PewPew's dev blog

Icons

2012-01-04T06:43:00.000-08:00

When writing this post I often wrote "iCon" instead of "icon"... Damn you Apple.

Anyway I got a folder full of different icons for PewPew, and I thought it would be cool to look at the evolution.

The first icon shows the classic ship shooting at an enemy, but when resized to 47x47 pixels (the original iPhone's icon size) it looked like crap.

So I simplified it and ended up with this. I like its purified appearance a lot but I decided to make it more eye-catching because I want people to download and play the game!

Up to now I was using Adobe Flash (!) to create the graphics. I decided to learn a bit about Photoshop and was able to add a glowing outline and some gradients.

It's interesting to note that the glowing outline is done the same way in Photoshop and in-game: blur the original image and compose the result with the original using additive blending.

I later found a Photoshop iOS icon template with which I obtained this icon. However it attracted a lot of (deserved) criticism on the Android market, because the iOS glossy look negatively stood out on Android devices.

So I removed the gloss (but kept the roundness), played with the color balance, and obtained the current PP1 icon.

In parallel I was working on PP2 (and its icon). I considered putting 2 ships on the icon, but it would have suggested multiplayer and I did not want to mislead the customers.

It seems that I attempted to unify the icons of PP1 and PP2, and ended up with this. It was a failure and was never used.

After a while I realized that the PP2's icon actually looked very plain compared to other game's icons and realized the power of adding textures. This is the current (and likely final) PP2 icon.

During my last round of experimentations I tried different color scheme and liked this one very much. I ended up not using it, but it inspired me for the Android Market banner.

Edit (23/01/2012): a reddit post complaining about the lack of coherence with the icons on Android made me discover the Android Guidelines for the application's icons.

These are the two new (and hopefully final) icons.

Space War

2011-11-22T20:29:00.001-08:00

Today, while doing my daily googling of PewPew-related news, I found a piano version of PewPew's main theme!

I hope an a capella version is coming.

Keyboards

2011-10-27T02:48:00.000-07:00

At one point during the development of PewPew, I wanted the players to be able to enter their name for the online high scores and replays. At first I started to use the native iOS keyboard, and for a couple of months that's all there was.

But because I always wanted to have as few OS-specific code as possible to make the porting to different OS as simple as possible, I decided to implement my own keyboard.

It was going to be a lot of boring work though, so I kept postponing for later... And then, one day, ~~I got in~~ I saw this:

Extract from Gunnm, a fantastic manga.

I immediately wanted to have this keyboard in PewPew, and two days later it was done. And it looked great:

custom keyboard = seamless integration.

Besides the speed gain when porting to a new platform and the code simplification, there are many other advantages to having a custom keyboard. PewPew's font does not contain all the characters, so I can show only the characters that can be entered. Also, you can have custom colors in your nickname, and by having a custom keyboard I can make it very easy for the users to specify them:

Of course, there are disadvantages to using a custom keyboard: the users aren't used to the layout, they can't copy paste, the native keyboards are likely capable of detecting false key-presses, etc... but when you just want to enter your nickname, those things are not important.

Asteroids

2011-10-20T01:23:00.000-07:00

Quick post to say that I released an update for both PewPew and PewPew 2, that includes a new game mode called Asteroids.

It's of course an homage to the classic 1979 game, albeit PewPew style: lots of shooting, and lots of enemies.

A few notes: To keep the retro mood going on, the ship's color is forced to white. The asteroids' shape is generated at run time: it was faster for me to write code than to draw manually them :-) Added bonus: they have a unique shape every time. Final note: I resisted the urge of making the asteroids rotate, to stay closer to the original. A game developer's life is tough.

PewPew in Bangkok

2011-08-30T17:04:00.000-07:00

I was until very recently doing an internship in Singapore. I got to visit southeast asia, and while in Bangkok I saw this advertisement in the metro:

It made my day :)

XPeria Play support

2011-08-30T04:43:00.000-07:00

While it's true that Android's openness cause fragmentation which increases the work of the developers, it also allows the creation of new markets and opportunities.

The XPeria PLAY by Sony Ericsson is one of those opportunities, and allows mobile game developers frustrated by the touch screen to have fun ;-)

As you can see, it has buttons, but most importantly for me, it has two touch-joysticks (I just invented that term, and now that I think about it, it doesn't mean anything).

I recently released a version of PewPew 2 optimized for the XPeria PLAY, and will be doing the same for PewPew 1 soon.

Sony Ericsson has been really awesome with the whole thing. After exchanging a few emails they rapidly sent an XPeria PLAY simply after I promised I would bring PewPew to their phone. No stupid contracts or anything, they just trusted me. Really cool.

Now the phone itself is fantastic and feels really solid, and the joysticks are surprisingly usable. It is thicker than most phones, but that's to be expected from the slide out gamepad. The GPU is great and in fact it's the Android phone I tested where PewPew runs best.

You can read a more detailed review over at engadget, but overall if you like playing games it's a great phone.

Download numbers

2011-07-09T05:17:00.000-07:00

When reading other's developers blog, I always appreciate reading the posts about the number of downloads. It is always useful to know how many downloads to expect, and what impact different events can have.

The mobile landscape is changing fast though, and while you can get a pretty good idea of the dynamics of the Apple Appstore, there's not a lot of information regarding the Android Market (AM) and the new Amazon Appstore (AA). Here's my humble contribution (please note that all the numbers given are approximations).

PP on Android Market

During the first two weeks, PP was getting 800 downloads per day. However it got featured by Google, and the downloads increased a hundred folds (it got up to 80k downloads on one day). During the one or two weeks it was featured, it got about 900k downloads and entered the most downloaded free app list. I am guessing that currently, every free app in the top 10 are getting at least 40k downloads per day.

Right now PP is getting 3k downloads per day.

One metric that people rarely share is the number of active installations. It is particularly relevant if your app is advertisement based, because you want people to keep using (and thus having) your application for as long as possible. Currently, 37% of the people that downloaded PP kept it, which I think is pretty good considering it's a free application (I download a lot of free apps, but most of the time uninstall them quickly).

Active installations of PewPew.

PP2 on Android Market

Shortly after it reached 1 million downloads, I released PP2. Two days later, I updated PP to include a link/advertisement for PP2. I was getting around two hundreds downloads per day. PewPew 2 was then featured, and there was a 50% boost which is nice, but really nothing extraordinary.

If I recall correctly, with 400 downloads per day, PP2 was the number 5 in the top selling games category. Right now it is around #40, with around 50 downloads per day.

Active installations of PewPew 2. Currently the rate is 85%

PP and PP2 on the Amazon Appstore (aka the Useless Appstore)

While I was featured on the AM, Amazon contacted me so that they could get my application on their store. I happily obliged, having heard that if you were lucky enough to be selected for their "free application a day" program, you'd earn a boatload of cash. The idea was that Amazon selects one application per day, makes it free for their customers but still pay 20% of the application's price to the developer instead of the usual 70%.

PP2 got selected for the "free application a day" operation, but I actually did not earn anything because Amazon makes you sign a contract that cancels the one where the 20% are mentioned. In the end the operation translated into 100k downloads of PP2, but 0$ in my pocket. Some might say that it's worth it because of the free advertisement you get, but on the other hand you do loose quite a lot of potential sales. More importantly, I believe that giving out your products (even for a short amount of time) devaluates their value, but that's a topic that deserve a separate post.

The last thing I'll say about the AA is that in June, PP2 got 18 downloads...

Conclusion

Getting featured on the AM is awesome when you are a free app, advertising a payed app from a free app that is featured is a good idea, and it appears that the top games aren't raking in as much money as the top games on iOS.

Also, currently the AA is useless. If the rumors that Amazon is going to release its own tablets are true, that might change, but for now the AA is not interesting for developers.

Interview

2011-05-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

Here's an interview I gave for droidgamers.com.

Among other things, I talk about which games influenced PewPew, what it's like developing for Android, what impact does getting featured on the Android Market has, and what I think about ad-supported applications.

Success and crashes

2011-02-08T09:42:00.000-08:00

One day has passed, and PewPew is doing well. It has entered the Hot android app category on AppBrain.com, and I am receiving a lot of positive feedback. While monitoring twitter I found 14n3 saying "Oh man, making a review of PewPew, this game rocks!". Always gratifying.

Unfortunately, there are a few people reporting crashes.

Since PewPew is very stable on the iOS devices, the crashes must stem from Android specific code I added. There are two areas where I am not sure I am doing everything right:

It's either the handling of the application life cycle, specifically the part where I have to reload the openGL data when the game is resumed, or the http requests to upload and download the scores and replays.

Those thing would pose no problem if PewPew was a Java application like most Android applications, but it is 99% a C++ app with a thin Java wrapper (and thus uses JNI). To reduce the amount of JNI code I cut some corners.

At first I started using the Android Java API for the http requests, but then I realised it involved doing a boatload of JNI functions and threads, so I decided to use a C++ library. Curl and Boost are the most well known C++ libraries for that kind of job, but they are also completely overkill and would require too much time to integrate in PewPew. I searched for a light alternative and found HappyHTTP.

HappyHTTP does all what I need, and can be integrated into a project simply by adding a .h and .cpp file. The only problem is that it uses C++ exceptions. I can't use exceptions in PewPew even if I wanted to, because currently the Android NDK does not support exceptions handling and STL usage at the same time! I quickly hacked an exception-free version of HappyHTTP, but I may have messed up some things up, which may cause the crashes on some devices under certain conditions...

I hope I fix everything quickly so that I can resume doing the fun stuff: working on new levels and game modes.

PewPew 1.5 available on the Android Market

2011-02-07T08:10:00.000-08:00

The title pretty much says it all. I uploaded PewPew to the market today, and it is now spreading across the internet.

Here's the link to download it for Android.

From what I've seen, PewPew is by far the best shooter on the Android Market. On my Nexus One, I'd say it runs at approximately 4 time the frame rate of the current most popular shooter, Gun Bros.

BTW, Gun Bros is an absolute piece of crap, gameplay and UI wise. It's sickening to see the work of good artists go to waste with game designers like that. Sorry for the rant, but some games just revolt me!

Now go play PewPew on Android and fill the empty leaderboards :)

PewPew Beta, for Android

2010-12-20T11:07:00.000-08:00

Currently my work has shifted from developing PewPew to porting it to several different phone OS. I'll try to write a post later about the process of porting, because there's lot's of interesting bits I've discovered.

A few weeks ago I submitted a version of PewPew for the Bada OS to Samsung, but it got rejected because my website contained an image of an iPhone and a link to the App Store. At first I was surprised, but they simply don't want to have iPhone advertisement flaunted at their customers, which is understandable.

In the meanwhile I ported PewPew to Android and improved many things, and because I got rejected, those improvements will get to be in the initial Bada OS release as well (I try to look on the bright side of things).

Regarding the Android version, I don't know how well my app works on other phones, so I am starting a beta process. I want to get PewPew perfectly right before I submit it to the Android Market: I am a firm believer that first impressions counts.

If you want to test it, here is the .apk.

PewPew 1.4 and PewPew 2 1.2 submitted to the app store

2010-11-30T13:29:00.000-08:00

I finally submitted to the App Store updated versions of PewPew and PewPew 2! Both versions now support the iPad's and the iPhone 4's resolution.

Most changes are in PewPew 2:

There's an improved Chapter One: among the things I did was adding visual feedback showing destructible objects were reacting to the players' bullets, so the players would know those objects were destructible . More importantly, I've corrected the bug where the game denied the completion of a level when a player died just after completing the level's objectives, but before the transition back to the menu.
There's the long awaited Chapter Two ! It took a really long time to create because it's containing a lot of new enemies, and the levels are more complex than in the first chapter.
I now display the best times for the campaign levels.

I've added a new infinity mode that you unlock by completing the chapter Two. This mode is very different from the existing ones since you actually control 2 ships. It took a while to adjust the difficulty progression because I am actually not a very good player at this game mode =). It's tough to adjust the gameplay for players that are going to be much better than you.

I've slightly improved user interface. I've made the buttons prettier because I've always felt the old buttons (just a rectangle) were boring. Also I've removed the explosions in the backgrounds since they just weren't justified, and in my opinion reduced the purity of the menus.

I've also re-done the website. The client side is done in GWT while the server side is in python. One of the visible change is that the high scores now include the colors of the nicknames :-)

Now that I think about it I was quite productive. I really hope you all like the new stuff. My goal is to make PewPew 2 the best twin joystick game on the App Store, so I am going to keep on working on it.

Lack of updates because...

2010-07-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

I am porting PewPew to the Bada OS. There is a contest going on, and I believe I have a real chance of winning a price ;-)

PewPew, step 10

2010-06-21T15:41:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of this blog, I used to do short movies showing the progress of the game. I think it's cool to look back and see what changed and what hasn't.

Following this spirit, I made a small video showing the new game mode in action:

It features two new enemies internally called "Rolling Cube" and "Planner" :)

It looks really cool, but I still find it hard to play because my fingers tend to slip off the screen. This is because when the two ships are going in opposite directions, they cancel each others movement. Because I want to move anyway, I naturally move my fingers away from the centers of the joysticks, and thus move my fingers off the touchscreen.

There is really nothing I can do, except maybe visually notify the players that they are already moving as much as they can, and that they don't need to move their fingers further from the center. Come to think about it, it's an excellent idea. Yay. Now back to work.

One month after...

2010-06-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

The lack of posts on this blog is due to some furious bug fixing. During this past month I submitted to the App Store:

-PewPew 2

-PewPew 2 Lite, but I removed it from the app store immediately because I had actually uploaded the full version, instead of the Lite version...

-an update to PewPew 1 to notify everyone about PewPew 2

-an update to PewPew 2 because PewPew 2 was crashing when the score table was full, and because the iPad version simply did not start. It got rejected because the game did not support correctly the orientations of the iPad...

-a second update to PewPew 2 to fix all the issues I was aware of at the time (it got accepted).

At the moment, there seems to be no bugs left on the iPhone, but the iPad version sometimes crashes when validating a score, or when editing the name... It will get fixed!

While waiting for Apple to approve the various updates, I worked on the campaign. In the next campaign, you'll fight the "Boss" once more. This time however, it's going to be a bit harder to defeat him (some cannons/turrets will accentuate the chaos).

Recently, I have been working on a new Infinity game mode called "Symbiosis". You control 2 ships of different colors, much like in the xbox 360 game Schizoid. The blue ship will be invincible to blue enemies, and the red ship will be invincible to red enemies. For now, the ships are linked with an electric field that destroys enemies. The electric field is also a spring, so one ship can drag the other ship.

Don't mind the graphics, I am only testing the gameplay.

I am far from having the gameplay done, and I am not even sure yet this game mode will ever be included in PewPew 2. Controlling two ships at the same time is really really hard, and that's why I added the spring between the ships: it helps keeping the two ships close. Still, I am persuaded that this game mode has potential.

I received a mail 2 hours ago...

2010-05-06T14:08:00.000-07:00

...telling me that PewPew 2 is live!

Yay!

Gold

2010-05-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

PewPew 2 is Gold! I submitted it to the App Store yesterday, and hopefully it will be accepted in the App Store within a week. It will be priced at $1.99, which I think is a very good deal considering the quality of the content :o

This month I did some beta testing on different devices (3GS, iPad), and discovered the performance on the 3GS was worse than on my iPod 2G! I lost a lot of time trying to find out what the problem was, until I finally found a post in a forum explaining that using timers to set the FPS is bad on the iPhone OS 3.0.

I also did a small trailer with iMovie:

PewPew 2 trailer from Jean-François Geyelin on Vimeo.

It was my first time doing video editing, and it was pretty fun. It's frustrating that iMovie does not allow placing the text where we want it, but overall it's still a cool and simple software.

That is all for now, more updates when PewPew 2 is live.

PewPew 2's progress

2010-03-27T17:07:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in quite some time now because I've been so busy with programming PewPew 2, but quite a few people are asking for news, so here we go:

PewPew 2 is progressing real well. Here are some of the new features that are currently done:

-Scores can be uploaded anytime, not just after you've played (it should have been the case from the start, I know)

-Replays are now uploaded along the scores. This will allow you to watch and admire the best players play. Also, you'll be able to show off.

-Better graphics, 3D sound, seriously optimized engine.

-2 new sound tracks.

-A 10 level campaign with a lot of diversity. And a boss.

-2 new unlock-able game modes (in addition to megagore, assault, chromatic conflict and dodge this)

-Medals. These are rewards when you achieve certain scores in one of the 6 game modes.

-6 different ships. You progressively unlock them by obtaining medals.

-Lot's of new ennemies.

I think it's enough new content for a first release of PewPew 2. Make no mistakes though, there will be updates ;-)

So what am I waiting for? Why am I not submitting PewPew 2 to the app-store? Well, I need to polish everything up. This is the step that will make PP2 awesome. I have to carefully balance everything, make sure the difficulty is not too high (I tend to do that), not to low (no worries there), that the in-game explanations are clear, that the objectives in every campaign level are also clear, etc...

One more thing... I have been busy bringing PewPew 2 to the iPad! Here are the first screenshots of PewPew 2 HD:

That's Megagore. Notice the increased viewing field.

And that? That's one of the level of the campaign ;-)

That's the splash screen. The quote comes from a review on the Canadian App Store, and I find it absolutely hilarious. I had to put it somewhere; I hope the author doesn't mind!

Fun fact: like 99% of the developers creating iPad apps, I haven't got an iPad to test it on. To find the ideal position for the virtual joysticks, I've made myself a dummy iPad in cardboard and imagined myself playing with it! Actually, probably all the game developers for the iPad have done the same thing.

OK, enough chitchat, I have a game to finish.

Volumetric lines 2

2010-01-20T08:07:00.000-08:00

I promised I was going to do a follow up on the Volumetric Lines episode, so here it is.

Like I said, it was very easy to change from regular lines, to using volumetric lines in PewPew. In fact, I already changed once the way lines are drawn: the early versions of PewPew used SDL without OpenGL, so the lines were drawn in software using the good old Bresenham. Switching to OpenGL forced me to reduce the coupling between the renderer, and the game engine. Here is all I had to do to make the switch to volumetric lines, besides the initialization:

#ifdef USE_VOLUMETRIC_LINES
for (int index=0; index < numberOfVertex; index+=6)
VolumeLineRenderer::getInstance().renderLine(
&vertexes[index],&vertexes[index+3]);
#else
glVertexPointer(3, VERTEX_TYPE, 0, vertexes);
glDrawArrays(GL_LINES, 0, numberOfVertex);
#endif

Here are some new screenshots comparing the regular render to Sebastien Hillaire's one with different line width.

Now this is running on a PC, not on an iPhone. I previously said that I could maybe port this glowing effect to a real iPhone/iPod Touch, but it requires programmable shaders, which are only available on the iPod Touch 3G and the iPhone 3GS. I only have an iPod Touch 2G, so I wouldn't be able to test it.

Anyway, if you do not like the glowing effect do not worry, because if I do manage to get this effect to work on a real device at a decent frame rate, I would put an option to keep the classic look :-)

Automatic .caf file creation

2010-01-08T06:42:00.001-08:00

As I said in the previous post, I am currently working on adding sound effects to PewPew 2. The preferred format for sound effects with OpenAL on the iPhone is the .caf (Core Audio Format), but audio softwares usually output .wav files.

Fortunately, there's an easy way to convert one format to the other, using a built in command in OS X:

afconvert -f caff -d LEI16@44100 -c 1 in.wav out.caf

Being a programmer, I am lazy, so I started thinking about automatizing the conversion for all my .wav files using a small python script that would look like that:

for every file in the directory:

exec "afconvert -f caff -d LEI16@44100 -c 1 file.wav file.caf"

But it was not going to be efficient: every time I would want to regenerate a single .caf file, the script would regenerate all of them.

And then it hit me: makefiles are made to solve this exact problem. I tested my idea with a small makefile that looked like:

test.caf: test.wav

afconvert -f caff -d LEI16@44100 -c 1 test.wav test.caf

and it worked as expected :-)

I am sure lots of other people thought about using make for stuff other than compilation, but I am still satisfied of having found this on my own.

While I was at it, I did a small python script to generate the makefile. Everytime I create a new wav file, I simply have to run the makefile generator.

Now what's pretty cool is that you can make the makefile run automatically in xCode every time you compile your project. Even cooler is that by executing the makefile with make -j 2 (or make -j 8 for some lucky bastards), you get to exploit all the cores of your CPU for the conversion. Indeed, man make explains that the -j switch "Specifies the number of jobs (commands) to run simultaneously".

Try doing this in Windows. For me, it's clear that OS X and Linux are the best OS for programmers!

Happy new year

2010-01-07T21:50:00.000-08:00

First of all, happy new year. For some, 2009 was the year of the Ox and 2010 will be the year of the Tiger. For me, 2009 was the year of PewPew, and 2010 will be the year of PewPew 2!

In 2009, most of my time was spent on creating the engine and getting to know the iPhone. Now that the engine is done, I am almost exclusively working on the content: I am creating tons of new ennemies and even more levels.

I say "almost exclusively", because I actually did improve the engine. I did an important (though obvious) optimisation regarding the collision system (Chromatic Conflict is smoother now because of that), I made explosions luminous, and I am in the process of adding sound effects.

The light added to the explosions is just an expanding texture (not even billboarded) whose transparency increases until it becomes totally transparent. It's simple, but it looks real good, I can't wait to post a video.

The sound effects are handled with OpenAL. OpenAL enables you to specify the relative position of the sounds, though I don't know yet whether I will use this feature or not. Basically, this feature allows you to changes the volume of a sound effect, depending on the player's position. For instance, the nearer an explosion happens to the player, the higher the volume of the explosion will be. What's even more interesting is that the volume of an explosion happening to the left of the player would be higher in the left earbud than in the right earbud. You can create other effects, such as the doppler effect, but that would be overkill for PewPew ;-)

PewPew 2

2009-12-11T09:19:00.000-08:00

Here's a news that will make a lot of people happy: PewPew 2 is in development!

It will feature (among other things) new game modes unlock-able by completing some levels (there's a campaign mode), additional sound tracks, and medals and ships to earn.

The release date of PewPew 2 is "When it's done", but I hope to finish it before March 2010.

Programming the levels in the campaign mode is one of the task that is taking me the most time. I want all the levels to have a distinct look as well as a different gameplay. Right now, creating one level takes approximately one week (20% of the time is spent creating the level, 80% is spent polishing it)...

Of course, if you have any ideas or suggestions for PewPew 2, feel free to send me an email (jfgeyelin@gmail.com) or post a comment.

PewPew 1.2 is out!

2009-10-26T15:30:00.001-07:00

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

2009-10-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-08T15:11:00.000-07:00

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
lots of small optimizations
one less spelling mistake (thanks for pointing it out in the comments Anonymous)

Colors

2009-08-30T17:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-14T16:28:00.001-07:00

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

2009-07-10T13:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-04T05:39:00.001-07:00

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!

2009-06-24T04:56:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-06-16T15:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Forcing xCode to update the bundle

2009-06-09T16:36:00.000-07:00

When you modify some of your ressources files in a xCode project, the bundle does not get updated until you modify some port of the code (or do a rebuild all, which takes a while on bigger project).
So here's my (ridiculous) work around:

mac:~ jyaif$ while [ 1 ]; do touch /Users/jyaif/PewPew/Resources/data/boo; rm /Users/jyaif/PewPew/Resources/data/boo; sleep 5; done

In other news, I am still waiting for my update to get approved. I suspect Apple takes this long, to discourage devellopers from updating their apps too often, as this would force them to hire one or -god forbid- two additional testers. In totally unrelated news, I installed and tried the Android SDK :o

Update sent to the App Store

2009-05-29T12:20:00.000-07:00

I uploaded an update of PewPew. From what I read, it will probably take a week or so for the game to be available on the App Store.
Anyway, PewPew now:

encourages doing the tutorial when playing the game for the first time
asks for confirmation when quitting a game
permits the activation/deactivation of rotation during a replay
makes it visually obvious to the player that he has taken a bonus
has a lower amount of particles
has prettier explosions
puts the game in pause when a low battery alert (or a music menu pop up) appears
ignores replays that can no longer be played
make the difficulty increase more slowly in the "Assault" mode
respects the players that are listening to their own music :)

Under the hood updates:

versioning system for the scores
precalculation of the explosions
needed models are loaded at the beginning of a game (to avoid ingame slowdowns)
externalized descriptions of the game modes

What I should have finished:

The 3rd mode
An obvious optimization to the collision detection

I am still not satisfied with the way the "3rd mode" is. I have tried a variety of gameplay models, but I can't find anything that's not too hard and not too boring.
Also, the "obvious optimization" will take a lot of time to do, and right now I prefer focusing on finishing the "3rd mode".

More countries

2009-05-17T02:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I made PewPew available in all countries, except the english-speaking ones (US/Canda/UK/Australia/Ireland...)

Downloads

2009-05-15T08:07:00.000-07:00

The downloads, so far.

Current todo list

2009-05-13T14:49:00.000-07:00

Here is the current list of tasks I need to do before releasing an update for PewPew:

force/encourage doing the tutorial when playing the game for the first time
ask for confirmation when quitting a game
permit the activation/deactivation of the rotation during a replay
make it obvious to the player that he has taken a bonus
load some of the needed models at the beginning of a game (to avoid ingame slowdowns)
somewhat precalculate the explosions, and reduce the number of particules
make the explosions more spectacular
put the game in pause when a low battery alert appears
create a versioning system for the scores
ignore replays that can no longer be played
externalise the modes descriptions
finish the 3rd mode
make the difficulty increase more slowly in the "Assault" mode
optimize [a small] part of the collision detection

Green = done
Red = might not be done

Ratings on the french App store, after 4 days.

2009-05-12T17:16:00.000-07:00

Overall, the ratings are decent, and the reviews are good.
It is a good surprise, since this game is really not for casual gamers. I expected more people to not understand/like the game, and subsequently give it a poor rating.
I expect the average rating to decrease though, as unsatisfied people uninstall the app and give it a 1 star rating.

"Your application status is Ready for Sale"

2009-05-07T19:51:00.000-07:00

Ca y est, PewPew est disponible sur l'appstore Francaise/Belge/Luxembourgeoise d'Apple.
J'ai crée un groupe de discussion pour pouvoir parler de PewPew, là.

There, PewPew is available!
Since I released PewPew only in France/Belgium/Luxembourg, this post is be both in French and in English.
To ask questions/talk about PewPew, go here.

Status: In Review

2009-05-01T11:35:00.000-07:00

Date Submitted: 01 May 2009
Release Date: 01 May 2009
Status: In Review

Now, we wait.

Syntax highlighting for Lua in Xcode

2009-04-22T11:28:00.000-07:00

It is possible! You only need to copy two files in the correct directory:
LuaXcode3SyntaxColor.zip

(found at Capgo's website via lua-users.org)

Update: after installing this, Xcode started crashing regularly, and at one point I couldn't even send the game to the emulator anymore => I removed the files.

PewPew, step 9

2009-04-21T14:37:00.000-07:00

Added:
-Lightning on the main menu
-3D cube transition between the menus/screens
-"About" screen
-Pretty joysticks
-A new mode (shown at the end) that totally rocks
-Scores
-Menu to display scores and launch replays
-Hashes to verify the integrity of the scores
-Preferences
-An in-game menu
-Lower case characters
-Scrolling background that can change color.
-Music
-A rotating camera when watching replays

PewPew, step 8

2009-03-19T21:56:00.000-07:00

Added: splash screen, a decent icon, and REPLAYS. Here I am showing the two first modes (using the brand-new replay system)

PewPew, step 7

2009-03-15T22:37:00.000-07:00

Bam. One of the modes playable in the game. Needs to be tweaked to become fun.

PewPew, step 6

2009-03-09T21:45:00.000-07:00

Added space partitioning, allowing efficient collision detection between the player, the ennemies, the bullets, and the walls.

PewPew, step 5

2009-03-06T23:11:00.000-08:00

Just for kicks I enabled addiditve blending which resulted in... ABSOLUTELY NO LOSS OF FPS. Shown here are spherical explosions (200 particules per explosions), still at 60 fps. I captured the video filming the simulator because I was hoping the quality would be better than when filming my ipod (the pixels on my computer screen are larger).

PewPew, step 4

2009-03-06T22:54:00.000-08:00

I added a lua interpreter. The graphics (font/ship/background/bullets) are loaded from lua scripts. Also, openGL is now set up for 3D graphics (before, objects far away from the camera were as big as the objects near).

PewPew, step 3

2009-02-16T23:22:00.000-08:00

There, the ship can shoot bullets. I also added explosions, and they aren't slowing down the fps either :-)

PewPew, step 2

2009-02-15T12:11:00.001-08:00

I mostly cleaned the code.
Also, the camera follows the player, and you can control the shield.

PewPew, step 1

2009-02-14T06:35:00.000-08:00

Pheww, finally managed to run some code on my ipod. The left "joystick" doesn't do anything, it's there just to prove I can handle multi-touch.

First

2009-02-13T06:30:00.000-08:00

This blog is dedicated to the development of the PewPew, an iPhone game I am programming.