One of the next big features that I want to add to Chipmunk is the ability to use different collision detection broadphases. It’s been on the todo list for years, but I’ve never gotten around to it.

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The last few days I’ve spent on Solaro have been cleaning up the ship editor. I’ve made the editor much simpler, but kept all the features. Reorganizing the UI has eliminated big rows of text buttons that were difficult to mentally parse. I’ve also removed the second “inspection …

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Here’s a quick art post. We’ve recently licensed a set of buildings for Solaro. Here’s one of them in game:

Isn’t it the ultimate sign of hitting it big? Maybe? Chipmunk Physics has been spotted on Oprah.

Alice for the iPad is an interactive story book app that was developed by Atomic Antelope. It’s gotten some great coverage on Gizmodo and you can figure out the app from their youtube video.

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Just about everybody who’s played a shooting game knows about leading the target. For instance, in Halo, rockets move pretty slow compared to bullets. To get good at the game, you have to learn how far ahead of your target to fire the rockets so they will run into the rocket’s path just …

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Getting the controls just right for Solaro has been something we’ve put a lot of work into. So we’ve continued to refine how you control your ship in order to maximize the fun for everyone.

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So these problems are kind of the bane of my existence. As a problem, it doesn’t really show up until the halfway point of the project. Appeasing unexpected client requests, feature additions well into development, and code added for performance optimization purposes are major suspects.

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Last week I talked about Unity’s Component model. I pointed out some problems, and this week, I have some possible solutions- each with some downsides.

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The first five minutes of gameplay is responsible for hooking your user. And within those first five minutes you need to teach your player about what’s going on.

Becoming hooked on a game relies on engaging the person. You have to show off the start of the game and show that there’s …

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This blog post stems from a discussion with Alex about his blog post about adopting a component model for his games. We discussed some of the weaknesses and challenges of a component system like the one Unity provides.

Alex nicely summarizes the pattern:
Instead of using inheritance to add new types …

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Who says that you can’t be polite and proper even if you are a programmer?

`
#define please

int a = 5; please

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So one item that we knew we would have to do eventually for Solaro was some sort of broadphase for the the collision detection. Up until now, collisions were processed by checking every object against every other object. In computational terms, this is O(n^2) meaning that every time you double the …

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Chipmunk 5.3.0 is out! The biggest new feature is that I’ve added the ability for inactive objects to fall asleep, reducing the CPU and battery usage. There are a number of other smaller performance improvements and fixes as well.

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Scott and I have spent much brainpower on the matter of deciding what elements of our universe collide with what. Our primary question is: Should ships collide with other ships? There are both gameplay and technical considerations here.

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One thing we’ve been focusing on while creating Solaro is to tell a story without large paragraphs of text. While there’s no denying that a rich world can be created with just text- but it’s not the experience people are looking for in this sort of game.

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We’ve added a faction system to Solaro. I hinted at it in a previous post, but now I’m ready to explain it in more detail.

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We got a few important things out of the way. Missions now save and let you resume where you left off. We actually got this working really nicely due to some good planning ahead of time. Missions you have completed the requirements for will be “reactivated” on loading your save- this phase is …

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Upshot has been featured in MacUpdate’s special promo. It’s a one day sale, so get it fast- and tell your friends. If you miss it now, it’ll be available for $13 for the next two weeks.

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Scott has been doing some excellent work, and he’s put together fleets of ships! A fleet is a set of ships that will fly together in formation, and generally look out for eachother. Firing on one ship in a fleet will get the whole group angry at you.

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With a lot of the core gameplay of Solaro roughed out, we’ve started work on generating some content. This step is key in figuring out the “flavor” of the world and direction of the game.