Please release me...

The Machine is now released. Check out the home page for more details, the epic promo video and to play!

Release candidate 1 - soon

The title of this post has to be the kiss of death but I do intend on having release candidate version 1 of The Machine ready really soon. I'd still like to add some more features but these can be added in later.

To 'celebrate' here's a few artlets I've been working on.

Trying to be clever

Hey, I sold another copy of Block A Drop Christmas Rush...in May :o

Anyway, we at Bumpkin labs are still working hard on our new iPhone shooter project. Obviously that's not a project that involves shooting iPhones. It's going pretty well but my reluctance to learn anything new means I avoided using any kind of physics engine to model the in game entities, and now I'm paying the price.

I have a fairly complex collision set to deal with involving irregular polygons (regular ones are just boring) so now I'm having to invent complex ways to detect collisions. Again because of my lazyness means that enemies are just exploding randomly at the moment and causing the player damage. I need to work more on this but I'm confident I'll get it finished by mid-year and polished for autumn!

I've also made some good progress with menus and the like, getting some of the best UI feedback from testers that I've ever had! Some of the sound effects are also in there which have added tons of atmosphere and "Umph!" to the gameplay.

Expect more news with possibly first screenshots soon...ish!

Bugettes

Unfortunately I'm not talking about long bread rolls. Found a couple of bugs in the machine that are taking some tracking down. Fortunately in his noodley wisdom the fsm gave us logging and taught us to implement it in advance so it shouldn't delay things for to long.

Site update

Given the homepage a bit of a spring clean. If you want to follow us via our new Facebook page there is a 'fanbox' at the bottom.

The drag of completion

Once upon a time there was a man who started a project to make a computer game. Then he thought, wouldn't it be cool to have user levels and then to add it to Facebook. If this were 'The Hogfather' then there would be a feature creap gnome hiding in the under the stairs by now.

So I, Rich Textformat do solumnly swear to the noodley one that The Machine will get no more features until it is released.

So what needs doing? The user levels menu needs sorting out, the pay system, the new combiner model needs adding and some more levels. Oh, and some menu music.

Let's do it!

How many enemies does it take...

To make a game interesting?

I've been putting a bit of thought into this over the last couple of days as I'm seriously hoping to have the main mode of the new project in it's first completed state by the end of this weekend.

So far I've 3 enemies of varying strength all approaching at the same speed. I know that's not enough so I have plans for zig zagging enemies and enemies approaching in a spiral, but just how many do I need?

Currently I'm thinking of having 10 different types, and even perhaps bosses, although I'm not certain about that yet. Nor am I certain how many waves there should be in total. Currently 100 seems about right. Because of how chains work, scores can vary amazingly within the first 5 already depending on how good a shot you are!

There's still a ton of work to do of course (this is only 2.5 weeks old after all!) But it's already great fun to play with.