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.

Open Feint Integration - Go!

Oh yes, the new project will undoubtedly feature open feint, the online highscore/challenge/achievement system.

You're probably aware of the advantages of this but if not then it's just a cool way of keeping track of how you've done in a game compared to the rest of the world, and your friends! I've integrated it into the new project already and it's looking pretty good!

I've been working on the leaderboards for now (it's a bit lonely having the top score all to myself!) But soon, once the survival mode of the game is complete - and it's not that far off - I can start working on the challenge modes.

The other great thing about openFeint is that it can also integrate with facebook and twitter so I'll be trying that out very shortly!

I'm looking forward to this project getting out there I really think it's my best game to date and with these added features should go pretty far!

Free Weekend Results For The SciOmeter

I decided to do a bit of an unnanounced experiment last weekend and put the sciOmeter up for Free for two days! I assume that some sites automatically track price drops and free deals so that's probably why it worked out fairly well!

Overall there were about 500+ downloads and even a rating! What a marvellous rating too, of 2 out of 5 stars! But at least there was an explanation, it's just a shame that they didn't check out the "How It Works" part of the website before posting.

It's back up to .59p now and I'm not certain how many sales it will generate after being free for that time, probably none now!

Anyway, the point of the exercise was to try and spread the app around a bit and to show people how much fun it can be. That's certainly worked to a degree and in hindsight is how I probably should have started with a free weekend to kickstart it...

Main site getting better

After a few friends saying "what's up with your site? It's just a logo!" I've decided to put something temporary and functional up here!

I've still got to put the sciOmeter banner together and the formatting of this column is a bit rubbish, but that shouldn't take too long to sort out!