Testing android

I got stocked in few issues in the developing of the final scene once you win the tournament and finish the arcade. I have really little memory remaining but I don't want that the final scene you get after so much playing looks like a crap. Therefore I want to find and use till the last bit of space to make it look nice. Just now I have issues to find the right locations.
I had to look something else and I decided to watch the game (at this stage) on Android.
After few failed attempts in compiling it I managed to play it on my sophix tablet I use to test android's games.
It looks good, no bugs whatsoever, the game is smooth (it doesn't have the same issues of the network system on Android) and it looks nice (not as nice as the iPhone one but basically because of the lack of hardware)
Now back to code the game... I want to make fireworks out of particles. Stay tuned

Arcade almost done

We are really close. Yesterday I managed to make work the whole arcade system passing from a character to another when you win and showing the arcade timeline with all the people you defeated and the one you have to challenge. Every level the computer tells you something to wish you "bad luck" and everything looks cool.
I tried to play the way it should be (without helps, aids and cheats) and it is quite challenging also for myself (the creator!!!).
The final screen with fireworks and thanks and titles needs to be done (in case you win the tournament) and needs to be done in a really small amount of memory...
Plus we have to decide in case the player loses if he has to start all over or he can just restart from the point where he lost always or only just for a couple of credits.
Every character tells you different things during the game and the phrase list of each character haven't been done yet.
Still a lot of work but game-wise all is set.

Keep on working on the arcade version of pong

I've been so busy coding and testing the new pong in special way the arcade part that I haven't got time to post all the development news yet.
The game now is totally glitch-less, the animation of the background works great, few backgrounds has been substituted with new items because we noticed that the blu-like background gives better overall results to the game.
All the little bugs regarding the new power-ups has been fixed and the Arcade session is on its way to be completed. Once it's done I'll record a quick video and I will post it here to show all the new things we could put into the game.
Back to work now... 

Talking enemies

The new feature is live and works well. It really gives a little touch to the whole game. The icon with the little avatar telling you something comes out in six occasions:
- at the beginning
- when you get a magneto power up
- when you get a gun power up
- when he's leading by at least 3 points
- when you have a match point
- when he has a match point

every character will say something different and this is just...cooool

goodnight!

Special feature on game

I'm working on a special feature that Filippo suggested as a normal idea and now will be almost reality. Basically any particular moment of the match (such us the beginning, or a special shot or a match point) the little avatar of your enemy comes out in the corner and tells you something (like "you will lose", you can't beat me or "one more point" and so on) to improve the "arcade spirit of the game. I made few code to see if it's possible and it seems to work. Now I need to do it well and I start to run out of memory...no more ideas :)

Arcade procedure

Yesterday night and this morning I've been working on the whole procedure that starts when the player hits the button "arcade" and goes till the real match.
Everything atm is related to the first level (therefore the first match) only but I'm planning today and tomorrow to modify the routine dynamically in order to fit all the matches more or less in the same part of code.
The final result is very nice. It starts by asking the player name, then the player (the only human attempting to raise the charts of the space pong) needs to choose between the 8 available avatars (4 males and 4 females) ... unfortunately in this moment GMS don't allow yet the use of the device camera or of the device storage so, for the moment, the avatar cannot be chosen from personal photos. Hopefully in the next release of the suite.
Once you pick the avatar you can see a recap of who you are and the timeline of the matches with unveiled the enemy's avatars that you have to play against or that you defeated already. Another tap of the screen and we have the final Player-name Versus Enemy in "fighter-style".
Then the game will start.

We are thinking with Filo to add also some message during the match in comic style where your enemy is provocative to you. Let's see if it fits...

Today's duties and recap

Yesterday has been a big day of work. The final mark on the game has been given, all works smoothly and the new features are giving a big plus to the overall aspect of the game. The arcade part starts to be part of the game, I have all the avatars, I have the base structure of the game, the "arcade-timeline" (as I call it) is already there and now the only thing to add is the link between the arcade story/tournament and the game itself.
Today I won't work full time on this because we have some urgent issues to fix such us the new Amsterdam's Casino promotion (for the newbies I remember we used to work in the gambling market not even long time ago) after the dutch shut down.
I keep you up to date on the things I will add to the arcade game. Meanwhile I wanna thank you a lot again for the 8k+ download that yesterday The Labyrinth Pro got as a free promotion for two days. Thanks, thanks again.

Working on the arcade

Everything for the arcade section has been written hands down on paper. Is time now to move it in the digital world.
I'm working now step by step to all the features that will give the best pong yet....keep you updated in this post:

- arcade choice and choice of the name   done
- creation of the avatars to choose and set them in the game list    done
- creation of the grid of avatars you can choose and map it    done
- selection avatar which goes to a unique global variable      done
- intro and presentation of the tournament      work in progress

Amazing performance of The Labyrinth Pro in free trial

As we said yesterday in this post we decided to give for free for just two days our game The Labyrinth Pro the way it is, no extra money, no limitations and no ADs. The performance of the app on iTunes yesterday has been extraordinary: more than 1000 downloads in just few hours and we are looking for tomorrow to see how it is performing across the whole day of today.
Thanks again for the support, and if still didn't do it...download it now for FREE.

All power ups set and dynamic backgrounds

All is done, the code is written, the game is tested and all seems to work fine. The asteroid blast, the magneto routine and the guns are now working properly and the few bugs I've noticed before are fixed. It is actually quite funny as well and of course it will need more play testing but so far I really like the result.

Then I added a very nice touch to the graphic of the game. Before the backgrounds were statics ... now I created an effect that makes the background moving. Basically I change (a little) the value of the xscale, yscale, rotation and alpha of the object background in order to have a nice dynamic effect and now everything looks even more elegant and technically impressing.
I like it!

Laser Gun effective

The laser gun power up now works and it is effective on the game. You have 10 automatic shots once you get the power up. If you hit with the laser the other pad this will start to roll for one second standing still creating a big handicap for your challenger. Same to you if the challenger's laser will hit you.
With the laser you can also destroy the asteroid but you won't get any new power ups.
It work quite well and it is a big plus to the game. I'm testing it now to make sure all runs smoothly.

Promotion: The Labyrinth PRO for FREE

We decided to give away a nice promotion for all our blogger, twitter and Facebook followers by let them download FOR FREE The Labyrinth Pro for iOS systems (iPhone, iPad and iPod touch). This is a unique opportunity which will last today and tomorrow (22nd and 23rd of October) and the game will be totally ADs free exactly as the original Pro game is.
Don't miss it then, download FOR FREE The Labyrinth pro for your apple device.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-labyrinth-pro/id692231326?ls=1&mt=8

Laser gun alive

Here we go, after an afternoon of testing and coding the game has got the most fancy power-up: the laser gun.
Ok...recap. The asteroid comes in, if you hit it it blasts and it will release at first a rolling magneto that if is cough will give you the magneto power: next time you touch the ball with your pad it will stick on it until you will shoot it by tapping the mid of the screen.
The second time an asteroid is blasted it will release a rotating gun: if you catch it you will get a little cannon on your pad which will shoot 10 (at the moment) laser beams across the screen. What the laser beams will do? I don't know it yet....but they will do something, most likely they will paralyze the challenger's pad if you hit it.
Now the game is quite full of stuff, some  moments you have the screen quite full considering you got the ball, the pads, the smoke clouds, an asteroid and the laser beam you are shooting. All is very fluid and nothing slows down so far which is very good. I tested on my iPhone 5 and on PC/windows.
Soon I will port it also to Android just to check it.
Little pause now...

Laser Gun power up

After the magneto power up I've been working over the week-end on another power up: laser guns. Basically it comes always by destroying the asteroid after the magneto power up has been released.
The rotating gun after the asteroid blast is already there as well as few new sounds. Now I have to finish the magneto "tap to release routine" in order to make it work on mobile devices and then I start to work on the gun power up in order to be complete and playable by the end of the day.

Magneto power up

The magneto power up is available and it works. The asteroid comes in randomly and bounce on the screen, if gets hit by the ball it explodes and a rolling magneto will go toward the pad of the player (or computer) who hit the asteroid. If you catch the rolling magneto with your pad a sound fx will tell you "magneto!" and that's allows the ball to stick on your pad and you just can release it whenever you want accumulating other power ups and speed.
It works very good and that is very nice...impressing.
Good night!

Power ups

So far we have an asteroid rolling up and down for the screen, if the ball (comet) hits it the asteroid explodes and the ball bounces back. Very fancy but it doesn't give really a lot more to the game.
The idea is, once you hit the asteroid, to obtain extra power ups (beside the 2 given by the smoke clouds), something like the old arkanoid power ups...we work on it, stay tuned

Asteroids!

While I'm waiting for the new drawing tools to be installed I'm working on few new features we want to add to the game. All of the sudden came out one object: ASTEROID!
Yes, I'm trying to fit asteroids into the game.
I already created an object that controls the asteroid sprite which will pop up into the screen randomly and will start to move around the screen rotating.
If the ball (the comet) hits it the ball will bounce to the opposite direction and the asteroid will explode.
The feature is already in the game, didn't take really a lot to add it. Now we just need to make it nicer, calibrate it and decide if we should keep it or not.

Clean up and getting ready for the arcade

To start coding the arcade version of Pong I will obviously start from the base of Pong 2013 lite but I have to do a quite big clean up first.
I didn't delete anything yet because I don't know yet for sure what might be still be useful or not, but I put apart all the rooms with the intros, the company logo, the old presentation, the advertisement objects and so on just to avoid all the unnecessary code (at least at this stage) that is going to make me lose a lot of time.
Right now as I try the application the starting menu pops up first nice and clean.
I need to rewrite a lot of options but our "art responsible" Filo is very busy with the release of a new web template and I need to make it work on my own. Unfortunately he normally uses Fireworks while I normally (the rare times I design) Photoshop therefore the compatibility of the two is limited...long story short I have to install on my Mac (Filo uses PC) the latest version of Fireworks and paying a new license (because we have a windows license and not a Mac on).
Lot of time lost :(

Keep on working to the arcade version

The work in progress at the arcade version of Pong 2013 carries on full time. We are defining all the steps, all the menus and all the options that the user will see once is playing the final version. We are also thinking to change a bit the name with something that I can't tell yet.
Plus we are thinking whether or not the network pong might be an in-app of the arcade or an app on its own.
We might ask you via social network what would you like the most.
Anyway on paper is all set...on paper. Just to let you know I shoe you a "little" note handwritten:

Not a lot I know.....You'll see much more soon.

Pong pro arcade version - new steps

After we defined the storyboard and the characterization I carry on to the next point: how to visualize on screen the effective arcade, tournament levels, avatars and whether or not making the characters interact with the player with few sentences before the game.
My approach will be on paper, then I will discuss everything with filo (my biz partner) and then I start to work on the code to make it happen.
I'll keep you updated on every news about it.

Pong arcade characters

Hereby few avatars of the characters that we are going to challenge in the arcade version of the new Pong Pro, if you wanna know more about the breeds and the families just read this post.

This bad guy is a Troll and the name is FILUX

This one is a very strong one and the name is TAURUS, he's a Manimal.

And here we have Gargo a very bad guy from the Skulls

More are coming but we won't show 'em or else there will be no surprise....

Pong 2013 Pro - Arcade characters

I wrote the basics of the challengers that the player is going to challenge in every single level of the arcade mode.
Based on the storyboard (which we wrote so we can even modify in the future before release) the known space is dominated by four known breeds: humanoids, trolls, manimals and skulls. The hierarchy of them is based on the results of the space-pong tournaments. Humans are considered a weaker breed because they don't have any good pong player and you are the one who has to change the situation.
For every character we have a different avatar. The humanoid for the records (level 1) is our friend Simon who's here in our offices in these days and he helped me already with few sound effects.
Description of breed, description of characters, hierarchy and avatars are already defined. Now we need to make them real.

Collision bug solved

The collision bug that was bothering me in Pong Network has been fixed. As I predicted was just matter of calibrate very well the collision system based on the dimensions of the two sprites (ball and pad). The glitch was also magnified because of an imperfection of the sound system which was repeating (sometimes) the same bouncing sound for the time of the two sprites colliding.
In fact the movement-collision and bouncing is managed stand alone on the device BUT the sound reproduction is managed by the object of the client or else only one device would play correctly the sound. Therefore the same collision routine must be duplicate on the client object in order to play the sound (only once) when the collision is detected: more complicate to explain it than what it is in real.
Anyway this is fixed. I put on hold for few minutes the network collision to start to work on the artwork of the arcade version of Pong. We are choosing avatars, characters and writing down a kind of storyboard.

Pong 2013 network collision system

Have been quite busy these days on personal stuff therefore I couldn't work properly on the network routines. Finally all is set so I can be back to work full time at Pong 2013 Network and the main version of Pong 2013 Pro - Arcade.

In these days when I could work I tested a bit the demo I've been working on connecting different devices between iOS, PC/Windows and Android. I noticed that on the device that runs as server the game is always way more fluid regardless the kind of device. If the game is hosted as server by iOS or PC (base setting) the game on the client device is way better than the same solution but with Android as server. The worse combo is two Android devices connected together.
It might be due to my test tablet which is not that powerful so before the release we need to test it on other devices. I'm really surprised (in positive) on how well the iOS devices respond to the network routines.

Anyway I'm working now trying to eliminate few bugs that bother the game in the collision control between ball and pads. The collision cannot be detected as usual (hardware way - language native functions) and as it is on Pong 2013 base because of the timing differences between server and client. The collision must be detected knowing the exact position and the dimensions of the two sprites in order to be calculated every screen refresh in both the devices connected.

This make the collision routine more inaccurate and it needs a good calibration to be glitch-less, which is what I'm trying to do now. Stay tuned.

Working at the sound FX

Today i'm spending some time to fix all the sounds of Pong network. I want to add some new features, new sounds and I will get profit out of the presence here of our friend Simon to record some very good sample which will be used probably for the server connection moment and for some other events.
He just recorded the following sentences: "waiting for player two and player two connected". He's got a very radio-speaker voice which will give a good touch to the game.

7.5k twitter followers. Thanks everybody!

Today we reached the notable amount of 7500 followers on our twitter account. This is the best satisfaction we can get to see that you guys appreciate our work and what we do. We opened our account not even two months ago and being followed by so many active people is a honor for us.
So thanks to everybody and stay tuned!

Back to work

The silence of these days was due to a little break I had to take from the coding to fix other internal things in the company here in Curacao.
Today a lot of work on the social network again, the new campaign facebook for The Labyrinth Pro has just started and many researches to gain new followers on our twitter account.
This afternoon I will keep on working on Pong 2013 Network.
Keep you informed, stay tuned.