Well we have finally wrapped up development on Touch KO! The last few weeks have been hectic as we had some last-minute requirements sort of indirectly imposed on us by Apple, but everything is wrapped up and sent off to Chillingo.
One of my next projects is a book on the Maya Python API for Morgan Kaufmann (publisher of David Gould’s Complete Maya Programming texts). Ryan Trowbridge and I will be working on this together over the next year, so it is sure to be fun and exciting. We have a pretty comprehensive plan for what the book will cover, but please do feel free to contact either of us if there are specific things you would like to see!
This last week the game has really made some pretty dramatic changes! In addition to getting more of Michael’s graphic design work in place, we have lighting working on the characters now! This is actually a really taxing process for a platform like the iPhone (not the rendering so much as skinning something with normals). That’s why you see so many games with unlighted characters. However, thanks to the genius of Renaldas Zioma and the rest of the iPhone team over at Unity Technologies, we’ve gotten some massive engine performance increases. One of these is assembly-level skinning using the ARM’s VFP coprocessor. Anyway, I’ll stop ranting and just let you take a look at the screenshots!
We’re coming down the home stretch right now with Touch KO as well as with Crane Wars. Have you ever crunched on games? Not fun. Now try crunching on two games simultaneously. OK well me crunching on my two games at once is probably still not as bad as crunching on one game for E3 at a company like Sony or Activision (you guys know who you are and have my deepest sympathies).
Anyhow, we hooked up with Michael Heald, the awesome graphic designer who did the Blurst website, to have him take a pass at the graphic design elements in Touch KO. He has done a marvelous job and we have started getting some of his work into the game. Just a couple more weeks now and we should be ready to submit! Here are a couple of new shots to share!
OK so I have been super busy lately, as evidenced by the frequency of posts since GDC. Sorry world! Touch KO is wrapping up in a matter of weeks, as is our new Blurst game, Crane Wars. Ben did a little walk through today to show the internets what we’ve been doing. Around 2:00 to 7:00 I show a face rig I did up Monday for one of the characters. It is entirely bone-based. Take a look!
How do you read individual elements in an MMatrix object in Maya Python? This is a problem that Ryan and I ran into about a year or so ago. Ryan brought this to the attention of an Autodesk developer at the time, who must have been misinformed and told us that it should work like C++. However, the following does not work:
# Create an MMatrix and print its first index
import maya.OpenMaya as OM
mat = OM.MMatrix()
print mat.matrix[0][0]
I was at Autodesk’s Maya API training last week during the GDC, and one of the trainers had run into this problem again. Unfortunately, she had also been misinformed by one of the developers as to how this should work. Read the rest of this entry »
I have been out of commission for awhile, working on some new Blurst projects and gearing up for GDC. Now that I am back and a little more in the clear, I can get back to posting.
For any of you who may not have been keeping an eye on some of the mobile sites, a press release went out last Wednesday that Chillingo will be publishing Touch KO. As part of the press release, I also put this new trailer out. Check it out!
While we have been finishing up Blush at Flashbang, I have still been working on boxing when I have been able. Now that Blush is done, I wanted to post up another update, so I just wrapped up a new video today showing some more progress. I have been working on adding a front-end menu with a career mode that includes stat tracking, character customization, and more. Also, my brother, Matt, has jumped on to develop the opponent AI.
As a final (important) note, the game now has a name: Touch KO! Everyone out there thought Flashbang people came up with game names using a dartboard. In actuality Brandon Boyer, who covered the game last time I put up a video, called the game Touch KO, so that is what I am calling it now too. Thanks for the unwitting suggestion!
I have been pretty quiet for awhile, as things have become busier leading up to GDC. In addition to working on some things for that, and a lot of Touch KO work going on (I should have a new video or some screens soon), we have been wrapping up our first game of 2009 at Flashbang. It is called Blush and is also the first game that we completed in a true 8-week cycle (meaning 8 weeks of calendar time rather than just production time).
At any rate, you can play Blush free on Blurst, so give it a whirl. Please note that we have had some compatibility with DirectX 10, so you could have issues if you are running Windows Vista with an nVidia 8x series card. We finally managed to put together a machine here at the office that can reproduce the problem, so there should be a fix soon. If you see a blank screen when the game starts up though, try pressing Q to drop into medium quality and it should work. If you have any problems, please let me know here or post a comment on the Blurst blog.
I had a chance to work a bit on the environment for boxing today and thought I would share some screen captures of the progress. In other news we are going to LA this weekend for the Flower launch party! I think Flower looks great and I can’t wait!
At the Unite Conference last year I started working on a hobby project: a boxing game for the iPhone. I have basically just had weekends to work on it (minus the time spent on working on video tutorials and free plugins) so it has taken a little while. At any rate, I have enough done now to post up a short preview video. I am hoping to have enough done with the game to do a release of some kind within the next couple months, so keep your eyes peeled!
