So I am looking for testers for AquaWars. Here is the signup link:

http://tflig.ht/enMnwr

Only requirement is a device with iOS 4.1 or higher. Next week I will be posting this to the TouchArcade forums, so get in now while you can!

So it has been a while. Only two weeks actually, but when I am used to writing weekly posts it certainly feels like a long time. I think I can safely say that I am 10% away from being finished, which really means I have 90% of the work left. But it does mean that I am starting to promote the game and look for beta testers. The TouchArcade thread should be coming next week along with the first teaser trailer for the game which will feature some cool gameplay footage. On to the updates.

I have spent a large amount of time working on the in game menus. Mainly because it is my least favorite thing to work on, so I am trying to work in it first and save the best for last (Creating new gameplay elements/bosses.) The ship upgrade screen I showed off last time is now fully functional, allowing you to unlock and open ships. It is still not 100% as each ship is going to have a blurb of text as a description, but the screen is to the right. It even has custom dialog boxes, which surprisingly is the first time I have not used built in system dialog boxes. I felt they ended up taking you out of the experience and just looked out of place. And in AquaWars they will be quite a few more dialog boxes then my other games, so I didn’t want to ignore an important element of the menus. The level ending screen also got a complete facelift, but I am not going to show that off here.

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If you haven’t noticed, I have yet to upload an AquaWars development diary post this week. That is because there isn’t one! Yes, I know you all must be quite disappointed. Instead I spent time this week working on my client project and a very large update to Rocket Chimp! The update will be adding a ton of new features, retina iPad support, iCade support, new menus and more!

The update will be submitted hopefully on Monday, and I will also be working on a new trailer for the game. Kind of a soft relaunch of the game I guess you could say.

But next week there should be a little work on AquaWars even with all the update and my other project. Till next week!

5 weeks in. I don’t like starting out like this, but I had yet another real life set back this week. My dad was having chest pains and ended up in the ER. Turns out he had a minor heart attack and had to have a stent put in. He is doing ok now, thank God. Turns out he went to the ER just in time. But anyways, I still made some decent progress on the game.

A lot of time this week was spent making things that appear to work actually work. The main menu now exists and allows you to either select a level or play survival mode. The menus look alright I think, but at this point they are mainly for placeholder functionality. I will probably end up redesigning them before launch. I feel they are a bit too static at this point.

As far as actual gameplay goes I added two new enemy types. So that means there are already more enemy types in the game than the original AquaWars. Content-wise this game is going to be my grandest endeavor yet. Levels are actually working now. I added some new features that will allow character dialogue whenever I want during a level, and it allows for it to wait until the player clears all enemies on screen.

Speaking of levels, I guess I will go into how I store my levels. I use JSON to store the levels just for its simple parsing and human readability, while not being quite as “dense” as XML files. The format allows for me to specify character dialogue and enemy spawn positions. The strings are separate, so I could possibly add some other localizations later. Each item is set to launch at a specific time (“t”) and has an action type (“a”). Currently there are only two actions, spawn and display text. Here is an example of the level format (Not an actual level, but it gets the idea across):

{ "levels":
    [
     {
     "name" : "Level 3",
     "level-strings": [
                       {"name" : "SYSTEM", "string" : "Welcome to Level 3! This text is shown right away."},
                       ],
     "level-data": [
                    { "t" : 0, "a" : 1, "d" : 0},
                    { "t" : 0, "a" : 0, "d" : 1, "s" : 0, "y" : -60 },
                    { "t" : 0, "a" : 0, "d" : 1, "s" : 1, "y" : -60 },
                    { "t" : 0.5, "a" : 0, "d" : 1, "s" : 0, "y" : -100 },
                    { "t" : 0.5, "a" : 0, "d" : 2, "s" : 1, "y" : -100 },
                    { "t" : 1.5, "a" : 0, "d" : 2, "s" : 0, "y" : -60 },

                    { "t" : 1.5, "a" : 0, "d" : 1, "s" : 1, "y" : -60 },
                    { "t" : 2, "a" : 0, "d" : 1, "s" : 1, "y" : -140 },
                    { "t" : 2, "a" : 0, "d" : 4, "s" : 0, "y" : -140 },
                    ]
     },
    ]
}

As you can see, it is readable, but not very fun to edit. I may end up creating some kind of simple level editor to aid in level creation, but I’ll see how it goes to see if it is worth the time investment.

The rest of this week was spent fixing scaling issues so now everything works on both iPhone and iPad.

So the original plan was to submit on the 18th but that is obviously not happening. I will hopefully be finishing up my other web project this week so that will free up more time to dedicate to the game. I’ll probably end up creating a new timetable later this week but it still has a lot of work and testing to be done so I’ll have to keep that in mind.

Here we are again, yet another week has gone by. This week was a lot more productive, but I still feel that I could’ve done better. I guess that is Just part of being an indie developer.

This week I began to work on some of the in game menus. The main reason I did this is because I often leave the out-of-game UI till last and end up throwing something together at the last minute to try and
get it out the door. Not the case this time. Here you can see the end level recap screen.

I also created the level select scene, but it is still a work in progress. I have decided though that there will be 6 “zones” per level. Think like Sonic, where you have 2 she’s that vary a bit, then a boss level. That is similar to how it will work in AquaWars.

Speaking of bosses, I began working on the first boss this week, but it is far from complete. The “idea” of the boss is there but I haven’t nailed down the look yet. Essentially it is a super submarine that introduces torpedo’s into the game. After the first boss torpedo’s will be found on various smaller ships.

I almost forgot, the primary thing I worked on this past week: power ups! So far all but the slow mo power up are implemented from the first game. I have improved the display of them and added the most requested feature: power up stacking! Yes, you can now have all the power ups active and not worry about picked up a new one that overrides your shield and gets your ship destroyed. So there you have it. One month down.

So it is the end of the third week. Unfortunately life has thrown a couple of obstacles in the way, meaning I did not get as much done thus week as I wanted to. On Sunday I got a stomach virus that made it quite difficult to work on anything, and the next two days I ended up working on a separate project. Thursday I had my four wisdom teeth removed, which wasn’t that bad other than the hours of having your face and tounge numb, along with changing out bloody gauze pads every twenty minutes.

I did work on a few things though, and have decided to set a finite deadline for the game, mainly to help me figure out where and when I need to get things done. My goal is to release the game on May 31st, 2012. I know that sounds a bit ambitious, but I think it is possible. It is also counting on a fairly short review time with Apple, but hopefully that won’t be a problem.

So on to the progress for this week. I began working on character dialogue displays, which is how the story will be told. They are far from complete, but they are loaded in from the level files and text is displayed on screen. They will be fully complete by next week. Explosions are also in the game and look quite nice. Subs also have bubble particle trails, but I am currently having an issue with cocos2d’s coordinate system misbehaving when I scroll the screen, so they still need a little work.

I have not created the first boss yet, but I have my thoughts. I will probably end up sketching some ideas later today. The first boss will look the most “normal” in comparison to the other bosses, as it will be a large submarine that fires torpedos and only has certain weak points. Later bosses will have more complex and strange weaponry.

That is all for this week, next week should have a bit more content to discuss!