For what its worth, here is a screenshot of the isometric engine as it stood after one night’s brainstorming:-

Albert from Puli Games added more advanced smooth shading to the sourcecode:-

Nice, eh? He also went on to create a rudimentary editor:-

Unfortunately when I compiled the code with the new shading for Android I found the performance cost was very high indeed. For desktops and laptops there would never be a problem but most mobile devices just wouldn’t have the GPU to cope. So, before I did my time requirement assessment on Friday I worked on an alternative shading routine that would, in theory at most, double the performance cost of rendering a scene. The original performed very fast indeed so doubling would still allow for excellent framerate on current mid-range mobile devices. Even my Nook Color deals with 8x demand without looking bad.

Initially the method I wanted to use needed 1296 32×32 blocks of texture memory to render shadows for top-down sides. I managed to reduce that to 6 16×16 blocks by rendering each corner separately without loss of image fidelity. Not often possible to reduce memory usage by a factor of 216.

Now, on with Chaos Rematch…

You can download the game for the PC platform from here: http://www.mediafire.com/?dunx1hbafl7yt9v

Just unzip and play.

Although Chaos has been cloned a great many times I’ve never seen a version available on iOS. I wanted to fix that. However, I didn’t just want to create a clone of the original game because there are plenty of those on other platforms. For example, on Android there is a version available by a guy called Richard Quirky. It is very faithful to the original while also fixing a few bugs and extending some features. He’s done a real good job and I wouldn’t want to duplicate the effort. So, a sequel of sorts definitely seemed the way to go.

Its a hard thing to try to capture what was great about a 27 year old computer game and thoroughly update it without loosing something in the process. I hope I can make up for any losses by adding enough cool new things to make the fans happy.

The above works well and it links in with another issue. If you want to be able to zoom in and out of the action, say, in an action video game, the further out you go the bigger the performance hit with having to render so many textures while zooming in can result in loosing a lot of definition. The solution is similar to what I mentioned in the above paragraph and also the mip-mapping techniques used in 3D games – different textures for different magnifications.

What I’m trying to do today is create a 2D texture rendering system that can not only adjust itself for multiple resolutions but also use different quality textures depending on how close to the action the current zoom level is. In theory I think it should be possible to use OpenGL mip-mapping to achieve this. Instead I will create my own system capable of retrofitting old code because I know the technique I use works for sure. Ideally I want to take any set of large sprites, run them through something like TexturePacker (a GREAT bit of software, btw) and let my system take care of the rest. In the end it could speed up development time considerably.

In other news, inspired by Ludum Dare and other similar competitions/projects I attempted to write a game in 5 hours. The time taken doubled to 10 hours and I ended up including previously written code. Even still, the experience was fun and I got a game out of it. Will post a video, download link and explanation soon.

Oh, and a PowFish update is immanent.

What I find particularly tragic about the above is that Spry Fox obviously try hard to operate with originality and integrity. Daniel Cook, the Chief Creative Officer at Spry Fox, offers up a great deal of resources, wisdom and inspiration at his personal blog Lost Garden. He’s a good person. Its a good company. We all benefit from the kind of creativity and generosity they display. Whether 6waves Lolapps is legally at fault over Yeti Town remains to be seen but I just feel bad for Spry Fox.

Now, I can hardly be called the world’s most original game designer. PowFish is inspired by Bejeweled and Tetris, Chaos Rematch is an expanded, reimagined homage to Chaos (Chaos is in the Public Domain) and Robot Ninja Assassin will blend many well known game mechanics. Regardless I very much doubt the developers responsible for games I borrow from would ever feel ripped off. Far from it. A game with similar elements to another is a far cry from a blatant clone that competes in the same market as an original.

Can’t party until later though, so trying to calm down…

So, I sat down at my desk this morning all ready to start and found I couldn’t do it. Why? Because even though it may be a good idea right now as I’m recovering from fighting off a flu and a stomach bug (Yes, I’m that unlucky) and could use a break, I found I felt stressed out by the thought of leaving the Chaos Rematch game hanging. I have so much to do, which is true even more than usual, so I’m afraid if I delay Chaos Rematch I might find it slow going to pick it back up again.

Even still, today as a side project I’m going to try to get FMOD tracker playing on iOS and Android. I also want to look into SunVox Tracker since that doesn’t require a hefty license charge to use. Ideally I want to keep game size down to a minimum, under 20 megs at the very least. Tracker music is one way to do that. PowFish was quite large for what it was, which was mostly due to the music.

The bug itself was very simple to track down and remove, once I knew about it. However, because of the holiday period I can’t issue the fix until my updates can be submitted and reviewed. Instead I have to be patient, keep busy with some minor improvements, code the Chaos game and watch the bad app ratings & reviews. *sigh*

I’m disappointed the bug managed to to get through play testing but it can’t have helped that the great majority of play testing was on the Android and PC platforms, neither of which have the bug. It also seems that when testing for iOS, the debug mode I created was actually preventing the error from occurring.

Anyway, it was learning experience, that’s for sure.