Category Archives: Game News

Greenlight Update and Dragon Bones

EBF4 has fallen in the Greenlight rankings a bit. It’s down to number 48, from 41. Which means a bunch of other games are overtaking it. If Steam keeps approving big batches, then that’s not really going to be a problem, but it does slow things down a bit.

So go vote, blah blah blah, etc.

The number of votes between games is pretty small now.
3,000 more votes will get me into the top 20, and just 1,000 will probably get me into the top 30, meaning I’d have a pretty good chance at getting into the next batch, if they do 25 again. I’ve currently got 14,460 votes, but pretty much everyone who cares has already voted… so things are gonna take some more time.

Meanwhile, I’m playing around with Dragon Bones, and hardware-accelerated skeleton motion-tweening!
That means that I’ll be able to do complex character animations with much better performance.
So if I ever make another game with as much animations as EBF4, it’ll run a lot better on crappy computers, and could even be playable on mobile devices!
So that could open up some new possibilities. Maybe EBF5 could be a mobile game. Maybe not. I’ll worry about that later.

Starling Tests

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When I was in London, a bunch of people recommended that I check out the Starling framework for making Flash games for mobile platforms. I was already slowly looking into it, but after hearing about the massive advantages and relative ease of implementation, I jumped right into it.

Basically, Starling let’s you use Flash’s Stage3D API and hardware acceleration without having to do any low-level programming.
With hardware acceleration, you get much better performance, which is very important for mobiles.

The limitation is that Flash’s traditional motion-tweened animations don’t really port well; it’s better to use sprite-sheet style animation.
That’s fine for Cat Cafe though, because the animations are very simple, and I can port the tweening required quite easily.

Anyway, here’s some of the tests I did:

Test 1: Stars

Test 2: Cats

Test 3: Tweens

The first test is just a bunch of glowy and transparent objects bouncing around, much like they would in Bullet Heaven.

The second test has a lot more particles and no transparency, which speeds things up a bit.

The final test is just to see what Starling’s built in tweening engine can do. It’s pretty easy to code objects flying around, stretching, rotating and fading. But it would be pretty hard to animate a character with multiple moving parts this way.

All of these tests should run at 60fps on a decent machine. They’re pretty extreme though, and no games that I have planned will need this many objects, not even a potential Bullet Heaven 2. For now I’m just going to use Starling to get Cat Cafe working at 60fps on crappy phones.

Greenlight Update

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So it looks like Steam have increased their game throughput for Greenlight.
Apparently they’ve recently Greenlit a batch of 100 games, which is a lot more than they usually do.

I had pretty much given up on Epic Battle Fantasy 4 getting through Greenlight, but after seeing this, it might still have a chance. Previously the game was no where near the top 100, but now it’s at number 70!

So if you know anyone who still hasn’t voted and might enjoy the game: get them to vote here! EBF4 currently has 13,453 yes votes. Boost that by 50%, and that should be enough to get it through!

The Steam version of EBF4 will include a new battle area, with stronger versions of bosses, long endurance/survival battles, and some bosses returning from the previous games. New equipment and achievements will be awarded for completing these challenges.

The Steam version will also include all premium content available in the web version, and will not suffer from the restrictions of web browser games; It’ll have fullscreen support, no ads, no audio compression, and it won’t need an internet connection!

It’ll probably cost around $10, but that’s not completely up to me.

If you’ve somehow stumbled upon this page and don’t know what EBF4 is, watch this trailer:

Cat Cafe Dress Up Mode

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This is pretty much the same thing as that “Cat Maker” I posted earlier, but with a new interface. I’m a bit worried that the buttons might be a bit small on devices with small screens, so if that ends up being the case, I’ll have to rearrange things a bit.

He looks happy…

Anyway! The main thing to notice here is the “Screenshot” button! Click that and you’ll get a wee JPEG of your cat saved to your device! This is a feature that a lot of my previous games would have benefited from. Unfortunately, it’s a lot harder to implement if the game is running in a web browser. For security reasons, Flashplayer can’t create random files on your computer, without help from some external PHP code (or something like that). So this is a feature that the web version won’t have, but will be available on your mobile device instead.

This image was made by the app.

Cate Cafe Main Menu

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Been working on the main menu for Cat Cafe.
It’s nothing too fancy, but I think it looks quite good so far.

I’ve also been playing around with some more Android features.
Turns out that it’s pretty easy to use the “Menu”, “Back”, “Search”, and other buttons. They’re basically treated like keyboard keys.
I shouldn’t rely too much on them though, since different Android devices have different buttons, but it’s still handy to have them.

Kupo Games

Web and mobile games by Matt Roszak.