[rant]
I am so tired of people saying that StarSmasher is just a version of TouchFighter. For the record: I had already written about 80% of the first iteration of StarSmasher’s game engine before I had even heard of TouchFighter. I have since downloaded TouchFighter (why wouldn’t you want to learn from well written sample coe) but the only thing I used it for was to learn how to produce sound effects. I wrote SS because I love on-rails games and I thought the accelerometer would be a perfect control interface for one (oh, and because the Wii continues to disappoint me in its on-rails and flight-sim offerings).
For those of you who haven’t played TouchFighter, it’s pretty pointless as a game. It is a turret based game, which essentially means your ship never moves. You change your ships rotation by tilting the device but the only moving parts are the enemy ships that come screaming at you. In other words there is less gameplay value there than the Free Flight version of StarSmasher.
The StarSmasher game engine is 100% my coding, with thanks to the guys in the #iphonedev freenode rooms for helping me solve some particular OpenGL problems, and isn’t even the same style of game as TF. Yeah TF is a space shooter, but the similarities end there for the most part. SS is about dodging asteroids and flying with style while TF, which really has no “flying,” is about accurately aiming your iPhone at targets moving towards you on the screen.
I just can’t understand why people who have never played StarSmasher or TF would rate SS poorly on iTunes. I think people saw the TF video and thought it was amazing because it was really the first video demonstrating the iPhone’s accelerometer controls, but that is it, a demo.
Oh well, there is nothing I can do about it, people will continue to think that SS is TF.
[/rant]
I added another wordpress blog as a place for people to give me feedback on StarSmasher. Find it here.
The game is out for review, link coming soon. Above is the screenshot I chose for the App Store.
Alright! Those of us who were still waiting for acceptance into the iPhone developer inner sanctum have at long last been allowed in! StarSmasher is now running on my development device but its running between 15 to 20 frames per second and it takes a solid 15 seconds to load. Now its time to optimize.
UPDATE: after rewriting a major portion of the game controller and the object models the game is now running at a smooth 28 fps. Looks and feels great.
Enemy ships attacking from the space station.
New Laser Model
One More for an Even 3.
I’ve finally added enemy ships! Also I added a nice shockwave to the player’s ship explosion (pictured below). One of the enemy ships (not pictured) is a light weight fighter with two top mounted cannons. The other ship is a mine layer that lays proximity mines (pictured below).
The minelayer up close and personal.
The minelayer laying mines.
Explosion shockwave.
Okay, I have two screenshots for today. Last night I finished the first part of the HUD. I have to write a routine to allow me to pass an NSString to the hud to type on screen for the score and lives part still.
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Added animated sprites (in this case an explosion) to the game engine!
Added over the weekend:
- Collision Detection (via bounding spheres)
- Player Weapon (those green ball things)
- New Skybox
- Simple HUD (so far no health meter, score, etc.)
To Do:
- Some kind of explosion for asteroids being hit.
- Enemy ships (equipped with their own explosions)
- Test on a real iPod Touch (once I get into the developer program)
- Sound Effects (maybe some good creative commons background music)
- Build levels
- Figure out how to store high scores
- Deploy!
I’m tentatively calling the game “Starsmasher.” What do you think? I wanted to call it “Asteroid Runner” but that is too many characters. It becomes something like “Aster…nner.”
Anyway, here is the wallpaper (click for larger size):
