Triage

The main challenges stand in our way: Pinch/Zoom, Optimization, iOS inconsistency's.

The Pinch/Zoom function I wrote two weeks ago was a good stop gap, however its not what people who are used to the feature would find usable. Now with Matt back in the office, I'm going to let him take his shot at the code.

This functionality is not easy folks, a decent amount of geometry is needed to correctly translate an object to the specified zoom in location & above all it needs to be lean enough to run on iPhone's. We are looking at examples of how other dev's have tackled the problem for some inspiration.

Optimization is a on-going challenge that continually appears right after you think you nailed the issue. Making sure that all artifacts are cleared up at the end of every state change is REALLY important, not to mention time consuming. I would love to use Adobe Scout, but we don't have any 64bit OS's in the office.... Until that point in time I'm stuck using Flash Builders own profiling tool.

& finally there are some super bizarre differences between PC & when we deploy to iOS in certain circumstances...

Some UI elements like a text field are strangely shifted out of place by a margin of 10 or so pixels... This is breaking the nice neat & tidy alignment we had of our UI elements. I cannot explain it, neither can Matt. The code is perfectly sound. Not to mention the fact that the issue affects one element, but not an identical element right next to it. And as I said these inconsistencies only appear on iOS, which means we need to build, deploy & test on device which drastically slows down the debug process.

At this moment in time its time to surrender to the fact we don't know whats going on & go get the duck tape. For each of the issues we will make a custom, specific fix to address the alignment issue. Is it excessive? Yes, absolutely, but we have run out of time to re-write our button class from the ground up again. So its time to bite the bullet.

TGIF

Wow, long work week.

Getting to be more & more like Fall here, Leaves are changing.

The major achievement this week is the stability of Online play & the inclusion of invitations. Players who have Game Center friends who also have Pathogen will pop up in the in-game friend list. From there they will be able to send/receive invites from one another. Very cool system.

A UI update just rolled through for Online & its starting to look pretty sharp.

We created a kill list of things we know need to get done as well as a list of known bugs we need to tackle. We are targeting a late October release, & things are going rather well so it looks like we should be able to hit it without too much of an issue.

Had a majorish issue this week while testing, the devices we were using were not connecting to Game Center for no apparent reason, so when the player jumped into online play they would crash it. Boggled the mind.

It ended up being cause by the fact that the device was not on the wireless network.... You cannot login to Game Center if you have no Internet. So now we have plenty of checks in there as well as a message letting the player know that Online Play is Not available Offline.

Did you know that developers have to Pay to have their device do push notifications?

Ya, kinda strange, but its the norm. We want to push a notification when its a players turn in online play, when a game is over, & when they receive an invitation. You need an additional server that deals with pushing notifications, the app itself cannot push the information because when in a locked state the device is not accessing the game data.

A good way to start the week

Ummm, we won?!!!!

Whoa?! Totally unexpected, but really awesome! A huge thanks to the Strasbourg Fantastic Film Festival for pulling the competition together & opening it up to the international
community.

This is the first year ever that the festival has included games. Pathogen was there with 11 other games that were on display, open for the public over the week of Sept 16 - Sept 22.

On Sunday we were awarded, an Octopix for "Best Work in Progress".

This is pretty incredible, especially since we were not there to explain it & the in-game instructions are in English, so potentially those playing may not been able to translate them. 

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This morning we got Online play working!First playable!

So that means I get to test it out tonight @ Champlain!

Kinda turning Fallish here.

Been a busy week of containing to polish the systems we have in place & clean out the remaining bugs.

Part of that is doing jobs you hate.

I am very much so a systems designer, I create an interesting rule set & see what happens when you push it in various ways. However on Tuesday I needed to buck up & tackle zooming.

Pathogen is coming to iPhone4/5/beyond, but it is pretty hard to play on such a small screen. To compensate we knew that we wanted a pinch/zoom feature that would allow the player to zoom into the play space. Saying we want that functionality & making it a reality are often two very different things.

Spent ALL day Tuesday getting absolutely nowhere. There is alot of strange math involved with attempting to zoom to a point in space, the object needs to reorient its pivot point, the object itself needs to offset to keep the screen centered, & after your zooming in, the player still needs to be able to pan around the environment.

Starling doesn't have any of this built in. Originally I attempted to use the Feathers Scroll Container object to facilitate panning, however it became apparent that there was no clean way of getting the thing to zoom.

The answer was to build something entirely custom. Its still not perfect (you don't zoom in exactly to where you want to go) but its good enough for a first test.

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Pathogen received two minor gameplay balances for the first time in almost 4 months.

1. After some great testing feedback the Virus recharge has been increased from 8 to 10 turns.
2. Putting a level three onto the field produces 4 adjacent level 2 pieces, these level 2 pieces actually never spread again. I don't know why it took me this long to correct this minor issue. Now the cascading feature functions a bit more logically. 3's always create 2's which always create 1's.

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Took a critical eye to our replay system. Yes its super cool, especially since the players can interact with the timeline at will. However by creating a timeline we were creating some expectations that we couldn't hold up too.

In general, whenever a player sees a timeline bar they expect to be able to smoothly scrub through time without a problem. Our timeline could never do that, perhaps with more time/experience we could create a system that would react that dynamically. The reality was that if they tried to interact with the timeline it would stall, hang, before jumping to a moment in time. Overall it felt amateur & unfinished.

So we fix this by removing the timeline, keeping the play button, centering it on screen & flanking it on either side with step forward/backward buttons that increment the current state of the game by 1. It keeps the functionality, is supported by our clean UI aesthetic, & helps to manage expectations.

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Online it progressing well, should have a first playable next week. Matt will be tackling the Online UI so hopefully we should be up & running @ testing on Monday.

Fixed the majority of UI aspect ratio problems that plagued the iPhone4/5 builds & retina display. Some still exists (victory screen, I'm looking at you), but its getting better.

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Whew, I guess a lot has happened.

Post FIG

And we're back.

Boston FIG was a pretty crazy whirl wind event. We left on Friday @ 1:00, planning on getting there at about 5ish. That way we could scope out the place, get set up at the Air BnB place we had, before going down to the Valve pre-party.

But like all good plans, it didn't quite go that way. It ended up taking us almost 6 hours to get to Boston thanks to traffic.

The Valve Event was basically a pitch to get developers to use Greenlight (which we did not have the greatest experience with in the past). However, it was very nice to just be around other developers & one of the best things about having a tablet game is being able to quickly pull it out and show it off.

We ended up going to dinner with a few of the Cipher Prime developers.

Saturday came around & from 10 until 6 we showed the game. We were completely busy for those 8 ours straight. We had a great reception from people, with many saying it was one of their all-time highlights at the event. Spoke to a few press people as well and hopefully got someone's attention.

Not everything went according to plan and we learned alot from those mistakes.

1. Team: You need to bring a team. Only Marguerite & I went down. Without any backup or anyone to switch out for us, you get worn down really quickly.

2. Monitors: We brought a monitor to display the game so that those who were not playing could kinda get a feel for what Pathogen is all about. However, the monitor was too low, no one waiting in line could see it. Next time we are going to either invest or make a television mount that would put a screen up about 6 or 7 feet into the air.

3. Airplay... We had this great plan to mirror gameplay onto the monitor. Worked in the office no issue. We get down their & airplay just cannot connect... I believe the issue simply is distance to the router. So next time we ask for a hardline connection & bring our own router.

4. More devices. Often we had Press people stop by & all the iPad were being used already. Taking the game from people is never a pleasant experience. We should have a special "press" device that we can whip out.

5. Break the rules: FIG told us to make sure we don't put anything in front of our booth. But a number of dev's brought additional chairs that they put out in front. This netted them additional room to converse with players, pushed the main crowd back from the table & generated interested from the crowd because the players and games were far more visible.

Glad to be back at work though now. Doing iPhone4/5 dev work today. Will be testing later tonight as well.

Here we go

Despite the nightmares of last week, we are in a great place right now. The website for Pathogen went live: http://pathogen.co/ & with it the newest gameplay trailer that Marguerite created.

Its simple, but solid which is perfectly fine right now.

We have some press interviews lined up for FIG & our publishers website has gone live! http://gameblyr.com/

We added sound effects earlier this week, which was positively received by our testers @ Champlain on Wednesday. The final build is all set and ready. Packing everything up as we speak.

The Indium Game Contest, held in Strasbourg France, is also happening this weekend. They successfully received the latest build last night!

Oh boy, here we go.

bugs bugs bugs

Finally...

Discovered a pretty strange iPad3 bug late last night. Caused the app to crash when the player tried to enter the campaign.

Strangest thing, was working fine the day before. (sigh)

Spent all morning trying to tackle the problem. The root cause was understandable. For some unknown reason there was a massive spike in graphics memory (50mb to nearly 150mb)  when a player entered the campaign. This spike would cause the iPad to basically faint at the sight of it.

But what was the underlying problem?

Well, it all comes down to what assets are being drawn on the screen. We have a single asset for the cell shape, which is prominently displayed on the main screen.

This asset was then scaled down to be re-used in two places. As the level images & the sub-level images. In general re-using assets is a very good thing. The thing is that because these assets are so large (778x778) & there were so many of them created. 6 of the 12 levels have 5 sub-levels within them so in total 36 of these cells.

The thing is that even though they are scaled down they still take up the same amount of graphics memory as the full-sized version.

This result was tripling our graphics memory.

To fix the problem I created 2 new variants of cell asset. A small one, used for sub-levels and a medium used for normal levels.

This new method solved the issue, bringing our graphics memory down to 60mb!

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In other news Marguerite is in New York today meeting with our publisher.

Testing went well, despite the fact that I did not have access to additional iPad's (kinda hard to test an iPad game with 1 iPad).

We will be testing tomorrow as well (hopefully I'll be able to remedy the iPad situation)

Then Friday we go down!

The Valley of Despair

The Valley of Despair.

That is what Sid Meir, the legendary designer of the civilization franchise, called the troubling times that all studios eventually reach during their development.

Last week was our Valley of Despair. Just about everything seemed to fall apart at the seams. The time pressure of FIG, combined with Matt's continuing sickness, the general shape of the game, our lack of trailer, lack of website, & a host of other concerns drove us into a corner. For a while we were lost.

However, we picked ourselves back up, dusted off our sleeves, pulled out a map & started the process of trying to find our way out. 

One of the key decisions was to completely abandon our online efforts. Stepping away from that line of thought made it much easier to give myself some breathing room to identify & tackle the known bugs. Worked over the weekend to make sure I was on top of it. Took new trailer footage all throughout Friday with FRAPS, previously we had been using a free alternative however that gave us some pretty ugly footage. If you are going to do it right, the best thing to do it pay for a program that will deliver. 

Feeling much more confident this week as a result. After last week, I think we can handle it.

The Claw

Construction going on right next to my apartment. Woke up & saw an Excavator right outside my window. The first thing that came to mind was this clip.

Trailer stuff is all done on my end. Marguerite has everything & is putting it together today. whew.

Today is all about logging in into the online system so that potentially Monday we will be able to test that.

Um what? How soon is FIG?

So we are attempting to not run around screaming about the sky falling.

Way too close to FIG, cannot believe that it is next Friday...

We have a build pushed out to Apple already, thank goodness. It should pass through cert by (hopefully) next Monday. Which means we should have 50 promo codes for FIG, which we will use to get the game onto the devices we are renting + for the press as well?

Have been working on a trailer...

This kinda melted down. Miscommunication problems. We really should have someone who can spend some quality time creating a trailer, without having to work on anything else (And start it a month ago). Unfortunately that person doesn't exist. I stopped production to turn around & create some of what we need & Marguerite will be spending the next two days stitching it all together.

We should have a first draft/pass by next Monday. We are headed to New York on Tuesday, then will be headed down to FIG on Friday. So hopefully we can squeeze in time to make edits.

Ed is making our website, that should hopefully be up on Friday? 

Marguerite had her first experience creating a banner, ended up being a wicked huge Illustrator file, the thing is like 80 inches wide.

Headed to the Champlain EGD Town hall tonight to stand in the spotlight & call out for Testers. We will be officially begin testing on Monday night.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHH, lets hope the sky doesn't fall. Too much to do.