I was done! So, on the seventh day I went to see a movie instead of sitting in front of a computer. There were a couple of pieces still missing, but all the functionality of Doodle Blast was there:
- Tank
- Stacking guns
- Projectiles
- Falling bonuses
- Static buildings, flickable soldiers, flying aircrafts
- Score counting
- Score tick marks
- Hit points, damage, and collisions
- Single and multi-touch support
- Sounds
- Menus
- Local scores
- Global scores
- Twitter integration
- Loading screen
What was missing was the final images (it’s hard to code and draw at the same time), a few more guns using the existing gun infrastructure (gun images along with data specifying firing frequency, aim speed, cool period, etc.), a few more enemies using the existing enemy infrastructure (images along with data specifying spawn frequency, hit points, damage, etc.), a few more buildings, and some sound tweaks.
After I took day 7 off, I spent three more days working on the above items. Yes, I know, I was cheating again.
However, I did a couple of changes that might interest you:
- I added logic to adjust sound volume based on game progression and the amount of mayhem on the screen.
- In an attempt to make the game playable by rookies as well as advanced destructionists, I added logic to monitor the user and adjust the difficulty level accordingly.
If either of these interests you, let me know and I will dig into more details with further posts. If not, there you have it folks – The Making of Doodle Blast! in a nutshell.
The final game stats were as follows:
78 code files, 7693 lines of code, 9 textures, 42 sounds, and, as of today, 1773 submitted online scores.
Great work mate! I love reading your posts! It's so inspiring. Please do write a post about how you wrote the logic to adjust the difficulty level accordingly to user expertise. For example, what algorithm do you use to figure it out?
ReplyDeleteKind regards,
J_Mak.
Okay, the "masses" have spoken. I will post something on the inner-most workings of the enemy-spawning logic soon.
ReplyDeleteJust curious - J Mak, are you working on a game of your own?
sweet! Looking forward to reading it mate!
ReplyDeleteYes, I am working on a game of my own, but my current learning curve is very steep, as I've never programmed in objective-c before, and I have very limited c++ experience.
I hope it's ok for me to ask, but is your game bringing in a good passive income? That's really what I'm trying to work on at the moment.
Thanks!
gc - greatly done!
ReplyDeleteI found your posts extremely helpful. All of them! This is a very rare case when guy who develops cool stuff can actually describe in human-readable and fun language how he did it :)
Thank you very much for your developer-for-developer chronicle!
- Denis
Please put here links to any other your posts wherever they are - I would really like to read them.
ReplyDelete@dvd00: thanks for your feedback!
ReplyDeleteCheck out http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/ if you haven't yet. It's a great community of developers like myself with much to offer to each other.
@J Mak: the passive income is very unpredictable at best. Let me put it this way - I write these games because I'm a geek at heart and I enjoy working on the platform. However, I'm yet to fully cover my operation expenses. I'm sure there are people out there for whom this is a steady income. However, I'm not at that point yet and my hunch is that majority of people aren't either.