PewPew 1.2 is out!

And the scores are pouring in... can you guess when did Apple publish the update?

So far, I've used 0.6% of the maximum CPU load (and 0% of the bandwidth), so I should be OK!

URL time

PewPew 1.2 should be accepted anytime now, so the scores are going to start to pour in... luckily I have just completed PewPew's website:

http://pewpewgame.appspot.com/.

The most important features are the score board and the forum. I made the score board myself in python, and found the code for the forum here. The forum is pretty cool, because it allows you to post with your Google account, or without login at all.

Everything is hosted on the Google App Engine, so if the traffic stays under a limit, I will never have to pay for the servers, and the website will stay up and running for ever.

According to my estimations, I can handle 100 000 score submissions per day without paying for additional bandwidth. Since "only" 50 000 people have installed PewPew, I should be fine.

I have no idea what to expect regarding the CPU utilization, but I have cached a lot of database calls, so I should be OK.

At worse, I might have to pay 1 or 2$ per day during the first week; after the first week, the traffic should decrease significantly.

PewPew v1.2

I uploaded the 1.2 update to PewPew yesterday. I have been working on it for several weeks, so there's a lot of changes!

First of all, there is a new game mode! I was not planning on adding one right away, but the survey made me change my mind. I won't spoil the surprise about how it's played, but I guarantee it is without a doubt the best mode yet.

Not shown here: insane amount of enemies.

Secondly, there is now an online high score board! In a couple of days, I will post about a small website with all the scores.

Thirdly, all the old game modes have been tweaked: I added a bonus to reward speed in "Dodge This", and there is a new type of enemy in "Assault".

Of course, there are some small new optimizations that should improve the frame rate a bit on the old iPhones and iPods Touch.

Here's the complete list of what is new:

• new game mode, called "megagore"
• online scores
• the possibility to move the camera freely when watching a replay
• the possibility to flip the screen (useful for iPhone owners)
• the possibility to disable the text notifications during the game
• a tougher enemy in "Assault", forcing the player to move
• an efficiency bonus in "Dodge This"
• colors in the nick names
• lot's of small optimizations
• one less spelling mistake.

Colors

In PewPew 1.2 (not yet released), you can colorize you nickname. It uses what I call the "Quake 3 text color convention". Indeed, in Quake 3 you could colorize your nickname by inserting "^X", where X would be a number between 0 and 7. Each number was associated with a certain color.

For instance the nickname "^1Hello" would appear red. "^4World" would appear blue. You could even do combinations, like "^1Hello^4World".

Well the same thing is possible in PewPew 1.2, except that there are more colors to choose from.

The new feature in action

Here is a picture showing each color, with its associated symbol:

I hope this will result in a colorful online score table! (more on that later).

Survey results

I had exams, so I could not really work on PewPew, but now I am back. Let's take a look at the survey results.
There were 46 responses, and I started having responses only minutes after I posted the link on touchArcade's forum. One cool thing is that they appear in real time, in a spreadsheet. Well done Google.
And wow, I can actually copy paste the generated summary into this post.
Here we go:


The game modes are pretty even, though it would appear you like shooting more than dodging.

What is your favorite game mode?

What is your least favorite game mode?

I find the music excellent, and you seem to agree. That's good because the composer is not cheap, he earns 50% of the profit* made with PewPew. The soundtrack is available for free by the way.

How would you rate the music?

Very poor

Excellent

Ah! Google is not perfect after all, they messed up the parsing! That's about all we learn from this question, because I already knew that I am good at making a game balanced.

The difficulty of the "Assault" mode increases:

The difficulty of the "Chromatic Conflict" mode increases:

And now, the most important information I got: it appears you guys prefer a new game mode over online scores! That really really surprised me.

What would you prefer in the next update

In fact, I was planning on releasing an update with the only new thing beeing onlines scores, but that made me change my mind. So yeah, this survey was useful.
Also, I was thinking about doing a game mode that involved dropping bombs, but since you like shooting so much I went in a different direction... that I have yet to find.

Finally, I got a lot of interesting/passionated comments in the form. I'll talk about all the improvements I did for PewPew 1.2 in a futur post.
Thanks everyone.

* that amounts to exactly 0€

Survey time

I am currently working on the update, and I'd like to have a bit of input from the players.

It's totaly anonymous and very quick (7 questions).

Link to the survey

Volumetric Lines

I first started programming PewPew on Linux, with portable librairies (OpenGL/SDL/libcurl). Of course, I had the iPhone/iPod touch in mind, so I designed the gameplay and the UI accordingly.

After a month or two (once I payed for the $99 for the SDK), I migrated to Xcode and the iPhone OS. I'll write a post about that later because it was not as simple as I imagined it would be.

A week ago, I migrated the code back to Linux, and this time it only took a couple of days :) The goal was to make PewPew prettier by giving the lines a glowing look (like geometry wars) by using the infinite power of my computer (compared to the iphone anyway).

Perfection.

Naturally, at first I failed :-)

My first idea was to draw the lines multiple times, with different width and different transparencies. Here's what it looked like:

Not perfection.

Okay so that was ugly, but it had to be done. The second idea was to use pixel shaders. A pixel shader is small routine executed on the graphic card, that is applied to every pixel drawn. In this case, the shader would blur the screen.

And then I remember that activating motion blur in Crysis made the game run at 10fps...

So I got a third idea, where every line drawn would actually be a streched texture. However, a problem would arises when you would look at the line along its axis: you would only see its profil. By searching a bit (actually, a lot) on the internet, I found out that this problem has been solved, and has a name: Volumetric Lines.

I won't go into the detail of the technique, there is some code here. However I will say that his implementation kicks ass, because he actually use the GPU to process the orientation of the texture (using a vertex shader). Here are some glorious screenshots:

This time, the screenshots are made under OS X, and with the iPhone's screen resolution.

Transparency is not yet working, but that should be easy to correct and I think that using mipmapping will reduce the aliasing (and thus make thinner lines possible). Also, the vertex shader has the additional effect of messing up the tab polygon. hehe.

Overall, I am pretty happy of the result. BTW, it might be possible to run this on the iPhone 3GS at a descent frame rate... To be followed?

Let there be PewPew v1.1

PewPew v1.1 is finally out. I have not received any crash report (yet?), so the update code seems to work well.
Also, it seems that people appreciate the new game mode =)

Review!

First of all, I am happy to announce that App of my Eye reviewed PewPew:

[...] the biggest praise we have for this game is it’s controls, which are very responsive and just feels great overall. If not THE best controls that we’ve ever had in an iPhone game, definitely one of the best. Other publishers/developers should take note. A must-have app for every level of gamer and amazingly, it’s free.

Secondly, last Friday (the 19th), I submitted an other update. Let's hope Apple will validate it more quickly than the last one I submitted!
The most important changes in the new version (PewPew v1.1) are that:

• The difficulty increases more slowly in the Assault mode.

• Because the gameplay changed a little bit, the replays you did are incompatible: you will not be able to watch the replays you made in PewPew v1.0. I am sorry, but it was just too complicated to maintain compatibility.

• I finally added a new mode, Chromatic Conflict. In this mode, you can change the color of your ship. Depending on the color of your ship, you can destroy certain enemies.

• During the replays, you can stop the rotation of the camera, and fast forward.

Edit: and I forgot to mention that PewPew v1.1 allows you to listen to your own music.

Update cancelled!

Okay, so I submitted the update two weeks ago, and it is still "In Review". I had not realized my update was so big it required 2 weeks of attention.

So I canceled the update, because right after it would have been accepted it, I would have submitted a new one, and I am pretty sure Apple wouldn't have appreciated it.