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iPhone and Wii Game, plus other news

By tommunism (4 posts) on February 2, 2009 at 1:14 pm

Hello everyone,

I've recently been hard at work on a few projects. One being an iPhone game, and another being a Wii game. First I'll touch on the iPhone (pun totally intended).

The iPhone game I have been working on is called Beat!. Beat! is basically Simon mixed with a random beat generator with a custom dynamic sound track and some neat sorta retro looking visuals. As the player progresses in the game, the sound track gets more and more intense. All in all its a pretty simple game but at one point it had a pretty complicated back end to it. I ported most of my engine over to the iPhone to help with this game. My main concern were the memory limitations presented by the iPhone, and with the dynamic sound track the game I was afraid of having (and did initially run into) memory issues. The first iteration of this game had a threaded music loading system. Basically as the user played, the next level of intensity would load into memory on a separate thread and when it was time to play the next level of intensity the current level would unload while the new one played. This took up at most 3 to 5MB of memory and provided a seamless transition from level to level. When being done all on one thread, there would be a very brief pause as one sound unloaded and another one loaded and played. However, there were some problems with the sound engine properly unloading sounds and I eventually had the sounds converted down to 32Khz and shortened their duration and ended up loading them into memory. I wanted to have a cool threaded loading system I could gloat about, and for a time I did but it just wasn't meant to be. I plan on exploring more threading options on the iPhone in the future, but I was generally impressed with the amount of load it could take. If you want to check the game out its called "Beat!" and its available on the iTunes store here. 

The official site for Beat! is here http://beat.pillowfortgames.com 

In other news I'm working with Edmund McMillen on Super Meat Boy which is a game for the Wii (http://www.supermeatboy.com). Super Meat Boy is a platforming game where you control a little cube of meat trying to save his girlfriend. It sounds cute, but it is a very difficult and satisfying game to play. SMB won't be a difficult game to develop, there's no crazy threading that will go on, maybe a bit of resource management but nothing too spectacular. SMB is kind of a cleansing game for me to develop since Goo! is a difficult and (at this point) tiring game to work on. SMB on the Wii gives me the opportunity to not only port the engine that powers Goo! over to the Wii, but also it gives me a unique opportunity to determine if Goo! can possibly run on the hardware. My initial stance is, no, it won't, but as I delve further into development I'm going to keep exploring the capabilities of the Wii. So far I'm impressed with the processor, it's pretty powerful for not being a totally top of the line latest and greatest processor like in the 360 and in the PS3. The biggest challenge in porting my engine over to the Wii for Super Meat Boy is the graphics pipeline. I never thought I'd be developing anything for the Wii, so I went with a totally shader driven graphics pipeline. Wii is Fixed Function all the way, so there are going to be some challenges along the way, but this again will prove to be a huge disadvantage in getting Goo! up and running on a Wii since it's pretty heavily shader driven. We'll see though.

Speaking of Goo!, development is sort of on hold as I'm waiting to see what the future will be. Right now there are some promising leads and if something pans out I will post here. Hopefully I'll know something in the next few weeks.

That about does it, I'll post more when more stuff comes up!

Categories: Gaming

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