iPad

Boom Bugs Released!

Posted on December 11, 2011 by Quick Fingers in Boom Bugs, iPad, iPhone, Unity | 1 Comment

Title says it all :) Boom Bugs my physics based destruction game has officially been released on iPhone and Android, and the iPad HD edition is under review as we speak.

After working solo on the project for a little while I collaborated with the guys at Playerthree and between us we finished it from an early alpha to the polished game that it is now!

If you aren’t familiar with the game, please take a look at the trailer below (courtesy of unity3d.com)

All you have to do is head on over to www.playboombugs.com for more information, get it on your smartphones and start killing some spiders!

Designing for iOS

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Quick Fingers in General, iPad, iPhone | 5 Comments

I’ve been quiet recently, a lot of this is due to me focussing on a couple of key titles for me for iOS. One you already know about and one is totally unannounced. With all this work on little screens I was doing all sorts of UI and HUD design and one of the things that bothered me was previewing the work I was doing in Photoshop on a device at native resolution. (especially with retina display when the native resolutions screen area is tiny compared to most computer monitors displaying the same resolution). I’ve researched some solutions but inevitably came up with my own that suits me best.

There’s an app for that.

Currently there’s a couple of apps out there suited to this. First up is LiveView from Nicolas Zambetti. This is a free screencast type affair that broadcasts a select area of your screen to your device. Setup is super simple, you do need a host app installed on your computer and it is only available for Mac, once installed the device connects over wifi and everything works. You need to specify an area of your screen just for the screencast, this means if you move your photoshop windows about a lot it’ll break the illusion and you might spend time re aligning to the capture area.

The second app i tested is called Review by Kevin Kalle and Pieter Omvlee. This is a more bespoke tool for the task, specifically targeting photoshop users. It is a file sync solution that again requires a host application and again is Mac only. (I use both a mac and pc throughout development so I prefer cross platform solutions)

Once you’ve got both the iOS app and the mac app running syncing them was easy enough and to use it, there’s a system wide shortcut for syncing any images selected in the finder or any active window open in photoshop as a png. Very nice. The only negative thing i found was the process to update an image currently being displayed was slightly convoluted. It requires you to go back to the start of the app, hit the refresh button, wait for the update and the click on the image again to show the updated version. The iOS app of Review is also not free. It’s currently being sold for £1.99.

So one app (LiveView) provides instant updates as you make them via screen casting techniques but requires you to have a reserved area of your monitor specifically for this so didn’t really allow for folks like me who chuck photoshop windows around reckless abandon. On the flip side Review was more suited to me, just a keyboard shortcut and a file is ready to be viewed on the device, however the price and process to view a file I may of only changed a couple of things in meant it wasn’t right for me. The other problem I had with both these apps was having to install another helper app on the mac side was something I’d like to avoid if possible (and ideally, get a cross platform solution) and with liveview, broadcasting a screencast does have an impact on your processor.

My solution (Dropbox / custom website)

Photoshop Action (bound to SHIFT-F1)

So what was the end result? Well I chose to use neither. Instead I utilised what I already had available to me… Namely a Dropbox account and a tiny little web site on my domain. How this works is as follows… I’m messing around with a mockup in photoshop, I hit a keyboard shortcut, an action runs to save a copy to my Dropbox public folder with a specific name (in my case iospreview.png) and I just tap my iPhone screen and the image magically appears.

(One added bonus of using Dropbox is the nice little icon that tells me when the image is done. And if the changes are minor it only uploads the delta so it’s pretty darned fast)

That magical bit is where the interesting part lies, I’m using a free app on my iPhone called Full Screen Browser (this app is also a private browser, whatever that means, but the full screen bit was perfect for my needs. I have a website that just shows that drop boxed image, and nothing else. With some metadata and javascript I’ve made it fit the iPhone screen pixel perfect and make the image a link to refresh the page. Simple! Now I can design on my Mac or my PC, with no extra applications running and update my iOS view with a simple shortcut and a tap of the screen. It also works without the iPhone being on the same network as my computer (Useful if your workplace has network restrictions or no public wireless) and its totally free.

Before and After some HUD Changes. 1 key press & 1 tap to see the update on device.

As an added bonus I included a swipe control on the website that toggles a “screen-door” effect. This basically emulates a non retina screen on a retina display device. So when viewing images on my iphone4. I can see how they would look on an iphone 3gs and lower just by swiping across the image. For information on how this works (and why it is different to just viewing a half resolution image on your retina screen) visit Louie Mantia’s blog here

If you want the source code for the html page to do this click the big blue button

 

Download Source

 

Introducing : Boom Bugs!

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Quick Fingers in Boom Bugs, iPad, iPhone, Unity | 4 Comments


Hello! I am pleased to finally announce the project I’ve been working on for the last few weeks… It is called “Boom Bugs!”

Earlier on in the year I made a blog post announcing a new title called Tick, Tick Boom. Well that was the prototype for what is now “Boom Bugs!”. I was getting to grips with working in 2D in a primarily 3D engine (Unity) and now I’m ready to reveal!. I thought a nice way of doing it would be in the form of a simple developer natter in a youtube video. This is my first youtube video I’ve talked in and I didn’t plan anything it’s just one take so its nice and raw :)
Enjoy the talk, and see how I’ve done some of the funky little things in Unity… Feel free to full screen it if you want a good view of the Unity interface. It’s in HD so should all be readable.

Thanks for watching!

Guns, lots of guns

Posted on November 2, 2010 by Quick Fingers in iPad, Unity | 1 Comment

I’ve has a long list of weapons for this game ever since the first GDD really, combat s always going to be a main feature of the core. Lately i finally got round to building some of them. If you have been following me for a while and have seen some of my previous videos you may recognise some of the weapons here but there are some new ones you won’t of seen aswell, including the black hole generator – an alien weapon that creates a temporary black hole sucking in and destroying any enemies near to it. Also a Terran made nuke launcher that will destroy most enemies in range with one shot :)

I had a few more weapon ideas written down but some might not make it into the final cut. Such is the way with developing on your own, you just want to keep adding and adding but inevitably something will eventually have to give, else the project would never ever get finished!

The Core Goes Multi Platform

Posted on October 18, 2010 by Quick Fingers in iPad, Unity | 3 Comments

I was in two minds whether or not to post this… on one hand, I want to inform people that I am indeed planning to make The Core as a PC/Mac downloadable game after the initial iPad release, and was excited to show some footage of a potential battle scene with cool explosions and all. On the other hand I didn’t want to put this out there and everyone expect all these cool explosions on the iPad version. As unfortunately that wont happen. Don’t get me wrong all the other stuff here will look like this :) Just none of the Detonator powered explosions.
Here’s the video!

The Core Planet Preview

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Quick Fingers in iPad, The Core, Unity | 1 Comment

Now for something interesting :) Showing in the video below is The Core’s planet surface mode. In this you control a little hologram drone and you can search for payloads on the planet.

Some technical limitations of the iPad mean that I had to develop some interesting techniques to get a terrain. Unity has a terrain engine but it is not supported for iOS devices so I had to roll my own.

This one works using simple planes with 10×10 vertices per plane. It arranges them in a grid and modifies the y position of each vertex based on a perlin noise generated height field. This way it’s very easy to do grid based culling to only render tiles that you need on screen. On top of that no lighting is used on the terrain, instead I use vertex colors to simulate shadows and highlights amongst the terrain.

I used a very basic ambient occlusion type calculation to generate the vertex colors based on the heights of the 4 surrounding vertices. It produces smooth gradients which generally look quite natural. As you can see from the video it adds some much needed variance to the texture and the result is fine for the iPad :)

All in all I’m happy with the performance and am getting ~25 fps throughout this part of the game.

Happy viewing!

The Core on a real iPad

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Quick Fingers in iPad, The Core | Leave a comment

This update is long overdue but I’ve been busy developing The Core. It’s hard doing everything by yourself! Even when you’re a robot from the future. So without further ado, the updates… I’ve been working on the combat game for a little while and finally have something worth showing. Also as a bonus this is it finally running on a real iPad!

In other news, I will have something fun to show very shortly

Optimizing Unity Games for the iPad

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Quick Fingers in iPad, The Core, Unity | 2 Comments

As some will know I started developing the core before the iPad was available to buy. This meant a lot of guesswork in terms of rendering performance, draw calls, vertex count and all the other fun stuff you have to think about from time to time.

This weekend just past I spent a good amount of time doing optimisation to get the core to run nice enough to make it playable.
The map screen is very light with just the star sprites and the ship taking basically no vram, and the background being the biggest memory hog here theres also no light sources and nothing really moves. So I’m getting a solid 60fps in the map screen.

Alpha Test Not Advisable
Coming into a system view with planets is a different story: originally I was getting around 15 fps on the sol system (Sol is the heaviest a system can really be with 9 planets and asteroids). The sun for each system is a particle system and a point light.

In the first system view I had clouds of very light dust sweeping through the background crossing each other.

It seems alpha test is very pricey so any layered transparency means big performance hits so unfortunately they all had to go, but I immediately gained about 5fps.

Next the planet orbit lines. These were originally drawn with line renders, one for each line. The only problem with that was line renderers don’t batch, So even though they all share a material, if there’s 9 planets that’s 9 extra draw calls, just for little lines.
Line Render Alternative
So instead of line renderers, I just built custom meshes in runtime for the lines, that way batching works and i save 8 draw calls. The intensity of the sun was something worth changing, originally it was 50 particles which gave the sun some life as you can see the shape moving and flaring away.

However I reduced the particle number to 12 and made the particles bigger which seemed to have a positive effect on the frame rate and still looks good, the sun kept its
shape a little more too it just has slightly less movement, which is fine.

Lastly it seems the ipad fill rate isn’t so hot, so having large areas of the screen changing frequently hurts. Simply zooming out with the camera slightly making all objects appear smaller had a very positive effect on the frame rate.


Now the system view is running at around 30fps I feel confident it’ll be playable. The only problem I can see is because the map view is so smooth, maxed out at 60 fps, you notice the drop to 30 when you enter the system view. Perhaps I should cap the framerate to 30 to ensure the game is consistent throughout. It just seem a shame because it looks really slick at 60!

So to summarise:
The key thjngs to remember on the iPad are low fill rate and alpha test causes strain. For those just interested in the numbers, the draw calls in system view are 33-45 with optimisations and 48-58 without. The triangle count didn’t change as i didn’t remove any meshes, so the triangles are 15,000, which means I don’t think polygon count is going to be an issue with most games on the iPad. Your more likely to hit a speed bump from fill rate before you need to redo your models.

Remember the iPhone? Well the iPad 3GS has the same GPU. But it has 5 times the pixels to draw. So by that nature things on the iPad cant really be expected to look “better” than they do on their smaller sibling, just bigger (which could be construed as better). I do think that having a nice big multi touch display that’s the most responsive on the market definitely makes the little niggles worth putting up with and remains a tremendously fun device to develop for.

1 2   Next »