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I was not very happy how the elevator looked in my game. I wanted it to have a more alumium look.

 

What’s in a name? It’s the most common name around in english speaking countries besides John (cannot back this up with any claims).

But who’s is Dave? And what is the motivation behind this name? Well it typically is a name that is given to a (anti)hero.  Lets list some of them  :

• Dave Bowman is the hero in 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Dave Lister is the only surviving human in Red Dwarf
• David Banner, the name of the TV Hulk
• The name of the impersonating President of the movie ‘Dave’

The Dave in this adventure is a smart guy, but as many fellows of his age, he is searching for a goal in his life. He dropped out of college for no particular reason and got into trouble when Kangs henchman found him. Kang wants him to do something dangerous. BTW : Kang will be the next character I will introduce.

 

Every given Sunday I plan to make a nice screenshot showing off some of the artwork of the game. This will mostly not be a final shot of the game, but it will give an impression how it will look. (So it will not spoil any of the plot of the game).

Well isn’t this a typical lab room? Dave, don’t try to do much silly stuff in this room!

Lucky there is a fire-extuingisher and a medical case!

Time to show some of the latest developments for my Adventure game the Lost Adventures

 

Room to Room from franzzle on Vimeo.

The video shows some of the Rooms that can be visited by Dave in Kangs enormous complex.
The rooms are the dining room and the kitchen. The kitchen shows a character that plays a little role in making a meal for Dave. Maybe you can guess what kind of meal this will be for our hero Dave? Will he found a way out of this mess? And will that the scenario he had in mind for himself?

It is chosen the title for my upcoming adventure this way because I have learned the hard way that chosing a snazzy name for your game will make it harder to discover in the Appstore(s). My previous game was called Blooneycounter, I thought this was a great name at the time and I sticked with it in the end. But nobody searches on blooney! Maybe people will search on count, but that’s it, basically. The title for the game Whamblambomb was also a stupid mistake. I wanted a unique name, and that it is unique is obvious, but it’s not a wise thing to do.

My first game was called Topotablet and did well, although it also has an uncommon name. Maybe it’s sheer luck or the quality of the game, or the niche category to which it belongs. I don’t know really. But choosing a good name is important I suppose. Hopefully I chose the right name, if people search for a adventure, voila it’s there. I am still doubting though if I will choose for “The Lost Adventures”  or “Lost Adventures”?

Developing a new adventure game is pretty hard stuff and I was reluctant to make this because of the time it will take to make it playable. However my interest making an adventure game was always in the back of my mind. But I really started  tinkering with the idea after I played Fester Mudd on the iPad.

What a greatly executed game. It was too bad it shut down making the second level. I think there is a nice niche to the genre on iOS devices (if you count some pixel art goodies there are about ten or so).  But I think this adventure didn’t sell well because people are flooded with big studio crap that is forced on them. The studio that made this game expected some more revenue from this and slashed the sequel because of that.

I do not have this (money)constraint on making this adventure game, the only thing that could stop the development is :

• Time
• Motivation

But I think this is not a big problem. Once you have a core adventure engine. Adding rooms is as if you are adding a new game every time….

Well, let’s make it happen!

 

I am very pleased that my latest game is Approved (in one go, as always!) by Apple.

The game can be downloaded here

One of the drawbacks of Tiled is that it fixes the game to a certain projection, called Orthographic projection. So the game could look awkward at first. But it also makes a lot of stuff easier. Let me explain…

All lines are parallel, there is no vanishing point. Many adventure games don’t use such projections, there are more artsy and free of any projection at all. But I chose for the RPG kind of style. The type of projection I used looks the most like picture 6 and has such an angle of about 45 degrees with the X-axis.

Well as you see, it won’t hurt the visuals that much and one of the benefits is that you can zoom in and out in the game. This is impossible with “artsy” adventures.

A problem with tiled maps is Zordering. I will tell about this in another blog post how to fix that…

A new revamped version is finally released. The work on this version is very important as it opens up oppertunities to an iPhone release and work on a multiplayer version.

Multiplayer support (Peer to Peer Matchmaking) development has already started and is looking good right now.

Also some bugs in the handling of strange characters were found this should be fixed. Otherwise the leaderboard will crash eventually.

So it’s still not perfect….! But what is?

It’s a mayor update to my first iOS game Topotablet. This version will be smoother and the gameplay will change a bit. The world map is rendered using a more memory efficient technique in cocos2d. Every tile that is not shown, is unloaded from memory and is thus keeping the memory usage down. This allows for the future to show a bigger map, and it allows a smoother scrolling experience. The other thing that changes is the way the heli flies at the edges of the world. A the edge the heli doesn’t fly to the other side but flies to the edge of the map without scrolling in both directions simultaneously.

The line shown is the border of the map, and as you can see the heli can move towards the edge but the black borders from the previous versions are not shown anymore. The game looks more polished than ever, and it’s start for the next improvement…. Multiplayer!