Snowball is adrift
Snowball is adrift until a certain space game makes its debut on mobile devices. After years of developing Snowball Touch with no public release — honest, it’s fun! — I didn’t want to discuss any other game development. In fact, if I had kept posting another entire game would be in the mix.
Shiny iPad in hand!
Yes, it’s one more thing for me to work on while trying to release my game. Yes, it’s like a big iPod Touch. Yes, it doesn’t play Flash. Yes, I want one — at least, one.
As far as my game goes it’s actually inspiring some harder work on it. So far, making it run on the iPad incidentally caused me to clean up some crufty old code in the game (again). Plus, I want this thing out near the launch of the iPad to catch another wave of new users looking for something to try out. It’s a dream, anyway.
When people say it’s like a big iPod Touch I think they mean it as a derision sometimes. I don’t really get that. It’s like mocking a laptop for being a small desktop computer. The size is one of the chief benefits. It’s going to open up the masses to multitouch in a much more useful and natural way. It’s going to look stunning, too, with that high DPI screen as large as it is.
Modified Snowball in iPad Simulator
I’m realizing I’ve learned quite a bit over the last year and a half. I had very little Objective-C experience (not to mention Cocoa) when I started and just yesterday I realized I could have made a much better architecture choice in my code. Going back to some of the original code is kinda painful sometimes, but it all works just fine.
One major feature I added is a visual one:
Cel-style outlines on the basic stage geometry.
My last post is a bit painful to read. Soon after that elated optimism I had to do some deep digging into my code.
This is me in July(!):
The technical stuff is almost completely over with: one gameplay glitch to tidy up — not a show stopper — and a few more sound effects to shoehorn in.
So that glitch wasn’t the only one, and that glitch did stop the show for a while. Ah, innocence.
Snowball Touch is picking up speed rolling down the hill towards release. On the way it’s glomming some new features onto itself.
There will be some very basic victory animations that change every 5 stages or so to help with that feeling of progress. Plus, you can try to beat your own times and see if you could have completed the stage with fewer steps. You can also see how long it took to figure out with restarts included.
So, I’m starting to get time to work on Snowball Touch, again. Getting used to the new little guy, after all.
Basic 2D-sliding/zooming/layered cinematics are go. That’s the last major feature that needed to be added. The pic below is from the opening (short) story cinematic and it’s in motion on the device. Kind of a camera pull-back reveal to give some depth and excitement.
Snowball contemplates options
I just put up a little sneak peak about Snowball Touch up on YouTube. Kinda weird putting it out there as I’ve been working on it for almost a year. That sounds more impressive than it is, though.