Vector Star Brawl and Endless Space Shooter updated

New ship landed

I just updated both games. Endless Space Shooter was still 32bit so it wasn’t available on the App Store. I complied with the latest SDK and it’s working fine on new iOS versions.

Vector Star Brawl was 64bits and has been working pretty well all these years but there were a couple of annoying problems I’ve wanted to fix for a long time, so I finally did it:

  • It was impossible to take off from the planet in Challenge mode. In the last update I made the planet’s gravity force stronger for more dramatic gravity effects (bending bullet paths, possibility of entering orbit…) but this had the side effect that the gravity was too strong for the engine power of the ships. I’ve increased the power to all ships and now it’s fine again. Also this makes the game more responsive and faster to play.
  • I developed the game on an iPad, only tried it at the time on an older iPhone, but if you played the game on a newer iPhone with a longer screen, the zoom calculation that makes sure ships are always visible was off. The ships would often disappear out of the sides of the screen. This has now been corrected.

I’ve been trying the game out these last few days and still think it’s my best game, and still fun, especially considering the fact that it runs now much better than in the older device it was developed on. As the graphics were done without GPU acceleration.

Endless Space Shooter now supports 2 players and has no ads

Endless Space Shooter has just been updated. The game now supports 2 players, each playing on one side of the screen, with the second ship flying inverted, oriented towards the second player.

A new leader board has been added for 2 player games which are cooperative.

I’ve also added a few fx so that bullets explode into tiny bits when they hit something. This should make it easier to see when you’ve been hit and looks cool.

Download here

Endless Space Shooter gets iCade support!

The update is out. The game can now be played with the iCade in two modes:

– Regular: Just like playing with the touch screen: Press Up to go up and release to go down. Any other button to accelerate.

– iCade Special: Activate the iCade button to play an iCade-only mode where you can control the angle of the ship by using the up/down stick, giving you total control over the ship. I’ve created special leaderboards for this mode as it makes the game easier, but it does change it a lot, feeling more like a shoot’em up. It’s fun!

Update for Star Brawl released: iCade and GameDock support.

Update: The update has been released. if you’ve got an iCade, go get it now!

I’ve released my latest update to Vector Star Brawl. The update adds iCade support for one or two players (and 2 player games work really well this way!).

I’ve also added full support for the upcoming Gamedock controllers, so the game also plays on an external display.

Note that in order to use an external display you need to have an external controller (iCade or Gamedock). At this time, touch controls are disabled when using an external display.

Vector Star Brawl Updated: Resolution switch added

Screenshot at 1/3 reslution with antialias. 1/2 should work fine in most cases

 

The update to Vector Star Brawl was accepted today. It corrects some problems with GameCenter achievements and adds an important feature, especially if your iOS device is older: an option to lower the screen resolution.

Continue reading “Vector Star Brawl Updated: Resolution switch added”

Why Vector Star Brawl? A little bit about the game…

Now that my first iOS game is done, I wanted to explain a bit about why I decided to make this game and why I made it the way it is. Just to explain a little bit about what went on before and during development…

I’m a big fan of retro gaming (it wasn’t called retro when I was a kid, of course) mostly because those are the kind of games that were done at a time where graphics weren’t too powerful and so you had to focus on gameplay. I’m specially fond of vector games such as Asteroids, and many of the other games of its time… The technology behind those games was very different and used monitors that worked in a totally different way, actually drawing all the lines instead of drawing a raster image with horizontal lines like normal TVs do. This meant that there weren’t any pixelation problems. The resolution was perfect… Continue reading “Why Vector Star Brawl? A little bit about the game…”