As the summer approached I was full of hope, game code was expected to flow abundantly from my fingertips, whole worlds were going to be created!

Immediately after WWDC, things fell apart. I had to focus on my industrial consulting business when a number of projects decided to align like the planets for installation in July. Working seven days a week, and long hours to boot, meant there was no time for game design. I won’t even touch upon issues in my personal life, but they have had an impact as well.

Its a shame that the time-out happened, but it is a necessary evil. The completion of these projects over the past 6+ weeks has brought in more income than the last 2+ years that Rogue Touch has been on the market! Without the money obtained by my consulting business, I cannot work on games. Someday I hope to transition to my older games sustaining me and funding new games, but for now I have to lead a double-life.

Now that my schedule has finally opened up a bit, I have recently returned to the world of Xcode, Objective-C, and OpenGL for the first time in a few months. It feels good. It turns out that taking a substantial time away from Mineko and Rogue Touch code is a mixed blessing… I have had time to forget how some of it works, even though I wrote the code! The flip side is that I’ve been able to rethink past assumptions, find hidden bugs as I re-read code, and improve the foundations.

To reiterate some goals:
1) Rogue Touch 2.0 is still “coming soon”, and is shaping up to be a much more dramatic update than I’d first conceived. It will be interesting to see how it is received by old and new players alike.

2) Spirit Hunter Mineko is deep in production, with thousands of frames of animation, and many thousands of lines of code completed so far. It is my sincere hope to release her before the holiday season rush this year.

3) “Unnamed Tactical TBS”, which I’ve barely mentioned around the internets, will begin to advance at a faster rate as soon as Mineko hits beta-testing. Don’t expect to see this arrive until spring 2012 at the earliest

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) was held last week in San Francisco, and I was there for the whole experience! It was great fun exploring the city, as well as getting up and standing in line with everyone at 5AM to be able to see Steve Jobs at the keynote last Monday. Also cool was meeting the crew from TouchArcade, as well as Josh from Crescent Moon Games, and sharing stories and drinks!

If you didn’t hear or see any of the keynote introductions, I can share this with you: iCloud will be a hot item for iOS gaming in the future. Many developers I spoke to shared the same idea, using iCloud to automatically sync game saves and progress across all your devices. That means you could start playing Mineko on your iPhone at work, and continue where you left off on your iPad while sitting on the couch at night! This will be especially useful for RPGs and such that have a seriously long playtime associated with them.

Another WWDC item- I sat down and talked with Blake Patterson at TouchArcade about past, current, and future projects and showed him some interesting unreleased stuff… some of which was showcased on the TouchArcade front page last week. If you missed it, take a look here: TouchArcade – Mineko Article

Mentioned but not shown in that article was a bit about Rogue Touch. Unfortunately the update was not far enough along to do a video preview. The good news is that graphic work is at an advanced stage now, and the details are starting to come together. Bad news is I have a few weeks of heavy consulting work to get through before I can finish assembling all the pieces. My target is to have this ready in later July, and it will be worth the wait! Smooth and fast gameplay, all new and improved visuals, Gamecenter integration, and a couple other surprises await you…

Those old-timers that have been visiting ChronoSoft since 2009 know that Rogue Touch has had a long history of updates and added features. After launching in February 2009, it gained things in the following months like D-pad support, leaderboards, bones, and new magic items. Things slowed down when my “day job” projects picked up and of course when Spirit Hunter Mineko started to take shape.

The most recent update to Rogue Touch was back in July of 2010, and contained some enhancements for iOS 4, including retina-display text and multitasking. It also contained some modified display code to address screen update performance in iOS 4.0. Something was broken in Apple’s new OS that had been functioning well since iOS 2.0 – 3.1.3… the drawing performance of CGContextDrawImage dropped to between 1/10 and 1/20th of its original speed prior to iOS 4.0.

I optimized the dungeon and map drawing code and regained much needed speed in iOS 4.0. There was much rejoicing last July… Then things got *even worse* in iOS 4.1. Everything was slowed further, despite my optimizations. I kept holding out hope that another iOS update would rectify the issue, but that we’re in 2011 now, and up to iOS 4.3.X… WWDC is just around the corner, but I’ve given up on iOS CGContext drawing getting fixed.

Rogue Touch was written using the easiest methods I could learn while learning Objective-C and the iPhone & Mac platforms. There are much faster and better ways to get things done… All the cool games use OpenGL, GPU accelerated high-speed drawing!

Coming in June 2011 is an overhaul of the classic! Rogue Touch will gain OpenGL rendering and quite a few new and interesting features. Can’t wait to share it with you all

For my first “official” blog post I thought it would be fun to talk about some of the sources of inspiration for Spirit Hunter Mineko. The story itself has roots in a variety of movies and anime/manga. We won’t be covering any of that! Instead, I’ll talk about gaming influences

Visuals:
The most obvious thing that can be seen in the few released screenshots and demo videos for Mineko is the pixel art and style of the sprites / tilesets. Some of the most well-loved RPGs came out during the rein of the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, and I wanted to capture the feeling of games like Zelda, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy (before they all went 3D)!. Everything is hand-drawn to approximate the best of the 16-bit gaming era. Even my choice of font (which has not been shown yet) is based on the bitmapped fonts that Square Enix used for games like Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger back in the 1990s.

In addition to the classic elements, I’ve developed a new line of sight and shadow casting system for 2D gaming that you can see evolve in the older tech videos. Since those demos were made last year other more modern features have been added like lighting, particle systems, and even some special mesh-based effects. All of this is my own hand-written code and mathematics, no libraries or game engines were used.

Gameplay:
Part of the delays in getting Mineko done are due to the gameplay. My first attempts were just not fun enough. Rather than make “yet another roguelike” or “dungeon crawler #8472″ I discarded a lot of work and documentation. Core gameplay has been, and continues to be refined. Now I am taking some of the best experiences a number of games have to offer and blending them into a cohesive whole that fits Mineko’s universe.

Shiren The Wanderer is an obvious choice to take notes from, it is probably the finest roguelike ever created for game consoles. I’ve taken small ideas from Shiren like the mini-map (actually used in Rogue Touch, and making another appearance in Mineko) and the idea that you always have a standard ranged weapon available (unlike Rogue). One of the more interesting aspects of Shiren is being adapted as well- death is used to drive the story forward, and careful planning can allow you to accumulate useful items for your *next* play-through. This helps take away most of the sting from any one death, and even gives options for those who like to grind in RPGs for better gear to make things easier.

Note that grinding is not mandatory, but it may actually be desirable for a few reasons. 1) Mineko has some “collection” aspects that may remind people of Pokemon! The magic system can be used for summoning help if you find the correct things. 2) The item system will allow a stunning variety of weaponry to be created. Expect to find weapons from multiple “tiers” ala World of Warcraft (from common to epic and more, with familiar color auras), with more powerful ones containing several types of magical enhancements and modifiers.

There is no “skill tree” in Spirit Hunter Mineko, but the items you can collect provide such a range of effects that they serve as a function equivalent… without the stupid re-spec or class change penalties found in most Action RPGs these days.

Audio:
Unfortunately this section is weak at the moment, but it is vital to the finished game! I’ve had a couple of false starts with very talented people, but hoping things are on the right track at last. Currently the idea is that “less is more”… many of the greatest themes in movies and classic games are simpler tunes, that just happen to be very catchy and memorable!

Spirit Hunter Mineko still requires several memorable tunes, combat / gameplay sounds, and a lot of ambient / background noises. If you are a good sound-effects person (or know of one) please post in the comments!

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Hope you’ve enjoyed reading this, I’m still trying to get my blogger skill leveled up! Not sure what my next topic will be yet, but might be one on “what makes games fun” or perhaps on user interfaces and more specifically, touchscreen UI.

Now that I’ve fulfilled my meme-related obligations, I am pleased to welcome you to the newly redesigned ChronoSoft site. The home page is now a blog which will house my thoughts on various classic and modern games, as well as game design and programming. You can expect to read regular news and technical related posts for all of my upcoming creations right here.

This is the first time my site has changed substantially since the release of Rogue Touch back in early 2009. In the past this was more of a shrine to Rogue than a website you’d expect for a company that, you know, might actually plan on releasing some new games

ChronoSoft’s new design is the result of a collaborative project between Anna Ahearn and myself. She did most of the hard work you see here, but was also very flexible in allowing me to tweak graphics and HTML/CSS where I wanted as well. If you’re in the market for web design services I highly recommend getting in touch with Anna- she delivers hand written code, prompt service, and reasonable rates! You can find out more about her at http://www.annaahearn.com/

Finally, I’d like to say thank you to the die-hard rogues that visit regularly, and a friendly hello to all the new faces that show up! Please watch this space in the coming days for special news updates about Rogue Touch and Spirit Hunter Mineko.