Wow… the knuckles have been cracking like crazy here in the studio… There’s been a lot of different things going on over the last month, so I’ll try to hit the highlights:
1: Creeper World: User Space Success
Creeper World: User Space finished a strong second place at Kongregate in September! This was a huge achievement and a testament to the endurance and commitment of the Creeper Nation. You see, September wasn’t any regular old month at Kongregate… the prize money was doubled during September. So the best of the best showed up and made runs for the prizes. For a second flash release of the original Creeper World game to finish in second place was absolutely astounding.
2: Custom Map Thumbs
Custom maps for CW2 have continued to pour in. There are a spectrum of ideas and some really neat maps have been created. One of the things I’ve been asked for has been some way to provide a ranking or feedback. So, I implemented a thumbs up and thumbs down system on the custom maps. Be sure to thumbs up your favorite maps!
3: Creeper World 2, the flash game
I often get asked about when there will be a flash release of CW2… something along the lines of CW:Training Sim. Welp, the good news is I have forked the source tree and am working on it. If all goes well, you’ll be blasting some Creeper around the time Santa is making his rounds.
4: ChopRaider
Bet you didn’t expect me to ever talk about that little flying helicopter again did you? I’ve dug up the old source code, and started ramping things up for a desktop release. Bigger screen, more game play options and weapons, custom graphics, and your very own map editor? Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see how it all goes….
5: iOS and Android
So AIR3 is finally out and I gave CW1 a whirl on the original iPad. The results were….. well, not the best. It ran… for a bit anyway. But at 5-10 fps unscaled, it is clear that AIR 3 isn’t the way forward for Creeper World on mobile. But I never give up that easily…. oh no. When something doesn’t work, I find another way. Have I found another way? Yes.
YAY! another way! 😉 can’t wait for the chopraider stuff. gonna be so awesome!
Be sure to think really hard about the AIR iOS / Android options: it’ll never run good if you just take the desktop AIR and republish for iOS and Android, you’ll need to do some work and research, and then you’ll be able to do quite a lot more then you’d expect at first.
Still it’s way easier then learning Objective-C or something and rebuilding in Objective-C and Java and maintaining 3 codebases.
There are numerous problems with getting the AS3 (air) version of CW1 to work on iOS/Android. First, it’s memory heavy. That creeper array, background images, etc eat up a chunk of memory. It’s trivial on the desktop, but real easy to go above 150M on mobile and get killed by the OS. Second, and even more important, the run time performance just isn’t there. The CA simulation that runs in CW has to iterate over a 70×48 array (an AS3 vector) and do lots of reading from other locations. This just can’t keep up on an iPad 1. I’ve been over and over this code optimizing it, but lots of array access in AS3 just ain’t fast.
For comparison, I ported the algorithm over to C# and ran it under Unity3D…. We’re talking at least 500 times faster…
Not surprised at all. Given the memory overhead of the CW games, I was initially interested that you chose AIR as your platform to begin with. Mind you there are obviously many benefits, but the ultimatum of CW is it’s very memory intensive, and that’s the most important element of the game (as it’s all about the physics). You could start with XCode and bask in the immediate speed advantage, but your biggest loss would be the convenience of AIR being natively cross-platform. What other cross-platform compilers have you considered?
I’ve mostly only looked at Unity3D. I originally chose AIR because I needed both a flash/web version as well as a desktop version. Flash would be for marketing and AIR would be for the full desktop game. But it is looking like Unity3D can provide all of that and much more… along with vastly superior performance.
Pricey, but very interesting! I didn’t realize there were cross-platform game development solutions. You could deploy CW on the console! 😉
I’ll have to pick up a trial version of Unity and give it a go. Thanks for the reference. I’ll add that to my list of excellent compilers.
but.. but… how will I play cw on linux if you move to unity3d?
*sobs. excusme me 🙁
Anyway, javascript/hmtl5 looks pretty promising right now- all the major desktop (chrome/safari/ffox) and mobile (ios/android) browsers support it. If rovio could port their game why not knuckle crakcer?
Creeper World 1 & 2 on my Android Tablet would make my life so much better.
I mentioned this in the last post, but I didn’t get a response. I suggested that weapon move speed upgrades also increase the speed at which the missiles fly at. This would be tremendously helpful if I need to move a launcher but that launcher is keeping the creeper at bay.
@Screech, you should check out the forums, as they’re the place for suggestions :3
Would Chop cost $?
Anyways I would just die If I had CW for my iPhone, if it made its way there
LOVE the map preview/rating system. I was really hoping you’d implement something like that.
Also, CW on Android sounds awesome – Looking forward to that someday.
Keep up the amazing work, Virgilw!