Galcon Labs – Preview!
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
Hey,
After a few days of itunesconnect being down, I was able to submit Galcon Labs to the App Store. Check it out! (See Phil’s first ever video!)
On a dev note, this game was REALLY fun to make. I got to do things that completely change the gameplay of Galcon so that Galcon Labs is really four totally different feeling games. My favorites are the Billiards mode (where the planets move around) which is just a lot of fun, and the Assassin mode where instead of trying to conquer everyone, you are assigned a single player that you have to destroy first. The interesting thing about that, is if you destroy another player, or the player who is trying to annihilate you gets destroyed – YOU LOSE! It really changes up how you have to play!
As usual, testing (TDD) was a big deal. Having a network game makes it so that everything has to be tested to make sure it really works. I’m going to be doing a talk at 360iDev on Wednesday, so if you want to hear me compare UDP networking to herds of rabid animals, be sure to attend.
Also, check out pygame 1.8. It is really awesome 🙂 While working on Galcon Labs I felt I needed to put more effort into differentiating the game from previous Galcon games visually. As it’s still triangle ships and planets, this took some effort. And during the last hour, I decided I needed a whole shiny new look for the planets. In the game I use a texture with 64 planet designs on it. So creating all those by hand would have been too hard. I used pygame to generate new landscapes and found the new pygame 1.8 features really helpful. I was able to use the new blending modes to trim the landscapes into circles and rotate and scale them down so I got a nice antialiased look for all the planets. In previous versions of pygame, this would not have been nearly as easy! So, not just for games, but for generating and doing automated image manipulation, pygame is really starting to shine 🙂
Cheers!
-Phil