2011 will see Anime 3D SFX hard at work as we’re still developing the Antistar sequels and the JME conversion, to say nothing about future plans (why, we’re busy enough doing what we do and doing it now).

While Antistar: Rising rallied hard fans, they are often prompt to note that they belong to an enlightened minority. Ay, a good game’s a good gift, so we decided to share Antistar with a wider audience, the 31st of December 2010 and the 1st of January 2011.

Heuristically (if ever coincidentally), connoisseur iPhone review site iFanzine listed Antistar in it’s 2010 roundup. A select club where our heroine in pajamas coexists with Spiderman, Marblenauts and Lara Croft.

Devil’s in the details still

So what are we working on? Well… lots of technical stuff is going through. Notably, evil stuff muxing user experience and artwork. For example, I never wanted to make the ground flat and square, although it could *simplify* walking around and path-finding. So instead I wrote methods for path-finding on meshes, and following contours, so the controls will feel nicer and we actually gain artistic freedom, instead of stepping back.

Another example is the blue kitten. Players (beta testers even) noted that the blue kitten doesn’t follow the player everywhere. It isn’t necessary to have the kitten around beyond chapter 3, but it’s nice. So because I don’t want the kitten to teleport auto-magically, I implemented path-finding to defeat moving platforms too.

I wasn’t all satisfied with our custom 3D engine, or the game framework for all that matters. I thought all this lacked flexibility, and it turns out that the design of this game demands flexibility – no wonder considering this title is meant to push our codebase forward, versus relying on existing functionality.

Quite a bit of work is going into avoidance / simple attack behavior too. And yes, again, all of this could be extremely simplified. But I don’t really want to do that. Why then, do these “small features” really add gameplay, isn’t it just a little bit of un-necessary polish?

Don’t think so. First, I already explained that artwork gets tied easily to draconian constraints regarding the shape of the terrain. But there’s something that’s a lot more important going on here. If a game world doesn’t implement minimally robust physical and geometric constraints, there won’t be a way that this game world can develop rich system dynamics grounded into physicality. Truly, from this angle it doesn’t matter just now, or for the coming update.

Well, just the beginning, is what it is.

With a fine brush

While a couple of pros are blessing the main character with their fairy hands, working on modeling and animation, I actually started redesigning and re-creating parts of the environment. I have a lot more flexibility on this side since I implemented the level editor. For now, I find the added element of freedom almost threatening. But somehow I’m getting fond of what used to be ‘just a design for a game’ and I feel willing to spend time ‘doing it over again’. I don’t want this to be just a bunch of platforms, move on and forget. So I guess even Klinnburg will look somewhat different in the next release. Later parts of the story will give us chance to unravel more of it’s mysteries too.

Stepping stones in the myst

Controlling a storyline doesn’t necessarily mean knowing everything in advance. I know fairly well what’s meant to happen in Antistar, up to Chapter XVI and beyond(!). I know it so well that I might change my mind about it. The same goes for game-play. It’s so easy to sketch ideas and settle on a plan, only to find out that we don’t like it anymore.

So I guess the next Antistar release, however overdue, will be a surprise for our players… …and for us.

On the 1st of December, major Japanese iPhone site App-Bank reviewed Antistar: Rising and posted a gameplay video. Thanks guys, getting a little attention is all we needed to steal the spotlight this week-end :)

We’re still way off the next Antistar update. Essentially changing the way our game engine works, without actually rewriting the bulk of code that makes it work, has occupied the best of my time in the past 6 weeks or so – although I’d like to rush into chapters VI-XI and all the fun of designing new stuff, I’m actually just piecing Chapter I together again, patiently. On this note, here are ‘three questions to a young game code designer’:

1. How do you handle cut-scenes?
2. How do you switch scene?
3. Can you serialize game state?

If your game engine/framework supports you when you want to cleanly disable PC controls and substitute a 2D UI while a dedicated class orchestrates an animated sequence, momentarily taking controls of both the  PC and NPCs, you’re doing good.

If you can teardown a scene and replace it by another, quickly (ideally without loading times), then you’re also good.

These two design problems emphasize the need for modularity and clean memory management in our game code. It’s quite easy to get started with something great, only to realize way way down the line that we just wouldn’t know how to teardown/disable/replace the game UI, or that you find yourself unwilling to switch scenes because you don’t know which wire to cut first.

It would be mindless for me to suggest an answer to these questions. Every game programmer will find their answer  if they bother asking – point being, the more we delay asking these questions, the more we’re likely to have a hard time answering them.

Activities, said we? [edit, 25/02/2011]

This post used to include short guidance about how to write Actuators. Actuators are classes that provide a simple [AnActuator step:(int)millisecondsElapsed] method in charge of performing time based updates. They should only be used when necessary and, most of the time, Activities should be preferred. Activities are even driven controllers managing actuators over longer periods of time.

Both activities and actuators are central to clean game design. I removed the original explanation (which misleadingly confused them both) and hope to write a better, sturdier introduction to this topic quite soon

Today I got a second Antistar review at iPadGames.org. I’m also preparing a proto-site (to get affiliated so I can track ad performance, although…

…the gut feeling at the moment is, not worth it.

I’m getting close to 200,000 impressions and 700 clicks in just a couple of weeks, with 3 spots and a google ad campaign over London. With 200 sales so far and a strong feeling that no more than 5% of these come from advertisement, I’ll be dropping my wishing coins into another well.

It may be worth noting that ppc google advertisement is costing me 3 to 10 times less than other channels.

iPadGames.org is the weirdest review site ever. Seems like a genuine .org, and I had to skim through other reviews to come to terms with the fact that the ever so slight cynical tone is normative, with little beyond the descriptive level to speak for each and any other title. Or maybe there just isn’t anything exciting on the iPad yet… Oh well. At any rate, it’s a genuine .org since I’d be hard pressed understand how they monetize. No referrals(?) No advertisement(?), no ‘features’.

Since you ask… OOgtech is a .org because I’ve registered the .com somewhere else, and I can’t access it at the moment.

5 minutes of celebrity

On Friday the 13th of August (Tokyo time), Antistar 3D:Rising made a quick dash into the top 75 adventure in App Store Japan.

My, it’s all in the title.

If you’re still missing out, best time to get onboard and try our serial adventure game. 4 chapters delivered, more on the way via free updates and rated 4-5 stars by more than 50% of players in the US app store.

App store link:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/antistar-3d-rising/id383382828?mt=8

Promotion ending as follows:

Honolulu: 24:00 Friday
Los Angeles: 03:00 Saturday
London: 11:00 Sunday
Beijing: 18:00 Sunday
Tokyo: 19:00 Sunday
Kiritimati: 00:00 Monday

Update: Antistar 3D: Rising is now available on the app store!

Why is a 13 year old dreaming of metal cities?
What lies in the dark forest beyond Klinnburg?

Anticipating the success of the Twin Star Saga,
Antistar 3D offers stylish anime action and adventure.

>> Watch the video
>> More screenshots

Join the buzz or check discussions on Touch-Arcade forums.

With an exciting title putting experienced and new players on fair ground, we’ve just proven that mobile entertainment owes nothing to game-boxes:

• Realtime, fullscreen interactive 3D
• Unique mix of adventure and arcade
• Unexpected allies and opponents
• innovative ‘no grind’ gameplay
• An original cast of haunting, magic creatures.

From the quaint emptiness of a marooned village to a mice gang’s lair, become a child without memories,
armed with only courage and a forward attitude to solving life’s little annoyances – not having a clue what’s going on, not having a chance against oversize wildlife and getting captured by really bad guys.

With procedural landscapes, three dimensional growth and beautifully detailed models,
Antistar 3D: Rising pushes the limits of 3D on mobile platforms and will seamlessly adapt to your device’s capabilities.

Main Contributors: T.E.A de Souza, Chan Zhang, Karen Xu; Music: Matt Hansen (Calpomatt), Justin R. Durban (Edgen), Mark. SFX: Mark E Buckland, Robert Gacek (FXProSound), Joel Carli, Sith Master, Starmanltd, The_lone1, T$_Technologies.