web levels

All of the levels we are shipping with have been created, we are testing and refining for difficulty now and will submit to the app store soon.

An interesting feature we have added is the ability to launch the app from a weblink (or a qr code, 2d barcode thing) - this will launch the game with a downloaded level specific to the link, so we can easily add challenge levels without an app store release, also we can make custom levels that are unique to websites we like. exciting!

Kill Screen

This was pretty funny... We hadn't finished making all of the levels yet but could still select a non-existant level in the stage select screen.  The game still soldiered on and tried to display (probably using garbage that was in memory already) Didn't crash though!


From wikipedia:
A kill screen is a stage or level in a video game (often an arcade game) that stops the player's progress due to a programming error or design oversight. Rather than "ending" in a traditional sense, the game will crash, freeze, or behave so erratically that further play is impossible.

Stage select screen before and after

Here is the stage select screen, mockup and (almost) final.  We dropped the big star that was meant to represent getting all of the badges on a level and made the individual badges more specific to the tasks completed.  The background now animates and looks pretty cool!

We're working on a new game!

Ok. We've put the other game on hold because we came up with something that we are much more excited about making.  It's going to be a fast paced platform game for iOs (initially iPhone) Here is an early screenshot!

We'll add more development stuff to this blog as we go!

apps in store

Progress on the new game will slow down for a week or so as we are going to prepare a version of seaglass (our first iPhone game) for the new Mac app store. Tony is basing this off the code and graphics from the iPad version of the game. Since the game is locked to a vertical iPad display mode, the graphics will have to be reduced by around 1/3rd in order for the game to fit on most monitors.  Hmm, I guess we better figure out the height of all common mac / macbook displays.  I'm not sure what is in the SDK for these mac apps, maybe there is built in display scaling - that would be handy.
I don't think game centre will be available at launch, but we will have the code ready to support it when it is inevitably added to the app system at some point.

Check out seaglass on the app store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/seaglass/id333188618

Speaking of Seaglass, we saw a slight bump in the number of downloads after we changed the look of the icon (and upped the resolution) - I'm glad we got rid of the big green "S" icon, the new one looks more interesting, and a lot snazzier. It's hawt.

Oh, and someone has completely blasted my high score in seaglass on gamecentre, and I don't have a hope of getting back to the top of the table. The #1 score is currently 170799 () - my score is only 43,625, and that was me really trying!  Still it's still a lot better than Tony the programmers EXTREMELY SUSPICIOUS 18000 points.... no one else on the high score table has 000 at the end of their score, what's going on here? Could he have just typed it in to the database by hand???

- nick