Tower Assault! Curse of Zombie Island

Posted on November 7th, 2010 by James Munro

I’m pleased to announce that RPNi have recently released our newest title, “Tower Assault! Curse of Zombie Island” for the iOS platform. This game has been a labour of love for the past 12-months and I’m really excited to finally see it in the App Store, alongside our previous game “iRis AG”.

If you have a few minutes and a couple of quid, please purchase the game and give us a review! We’re totally excited to hear your feedback, it will help us improve the game with new features and we always feed customer responses into a future developments. Here’s the official product description:

FIRE BRAINS FROM A CANNON AS YOU PLUNDER UNCHARTED RICHES WITH A PIRATE ZOMBIE HORDE. ARRRRR!

After a long season of pirating the tropical seas of the Caribbean you are forced to stop for supplies before the voyage home. Through your telescope you spot an uncharted island and set sail for the local dock.

After foraging for supplies you return to your ship to find the unspeakable… DISASTER! Your loot has been stolen and your trustworthy crew has been turned into blood-thirsty zombies! An evil cackle is heard upon the wind… turning to face it, you see an Evil Witch Doctor fleeing into the dense jungle!

Meanwhile, your crew are voicing their only concern: BRAINS! A cunning plan formulates in your mind as you stroke your beard, the metallic glint of a cannon catches your eye. Using advanced pirate logic you reach an explosive conclusion: CANNON + BRAINS = ZOMBIE CONTROLLING POWER!

So, strap on your pirate boots, grab a sack of brains, and command your horde of zombie minions through this reverse TD adventure game to recover the stolen loot, plunder the local villages, defeat the Evil Witch Doctor, free your crew, and uncover the secrets of Zombie Island. Let the domination begin!

——————————————————————————————–

* SHOOT BRAINS FROM A CANNON!
* A cunning pirate uses everything at his disposal. Command your zombie horde to victory using brains and gunpowder – a destructive, and messy, combination!

* REVERSE TD ACTION NEVER SEEN BEFORE!
* Over forty levels that require skill and an understanding of the strange environment you now occupy. Enslave the native islanders to your army of brain-hungry zombies as you battle through traps, ambushes, and take down the natives’ towers and soldiers.

* MANY ADDICTIVE CHALLENGES AWAIT!
* Never a dull moment in the life of a pirate – play the many different bite-sized challenges: Run the Gauntlet, Capture the Treasure, Invade the Village, Destroy the Towers and even the opportunity to win the allegiance of Good Witch Doctors!

* UNLEASH THE POWER OF THE AMULETS!
* Find and use the power of several mysterious amulets, each granting special abilities upon your zombie horde. Vodoo magic has never been so delightfully useful!

* UNCOVER MYSTERIOUS SECRETS!
* Discover the secret spoils of Zombie Island, hidden deep beneath the depths of the jungle canopy! Do you have what it takes to command your zombie horde to tales untold?

* EXPERIENCE HIGH-QUALITY POLISH AND A CAPTIVATING SOUNDTRACK!
* This game is developed to a high standard: we know you’ll enjoy our attention to detail and a soundtrack that you just won’t be able to stop humming!

——————————————————————————————–

ABOUT THE DEVELOPERS: Rogue Pirate Ninja Interactive are committed to bringing you a notoriously addictive gameplay experience using the latest and greatest ideas and technology with a methodology derived from the traits of the Rogue, the Pirate, and the Ninja!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Game Developement, Games | (0) Comments | Click here to add a comment »

BlockMaster: New Stuff Soon

Posted on September 27th, 2010 by James Munro

I’ve been continuing the development of BlockMaster in the hope that it become a nice demonstration of Metagine’s current feature set. The first thing I needed to change was the visual style, it was pretty poor (although not too bad considering how quickly I knocked it together). I’ve also been working on tweaking the gameplay, and there will be multiple levels upon the new release. I’ve also implemented some pretty cool particle effects, see the screenshots below for a better idea. I hope to have this release ready within 1-2 weeks, it’ll be a lot more polished than the current version!

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Game Developement, Metagine | (0) Comments | Click here to add a comment »

Metagine: Feature Plans

Posted on September 22nd, 2010 by James Munro

Last week I developed a game using Metagine, check it out here. The game is only simple, the idea was for me to test what is working in Metagine and to find out what I should be doing next. I was pretty pleased with the minor number of issues that I ran into, I only had to deal with a couple of cyclic dependency issues and the occasional memory leak. I noticed a couple of rendering issues with older graphics cards but this is mostly due to their poor OpenGL support, not something I’m especially worried about.

This led me to start thinking about the next step that I should take with Metagine. I’ve decided that rather than focusing on adding some glitzy new features I’m going to stand back and perfect the code I’ve already got. For me this means a mixture of the following things:

  1. Fixing known bugs.
  2. Refactoring code to a higher standard.
  3. Writing the engine documentation.
  4. Identifying performance bottlenecks (if any).
  5. Splitting out game projects from the Visual Studio solution.

There are some pretty insignificant bugs, but there are also a couple of bigger ones. Notably, font rendering is currently hugely inefficient. Every time I render text to the screen with an MFont object I’m rebuilding an OpenGL texture and this can happen multiple times per-frame. This has undesirable effects on FPS and so something needs to be done about it. The other issue is I generally load textures into memory on-demand, however I don’t currently have any policy for removing them from memory after their use. I think I will devise some routines that can flush the entire cache, and perhaps also automatically free textures that haven’t been used for a specific duration.

Once I’ve completed these tasks I intend to package the relevant files into a distributable archive with the accompanying documentation so that people other than myself can actually use things fairly easy. I guess this would also need an example application to explain how to use some of the features. Time to get busy!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Game Developement, Musings | (0) Comments | Click here to add a comment »

Mini Game Jam

Posted on September 18th, 2010 by James Munro

Yesterday I decided to run my own solo mini game jam using Metagine and a couple of art assets I had lying around from other projects. The result is a basic Breakout-style game with a splash screen, a menu and 1 level of gameplay. Really there’s nothing unique about this but I was really pleased to get a working game prototype made in such a short amount of time using my engine. Whilst I was working on the game code I barely made any modifications to the engine library which is a great sign that the features and functionality are now decent enough to make some simple 2D games. I borrowed a lot of the splash screen code from Able In Space, but there was little point in me re-writing it, and everyone loves code reuse!

With this post I’ll attach a few screenshots but there won’t be a downloadable/playable game just yet. Today I’m going to be adding more levels, scoring and generally polishing things to a better standard. Then I need to perform some testing to make sure that the engine has all the files it needs to run on other PCs.

I tried to run the game on my girlfriend’s laptop but unfortunately her Intel integrated graphics chip has poor OpenGL support and didn’t have the ability to use VBOs. As a result I retrofitted the option to use regular VBAs instead which fixed the immediate problem, however some of the textures weren’t displaying correctly… I’ll need to research this another time.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Game Developement, Games, Metagine | (0) Comments | Click here to add a comment »

Metagine ChangeLog (16/08/2010)

Posted on September 16th, 2010 by James Munro

This week has been decent for progress on Metagine, despite other commitments. A lot of the changes I’ve made this week have been under-the-hood and so the impact on visuals is limited. I don’t have anything particularly shiny to demonstrate but I do have a video showing some of the new functionality I’ve added to the developer console (shamelessly inspired by Quake).

Summary of Changes

  1. Upgraded engine’s internal resolution to 1080p (read about that here).
  2. Renderer overhaul – using VBO’s instead of VBA’s (where appropriate).
  3. Developer console now has scrollable buffer.
  4. Added auto-complete to the console, really useful!
  5. Huge amount of const-correctness improvements, improved code maintainability.
  6. Removed quite a lot of source-code cruft that had built up.

In my previous post I mentioned in passing that the game runs at 60 FPS. This is completely true, but what I failed to mention is that I’m artificially limiting it to that speed. If you adjust the relevant console variable (i_framecap) and set its value to 0, you’ll see that the game can actually run at over 1,000 FPS so there’s absolutely no need for any profiling/performance tuning at this stage. Yay!

Here’s this week’s video. I’ve used the YouTube annotations feature to try and explain what’s going on. Hope you can follow well enough and be sure to watch it in 720p if your hardware can cope.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Game Developement, Games, Metagine | (0) Comments | Click here to add a comment »

« Older Entries