NimbleBit

Ian is omitted from this weeks post, claiming his last weeks vacation extends to having to write his IKWYDLW post this week. Valid point, or mere laziness? You decide!

While tracking down some performance issues, I discovered a sort of HeisenBug. The code I was using to find slowdown was causing slowdown. After adding a function to toggle this code, the game ran much, much faster. Some code that was no longer needed was removed from the input system. I had to add a key code translation function to the input system as some keys (~ [ ]) didn’t have the expected code on Dave’s new laptop (I hope that doesn’t come back to bite me square on the ass). There were other tweaks here and there, mostly related to performance.

For this week, I am going to finish working on optimization and fix the remaining big issues on our tracker. I count 7. Perfect, 1 a day…

Last week I spent some time prototyping the early stages of a skate park inspired Zero Gear level. I always have fun trying to do stunts on our current maps, so I figured it would be a lot of fun to have a map full of nothing but things to launch yourself off of and collide with. I also helped Brian with testing a little bit to help squash more bugs.

This week I am hoping to start refining my stunt park type map, as well as help Brian out with anything he needs in his quest to root out Zero Gear bugs.

Here is everything you need to know about what we did last week:

I have been working to make Zero Gear faster. To this end I have replaced boost::signals with my smaller, faster, less flexible solution. I replaced Lua with LuaJIT. LuaJIT takes the Lua code and converts it so it can be executed directly by the computer rather than by the Lua software interpreter. LuaJIT definitely makes your Lua code run faster but it has not improved the performance of the game. I started working to improve networking related code at the end of the week which had the biggest impact on the speed of the game.

This week I plan to make the game go from sub-light speed all the way to ludicrous speed. I will endeavor to perform adequately.

Last week I was working on some post-submittal promotional graphics for Moon Drop and another promotion we will be doing this month. I also did a little bit of testing with Zero Gear to try and help Brian zero in on where we are having some performance issues with the game. As we work out issues it is easy to see how crazy fun the game is going to get as we are able to support more players at once.

This week I am going to handle whatever the great spaghetti monster chooses to drop into my lap.

Last week we finally got Moon Drop out of the safety of the NimbleBit nest and out into the scary world of Apple Review. Its hard to tell how long before Moon Drop will be available, but we’re hoping less than two weeks. I’ll be spending the rest of this week on Catalina Island and hopefully doing a bit of brainstorming about future projects. I’ve been spending a lot of time writing lately but hopefully it won’t get in the way of prototyping some new concepts once I get back. Keep your eyes peeled for Moon Drop and I’ll see you all next week!

The hardest part of Mondays is remembering everything you did last week.

Making a game is really just the process of removing bugs. The very first bug being there is no game. I spent all of last week (and most of the past 6 months now that I think about it) debugging. Specifically I got some old, buggy gameplay scripts updated and debugged. I also fixed some problems in the bits of code that syncs players looks between the server and clients (what hat, kart, etc they are using and with what colors). I spent more time working on networking issues as well. Not too exciting but then 99% of game development is not exciting.

This week I plan to concentrate on fixing the remaining problems in the networking code. These problems are the last thing really holding us up at this point. I worked on a network stats display GUI over the weekend that should help me in this endeavor.

Last week was spent tweaking and adding the final graphical touches on Moon Drop as well as doing as much testing as I could. We were able to add some more personality to the game which is what makes it a NimbleBit title. Me and Ian hashed out some of the final game play tweaks and it should be headed off to submission soon! I also spent some time trying to find some sort of style we could use on our app icons to tie them all together into more of a collection, but have yet to find a style I like.

This week hopefully I will be doing a lot of Zero Gear network testing with Brian!

Last week I spent what feels like the majority of my time playing Baseball Slugger, but in between rounds we worked to get Moon Drop to the brink of submittal.

This week we’re tidying up the odds and ends and polishing it up before we pack it in a box and mail it off to Apple.

A brand new week! Huzzah! Here is the skinny on last week:

I spent most of last week confirming my suspicions: being healthy is much better for productivity than being sick. Even with this blight upon my mortal vessel, I was able to get a few things taken care of including fixing a few remaining issues on map change, polishing some weapon’s behavior, and a few other small issues.

This week I am feeling healthy and ready to enact my vengeance on the remaining bugs in Zero Gear. Also, I got one of those fancy XBox controllers that all the kids seem to like. I plan to get it working in our code after all the vengeance is done being enacted and whatnot.

Last week I was doing some more testing for Zero Gear, trying to figure out the cause of a few bugs in our persisting quest to get to another larger scale testing phase. I also spent some time working up the graphics for our next iPhone game, Moon Drop. I have also been spending time playing the game and working with Ian on tweaking the gameplay and screens. This week I will finish up any graphics that remain to be created and trust Ian with tying up all the loose ends! Hopefully you will be playing Moon Drop soon.

Last week was all about recovering from WWCD-itis which seemed to spread like a wildfire through the weak and immune system compromised nerds up in San Francisco. After being revived I got to work on our recently announced game titled Moon Drop. As you can see from our video preview, we’ve got the core gameplay nailed down and are hoping to have a finished product in the next week or two.

No blog posts between IKWYDLW updates… either we have been lazy last week, or we have just been very busy. I will let you decide!

*Murphy has contracted an illness which I can only assume is a new strain of “Cat Flu” due to his regular proximity to cats, so I will just mention a few things he worked on last week -dave.*

A few weeks ago we finally started using an issue tracking piece of software to nail down exactly which things we want to finish for the next beta of Zero Gear. We used Pivotal Tracker which is free and a very nice tool. So Brian has been working his fingers to the nub to whittle down the list of issues until we arrive at our next milestone for beta testing. Here are some of the issues he has crossed off the list in the last week:

Twister and Puncher weapon functional again, game bogs down when rapid input is given
graphical kart wheels not rotating properly
kart does not reset orientation when respawned
soccer ball object not graphically scaling, LUVbot weapon functional
GUI unresponsive to input
client not able to connect to a server if connection has failed in the past
camera not functional in garage
client lua error when switching maps.

wow, exciting stuff!

Last week I spent a few days working up some more graphics for an upcoming iPhone game which you should be hearing more about soon. The rest of the week I spent testing and logging bugs in order to more clearly define how close we are to the next Zero Gear beta. We finally got all the weapons working together, so I spent a few days tweaking masses and force values in order to make them all a behave a little better in relation with each other. The emergent gameplay that comes out of all these physical weapons interacting with each other, players and game objects is quite cool!!!

Last week I attended my first WWDC (Apple World Wide Developer Convention) in foggy San Francisco. It was quite the experience, and I’m glad I ended up going. Days were spent attending iPhone sessions and evenings/early mornings were spent at various parties sponsored by websites, developers, and publishers. I met a lot of great people, and learned much. I am glad to be home however, finally getting back to what I enjoy the most, making games! The long wait continues for the Bluebird and Scoops updates to be approved, but I’m wasting no time and diving in to our next iPhone game, more details to come!