Ascent of Kings Review Round-up

Some reviews of Ascent of Kings have popped up around the internet over the past week. You can check out what they had to say from the links below:

Chet & Jon
Indie Gamer Chick
IndieGames.com
CGR Undertow
gameding

Working on Playstation Mobile

Yep, that's my game intro screen running on the Vita. I have spent the past couple of days porting my 2D game engine to PlayStation Mobile.

The PSM platform is C# based, so it was a really good match for me. Even though PlayStation Mobile uses MonoDevelop and I use Visual Studio, the two environments are assembly-compatible and I can still do the bulk of my work in Visual Studio and mostly just use MonoDevelop as a means for final deployment.

The hardest part of the process was getting the drawing code working. PSM provides a pretty low-level graphics interface, so it took me a while before I had my first triangle onscreen. When working with a new graphics api, the first triangle is always the hardest. There are a million different reasons (matrix transforms, shader issues, culling, bad vertices, bad indices, etc.) why your triangle won't render. Once you can see something, you can fix what is wrong. When you can't see anything you don't have much to go on.

After getting my first rendering working, the next step was sprite batching. PlayStation Mobile provides a batching implementation, but it is integrated with a higher-level scene interface. That is a great help to people who are doing new game development, but for someone like me who already has a game engine that I'm trying to put on top of PSM it doesn't work. Fortunately, I've written sprite batching systems before, so it wasn't too much of an obstacle.

Then it was off to the races. Input was easy. I've already integrated with multiple touch systems, so PSM touch input went in smoothly. I haven't done buttons/thumbsticks yet, but I don't anticipate too much of a challenge. Sound was easy - the PSM audio interface is clean and exactly what you look for.

I started working with PSM yesterday, and I had my first game (my ubiquitous test game "Sokoban for Beginners") running in the simulator this afternoon. With that validation, I pulled the trigger on a PlayStation Mobile publishing license. After a few hours and a bit of messing about with publishing and application keys, I had a game running perfectly on my Vita.

Look for some "Ascent of Kings", "Quiet, Please!", "Kung Fu FIGHT!" - and just maybe a bit of "Tunescape" and more speculatively some "Block Zombies" on a PlayStation Mobile device near you.

Ascent of Kings Update

"Ascent of Kings", the game I made for Ludum Dare #20, is now back on the top of my development stack. I've been making great progress and have added a bunch of new content. I'm hoping to finish things up over the next couple of weeks.

Since I snubbed the Xbox with "Quiet Christmas" (I ran out of time before the holiday) my current plan is to release Ascent there first, with mobile versions soon thereafter.

Quiet Christmas

I came up with the idea of making a Christmas episode of "Quiet, Please!" about a week ago, and I've been madly working on it ever since. It is almost finished now, and I should be submitting it to the various mobile app stores soon.

Maybe an Xbox version, too, if I can think of a good way to make a trial work.

"Quiet, Please!" Released for iOS

"Quiet, Please!" is now available as a universal app for iPhone/iPad. You can find it here in the App Store.

Unfortunately, because Apple's policies prevent me from doing a free trial of the game, only a paid version ($.99) is available. I plan to do a web-playable trial at some point to work around this limitation.

iOS Releases Coming Soon

The lack of apple dev hardware is the only thing that has been holding me back from being able to develop for iOS. I finally took the plunge last week and bought the cheapest refurbished MacBook Pro and iPod Touch 4 that I could.

Given that I was already using Unity to deploy for Android, the additional work to get it running for iOS was pretty minimal. It took me a while to get used to working on a Mac for the first time in about 20 years, though. The verdict - I'm not a big fan. Usability is very much in the eye of the beholder...

Anyway, I've got my games mostly up and running. Ironically, it took me more time to figure out how to publish to the App Store than it did to get iOS ports running in the first place. I've got that pretty much sorted out now though, so expect to see my games on an iOS device near you soon.

"Quiet, Please!" Out Now For Android

I am happy to announce that "Quiet, Please!" is now available for Android devices.

You can get it from either the Amazon Appstore (US only) or Google Play.

Here are the marketplace links:

Amazon: Full Game or Free Trial

Google Play: Full Game or Free Trial

I also made a little trailer for the game. It is a mashup of clips from youtube videos people posted of themselves playing the Xbox version. The Android version is identical except for the addition of touch controls.