2 weekends of snowboarding followed by a relaxed weekend full of programming. That’s where I’ve been for the past however many weeks. At some point before the programming-filled weekend, my iCade arrived in the mail. A huge thanks to Bruce for hooking me up with it. As soon as I got it assembled I immediately tested it out to make sure everything was working properly. League of Evil 2 was the test subject and it performed flawlessly. It’s a great, hardcore, Super Meat Boy like platformer that you should pick up if you don’t have.

The reason Bruce sent me the iCade was so that I could program our game to use it. After some googling, I stumbled upon this wonderful tutorial on how to do just that. It took me all of 10 minutes to get it working properly and it works great! I’m thinking I might make some iCade specific controls, such as having to press a button to shoot instead of the player auto-shooting. It just seems like it would be more fun like that. I believe Velocispider does that for the iCade. I’ll have to tinker with that when more of the gameplay is programmed. For now, it’ll suffice.

After Bruce checked out the game on the iCade, he came up with a pretty cool idea on how to make the combat more fun. This more fun version would involve 2 key changes. The construction of each “chunk” would have 3 “tiers”. You can see below how there are 3 different height levels, whereas before the level design was more free form. Disregard the FPS counter. My computer is old and can barely run Flash, let alone the iOS simulator.

The second major change is the way the enemies appear. Instead of appearing randomly throughout the environment, a dropship now flies in and flies along one of the tiers. The dropship spits out enemies like nobody’s business and will continue to do so until the player destroys it. Once the dropship is destroyed, another appears at a different tier and the player must again fend off enemies while also trying to destroy the dropship.

Next steps! I’ve already added explosions to the enemies and dropships. However, the dropship needs a much more epic explosion. So when it “dies”, it’s going to have smaller explosions all over it as it crashes to the ground. And when it hits the ground, the entire dropship will explode. I’m also thinking a screen shake effect would work nicely. We’ll see how it looks.

The rate at which enemies pour out of the dropships, how quickly another dropship appears after one has been destroyed, and how many dropships are attacking at once are all things that need to increase in difficulty as the player runs farther. These variables will basically define how long an average session will last. I have a feeling it will require the most amount of tweaking.

That’s all for now. Back to the wonderful world of game development!