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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.

Prototype 03 Alpha v0.3 is up. No real gameplay changes. Basically I overhauled the laser code. List of changes is below.

• Can now cycle forward and backwards through color. Tap anywhere on the left side of the screen to cycle backwards through colors. Tap anywhere on right side of screen to cycle forward through colors.
• Enemy soldiers now take more damage from the lasers.
• Now uses cubic bezier instead of quadratic bezier.
• Laser now animates the bezier control points.
• Now calculates length by subdividing bezier instead of using algorithm to estimate arc length.
• Bezier collision sensors no longer separating when the bezier is curved.
• Laser hit point is more accurate.
• Added hit emitter for the end of the laser.

• hit box for player ships is now bigger, this is to help make the controls less frustrating when trying to move the ships
• ships will now constantly fire instead of requiring to be in touch with a laser
• stage will now keep a color state for all enemy’s, enemy soldiers and soldiers factories will flip to the new stage color ever 5 seconds, wally will change to the opposite color of the stage color
• laser towers are now spaced further appart, this allows enemy soldiers to attack the correct tower

First alpha build is done. I got all the core features in and working pretty solid. You can get it by clicking the link below.

I got sidetracked form my children’s story. I thought of a small iPhone game that I want to try to do. Using free version of jing to capture the video. It can not keep up. The laser particles actually lay over each other which doesn’t show in the video at all. Everything runs at 60fps in the simulator. Using cocos2d and chipmunk.