Deadmans Run- Ogre iPhone game

[azrialelf]

This game has been developed entirely by my brother and I using Ogre3D and will be released May 1st.
[youtube]MqHhrHTk108[/youtube]

We are publishing ourselves, so if you guys like what you see (or want to support indie development!) we'd love if you could share our game on Facebook, Twitter, or however else you communicate with your friends.

**Shout out to masterfalcon for his helpful and quick responses way back in 2010 when I was struggling to get things working in Ogre (So long ago now!).

Cheers!

Tristan and Ethan Mitchell
Indie Game Developers

[Mind Calamity]

Great job! I love how it came out. Shame I don't have an iOS device, it looks absolutely amazing.

[areay]

Congratulations on your release. I really like the car upgrade scenes.

How long did it take you? What libraries did you use etc?

[duststorm]

Really nice concept and realisation.
It seems like it plays well and smooth.

Great work!

[azrialelf]

Thanks for the kind words guys!

The game is available World Wide now!
http://itunes.com/apps/deadmansrun

We need everyone's support to make our app a success, so please help any way you can - The app store ranking model means that for us to be ranked well tomorrow we need lots of sales today, so every single purchase counts! Buy our game (it's less than a cup of coffee) and tell your friends and family (Facebook posts would be great!)

**Those without iOS devices can still purchase through iTunes, and/or use social media to spread the word**

Answering questions:

The game took about 6 months of heavy development, though we spent another year after that polishing and refining - Mostly as a result from feedback with our then publishing partner, Chillingo.
However after the year of revising the game to appeal to the masses we decided we weren't willing to sacrifice our vision and mutually ended our publishing agreement.

This left us without publishers, but with a solid game (a lot of their feedback was very good - It was near the end that they were pushing for a complete mechanic overhaul ), so we decided to publish ourselves!

Some tech specs:
3D Engine: Ogre3D
Physics: Box2D (yes, 2D physics!) (http://box2d.org/)
Audio: Modified Sparrow library (http://gamua.com/sparrow/)
UI: Gorilla (thanks Betajaen!) (http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/Gorilla)

If there's anything specific you'd like to know, just ask and I'd be happy to answer.

[DanielSefton]

Congrats on the release! I will buy it as soon as I can.

Like you say, polishing is the real pain, as I'm finding out with my game

[azrialelf]

Thanks - We appreciate it!

[azrialelf]

If you haven't bought our game yet, there's a chance to win it on http://iphonesoft.fr/2012/05/02/concour ... n-a-gagner

Check it out ;D

[lonewolff]

Quite a feat for a team of two! Well done!

I think your timing is perfect. It seems that right now is the time to go 'indie'. I think that publishers must be now (if not soon) feeling the heat. There is nothing stopping people taking things into their own hands and taking the 'big boys' out of the equation. I am confident that the power is shifiting at a rapid rate.

Hats off to you!

[Treon]

That is a good pice of work, impressive.

[rnc]

Congrats, looks good!

[mistigrii33]

The game looks great ! Nice job !
If you have an Android version, I'l love to get it...

[azrialelf]

Thanks a lot guys! We've worked very hard on this and we're proud of what we've created .
Our sales have been respectable (We're on the charts in 18 countries, hitting #16 in Canada and #12 in Russia) but we're really hoping some game reviews get published as we distributed all 50 of our promocodes, by request, within 24 hours of our launch - Hopefully that will give us some needed fuel!

One thing we've found is we need some more international reviews - Our 5 star average in Canada doesn't help with the the rest of the world

[azrialelf]

A "first impressions" video was just posted on the Touch Arcade forums of our game, it's quite interesting for anyone who would like to see what the actual gameplay experience is like:
[youtube]o-lfBFGQD-U[/youtube]

[Slappy]

Game looks really great, it reminds me a TrackVerse game (also Ogre3D game) because of "cars hovering" (by the way why they are called cars if they have no wheels?

Also the UI is fantastic, heh
Do you have plans to release it on hard-core platforms (PC/Mac/Linux) or at least Android?

Nice work!

[azrialelf]

Heh - I never really considered that they shouldn't be 'cars' anymore. Though we call them 'hover-cars' most of the time.

We have absolutely considered a PC/Mac/Linux release, but I think we're going to be pushing that for Deadmans Run 2.

Android is unlikely, not because we don't want to but because I honestly know nothing about porting so it's a resource allocation concern - Should we look into an android release or add some content patches to the existing game? (IAPs, new cars, tracks, game modes, etc).

[azrialelf]

Hey Guys! Three codes just for Ogre users:
YFY4W36JTYHA
4NLHME6YYP6K
JMX63RTJEKRH

Please reply to let us know which one you used!
And if you enjoy yourself, we wouldn't mind hearing about that either

[azrialelf]

None used yet?

If anyone tries any codes and finds them to already be redeemed, please let me know.

[Kafu]

Bought it! I will release a review on iTunes later this night. It's a very good game and I've found it thanks to a review on Touch Arcade (a great result!). I played it on an iPad 2 and an iPhone 4S, and I love it's framerate (BTW the "headlamp" effect is great!).

I would like to know what has been your experience with Ogre 3D, for example: has it required modifications? Have you had problems with performances? Can you share some non-obvious tips on using Ogre3D on iOS?

Congratulations for your work,
Daniele.

[azrialelf]

Thanks very much Daniele!

The Ogre engine itself was largely unmodified from masterfalcon's starter project. The problems I ran into were mostly related to the functionality I needed that wasn't provided by Ogre - Physics, Audio, Level loading, UI, Texture compressing, and interfacing with the Apple stuff (like Game Center, IAPs, etc).
Briefly, here are some notes and hints from my experiences:
- PVRTC textures are essential for iOS. They aren't that small compared to a compressed jpg but they are so much faster. We experienced a massive decrease in resource consumption just by using PVRTCs over jpgs. The exception was transparency - I never got PVRTC transparency to work and had to use PNGs for that.
- Release your resources whenever possible (for us, it was after every race. Before we implemented that we would run out of resources and crash about 2-3 races in).
- When creating your UI, do not make it a static size or location - Use "anchors" based on screen proportions - eg Top, Left, Right, Bottom, HorMid, VertMid. Make a global "UIScale" value based on the resolution of your device, and adjust the UI sizes accordingly. You'll notice on the iPad that there is a slight position bug in the "1st", "2nd", "3rd" ,"4th" text as it slides around - This is due to one of those scalars being off slightly because the aspect ratio is different than the iPhone (I've fixed it in an update that will be launched soon).

The most tricky part was interfacing the C code with C++
**Disclaimer**
I'm not an educated programmer, I'm self taught, so what worked for me might not be the right way to do it. However, it was a pretty time consuming, difficult solution to arrive upon, so maybe explaining how I was able to deal with the issues can provide guidance or insight for anyone else facing the same challenges.

I had a LOT of problems calling any of the Apple stuff or audio stuff from C++ - However, in the sample project masterfalcon provided he called C++ code from C- So I figured if I can't call the C code from C++, maybe I could create some kind of "queue" system that queued the intended calls in C++ and then I could check the queue in C. If I found calls waiting to be processed I could then call them in C. This might sound confusing, but it really wasn't that bad and worked quite well.
Basically, for audio, I send the important information to my AudioManager (like the filename and volume/location of sound). I stored them in a vector (dynamic array). Then, in the frame loop portion of the C code, I would check to see if there were any sounds in queue to be played, and if there were I would play them and remove them from the queue.
I did the same thing for calling achievements, sending scores to leaderboards, and calling IAPS (all of which aren't actually active in the live version of the game, but have been programmed and will be implemented eventually. The only reason they were removed was because we cancelled our publishing contract with our publishers and all the Achievements, Leaderboards and IAPs were set up on the back end of their iTunes connect account and we didn't want to delay our launch anymore).

Now, a more experienced programmer will likely read that and say "Well, you could have just done BLANK". If that's the case, please let me (us) know! My solution was a pretty messy work around and the whole time I kept thinking "There has to be a better way to do this", I just never found it.

[azrialelf]

Ohhh the Touch Arcade review is new!

Pretty cool we got reviewed there, though it's unfortunate the reviewer didn't appreciate the controls (we actually got really good feedback from other members who tried the game in our forum post at http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthrea ... t=deadmans).

[Kafu]

it's unfortunate the reviewer didn't appreciate the controls

True, but I think it's more important to being reviewed on TA; a lot of people don't read anything, look only at the video

The Ogre engine itself was largely unmodified from masterfalcon's starter project. [...]

Thank you for the "technical postmortem"! I appreciate it a lot! I think having honest feedback from other developers is a key element to improve usage of our tools.

I had a LOT of problems calling any of the Apple stuff or audio stuff from C++
[...]
Now, a more experienced programmer will likely read that and say "Well, you could have just done BLANK". If that's the case, please let me (us) know!

Maybe I can be useful. With "C" I think you mean "Objective C". Tapsteroids (my game) is written using Cocos2d-iPhone (an Objective C, 2D graphics engine), common Apple SDKs (Game Center, etc, all Objective C) and near everything other in C++ (the game engine, Box2D, OpenAL, etc.). The technique is quite simple: you write your C++ class as usual (".h" file, ".cpp" file), when a C++ method must call Objective C stuff, you simply implement it (the single method) in a file with extension ".mm". That extension allows you to freely mix C++ and Objective C together, for example (pseudo-code):

Code: Select all

void GameCenterSystem::submitScore (int score, const std::string & category)
{
    // Convert C++ objects to Objective C.
    NSString * nsCategory = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:category.c_str ()];
    // Submit the score to Game Center.
    GKScore * s = [[[GKScore alloc] initWithCategory:nsCategory autorelease];
    [s setValue: score];
    [s reportScoreWithCompletionHandler:^(NSError *error) { /* ... */ }];
}

The same technique (implementing C++ methods in ".mm" files) can be used to pass objects from Objective C to C++ (with some typedefs to "hide" that object types to C++ type system, when needed).

Bests,
Daniele.

[azrialelf]

Well damn.

I knew there had to be an easier way