete deadline to hit. A deadline that cost me money… Still need to upload final binary to IGF by end of this week. I’ll be putting some final graphical polishing into S BAT 2 this week. So no beta release this week, but definitely expect one next week.

Sorry it’s a little behind. Nothing major in this release, more of a polish/bug fix release. This week I’ll be moving website over to different host and tweaking it a bit. Also worked on preview video this weekend, so expect that to be up once I get the website moved over. Beta v1.7 will be delayed till I get website maintenance out of the way.

• Pause menu now works. You can restart a new game from the Pause menu (saves the trouble of having to reset the app, which was really annoying).
• Menu system code cleanup.
• Emissions now move a little slower.
• Enemies and Towers now shake when damage is done to them, I will be tweaking this some more in future releases.
• Barriers will now be the opposite color of the generators.
• Barriers can now be destroyed by hitting them with the same color (they will shake if you are doing damage). You do not have to destroy the barriers, and you aren’t awarded extra points for destroying them, so it is better to shoot around them.
• Emissions no longer need to be destroyed before the wave timer runs out, only generators need to be destroyed before the timer runs out.
• Fix, emissions spawning on top of each other.
• Fix, enemies would not always deactivate their collision body when resetting the game.
• Fix, enemies would not rotate to the next tower when recalculating their path.
• Fix, enemies will now stop when there are no more towers (you can still kill them while the final towers are exploding for extra points).
• Fix, emissions getting stuck on each other because the groove constraint was too short and the emission could not back up.
• Fix, wave timer damage would occur if an enemy was dead but still exploding.

This was rough week. Got menu system in. I’m rather pleased with it. Looks better than I thought. Was not able to get the pause screen in. I got the pause screen layout done in code but I will have to restructure some stuff because of how scene management and pausing the scene works (I didn’t really plan it into the design cause I didn’t know how it worked…). And while this update is a small list, it was a LOT of work.

• Added menu system. Tutorial Mode, Leaderboards, and SFX Volume currently do nothing. Everything else should be functional.
• Took out phone vibration when disc takes damage.

Feel like I’m in the final lap to make this thing actually feel like a game rather than a tech demo. Did a lot of minor gameplay polish and started working on wave progression. Luckily the infrastructure I laid out to plug in wave’s at various difficulty levels worked out. While it’s easy to plug in new wave algorithms, it take time to test/balance gameplay. S BAT 2 now has twelve different spawn patterns. Goal is to add a new spawn pattern a day while I continue to work on other features. I think I will shoot for 50 wave patterns for release. I thought at first I’d do 100, but then realized it takes longer to gameplay test/balance a wave than I thought.

Next release is the menu system.

• Now has twelve wave patterns that increase in difficulty as you play.
• If you do not clear the wave before time is up, then all towers will take damage.
• Now only takes three hits to take down a tower instead of five. Letting an emission hit a tower or failing to clear a wave does the same amount of damage. In other words, if you fail to clear three waves in a row or each tower gets hit three times by emissions, then you lose.
• Phone now vibrates when a tower takes damage.
• Added prototyped menu system that is going to get overhauled in the next release.
• Made touch area for movable disc bigger, so should be easier to interact with them.
• Pause now requires you to start and stop a touch on the pause button. Fixes issue where it was easy to unintentionally pause the game.
• Removed z axis animation on HUD (it was ugly…).
• Fixed typing animation so it no longer jitters (it was also ugly… only pretty people allowed in my game).
• Fixed z order drawing issue when emissions where spawning at the same time on top of each other.
• Polished up the background image.
• Moved the emission generator health bars inside instead of having them wrap around the outside.

Man, I really didn’t feel like I got much done this week, and then I wrote out that list… So I guess I did. This game is taking me forevar!

W00t, getting stuff done. I have to say, the music tracks are astounding! I think Langevin is still up in the air on if we will use the tracks as is or break them up and only use pieces of them. I could care less, cause either way, they will sound friggin’ fantastic!

Also started a twitter account if anyone is interested.

Started coding faster, so unfortunately, that means I’m getting a little more hacky. However, I’m pushing for actual deadlines now, which is good. Got HUD stuff done over this last week and will start working on the the difficulty curve and the wave patterns this week. Changes are below.

• Added HUD to top of screen that will animate in/out when you start/end the survival mode (only mode there is, haha).
• Score is now the proper font and animates in by typing. The typing is a little jittery so I need to see about polishing that later.
• Wave progression timer is to the right of the score (very please with how it came out).
• Added pause, just tap on the box at the top and it will pause the game. Music will continue to play. To resume, just tap the box again. Note that it does not retain it’s paused state when you close and re-open the app. Cocos2d is doing that, so I’ll need to make a work-around to save off the state and reset the it when you open the app.
• Added latest tracks from Langevin even though he asked me not to. And you know what? He can deal with it! Cause the tracks are awesome and I want to hear them in the game!