Third In The Space Watch Trilogy

WatchOS 6 is launching soon, and I've been busy preparing some new games exclusively for the Apple Watch.

I've already released Kepler Attack, a fast paced space shooter inspired by the arcade classic Gyruss, and I've recently completed Star Warp, which is now available for pre-order on the App Store. Star Warp will launch on the 4th of September and is inspired by Galaxians.

And right now I'm busy working on another space game -  the third in my Space Watch Trilogy - and that game is called Asteroid Commando. No prizes for guessing the inspiration for this one...

Like the other two games, Asteroid Commando is built using Swift 5 and SpriteKit and is designed to take advantage of all the latest features of the Apple Watch. It uses the Digital Crown with haptic feedback, runs at a silky smooth 60fps, works with Game Center for the Watch and runs independently of the iPhone.

I've built up a framework while developing Snappy Word, Kepler Attack and Star Warp - sharing a menu system, leaderboard and save/load system between games lets me kick off new projects and get into the core game a lot faster.

Initial sprite set for the game

I'm finding the constraints of the Apple Watch a joy to work with. The smaller screen size and limited input, coupled with the shorter play sessions means that a Watch game is much smaller in scope than the average mobile game. And this means shorter development times without compromising the quality of the experience. In some ways, the Watch is a great delivery platform for what is essentially paid hyper casual games.

I plan on doing more regular updates as I close out Asteroid Commando, so please check back to see the new features I'll be adding over the coming weeks.

Cheers,
Johnno

Billy Carts Dev Blog 13 December 2016

Yesterday I caught up with the talented Pete Mullins, my co-conspirator on Billy Carts, so we could go over what we've done so far in the game, and more importantly, plan what we have yet to do.

Like many indie game projects Pete and I are working remotely on this one using Trello, Unity Collab, email and Google Drive to share assets, ideas and documents. So it's great to catch up in person every now and again!

As a result of our meeting we worked out that our first priority is making sure the game controls well and feels fun. Pretty obvious really :-) We're not too worried about the overall design just yet - we're fans of iterating rapidly on ideas to see if they work or not and letting that shape the game. Definitely not the approach I would take on an adventure game, but with fast action games it's all about the moment to moment feel.

Yesterday was also a great opportunity to get some first pass assets and integrate them into the game.

We're aiming for a very Australian theme with Billy Carts pulling inspiration from where we live. So I expect a few of my Aussie friends will cringe when they play the game. Make them squirm, I say!

Some of the new assets Pete built include a petrol can (or gas can for Americans) and a coin.

Collectable coin featuring a koala!

A petrol can that refills your billy cart.

Technically Billy Carts are box carts and don't have engines that require petrol/gas - but this is a game and we're prioritising fun over facts :-)

If the game has a positive reception and we're lucky enough to keep building on it post release, we're definitely keen on adding new environments inspired by other countries - particularly some of the beautiful scenery from the USA. So fingers crossed it does okay!

One of the new assets we added in during our catchup was a sharp right turn in the track. It sounded like it would be fun on paper but in practice it slowed down the game play - so we nixed it.

The track is  made up of small segments that are each unique in their shape and include small hairpin curves, dips, hills, etc. and this seems to work well.

So, the next step is to wire up the new assets, see how they feel and tweak them. This is a process we'll be repeating until done, so stay tuned to see where we end up.

Coins in the game!

Cheers,
Johnno

No matter what you do it will take a lot of work

I've just wrapped up an update to my iOS game Snappy Word. It's a word game built in Swift for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and iMessage.

Snappy Word

I originally wrote the game for Right Pedal Studios back when the Apple Watch came out. The game was one of the launch apps and I'm quite proud of being there at the beginning.

I was lucky to get Snappy Word assigned to me when Right Pedal wrapped up, so rather than ~re-releasing it I decided to do a major update. This meant making it work with Swift 3 and the latest WatchOS, adding in an iMessage version, redoing the art and adding in a new game mode.

Despite it being a fairly simple 2D word game the rewrite in Swift 3 and the addition of new frameworks ended up taking a few months of part time work to finish.

But I learned an important lesson doing this update:

No matter what you do it will take a lot of work.

I've already started my new game - a cool 3D game built in Unity with my mate and talented artist Pete Mullins.

Billy Carts made in Unity

The amount of work to get the initial 3D game up and running was probably a little less than it took for me to wrap my head around the iMessage framework. But showing the 3D game to friends got oohs and aahs. This was a "real" game.

This game is definitely a leap ahead of my previous stuff, and yes, it will take a lot of work. But you know what? I'm really looking forward to putting in that work because this time the effort is going to show on screen.

As I've learned everything takes effort so you might as well go for gold :-)