“Yay, it’s finally here! Check out Galcon Fusion today! We’ve got a free demo and it works on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Steam! It features some crazy nice hi-res graphics and soundtrack. And epic multi-player battles like you’ve never seen ‘em before! Have fun!” <– marketing blurb

Okay, for some dev thoughts. Man, it was a long week! Adding the “demo” feature to the build was a ton of work. And then doing all that other ’stuff’ that sort of comes up. I think the one serious lesson I’ve learned in this whole process is that beta-testers are awesome.

Really awesome. I had about 50 people who I passed out 10 builds of the game to over the past 3 months. Some of these people put in several dozen hours of play time. All this was a huge help for me, as this was my first desktop ‘3D’ game, so I had a lot of learning to do in terms of graphics capabilities. As in, I was able to get the game to run on my computer which is a pretty nice MacBook Pro .. but not everyone else’s.

The beta tester feedback was huge, I was able to get the game running on old PPC macs, various linux netbooks, and who knows what else .. as long as it had a somewhat reasonable 3D card. I changed the memory requirement for graphics from about 200 MB down to < 64MB. Without any noticeable reduction in graphics quality even in HD video modes. In fact, that reduction changed the loading time on my computer from 5-8 seconds down to about 1 second

Anyway, I think I’m going to take a nap. It’s been a long week, and I really appreciate everyone who helped me get this game put together. Give it a whirl, and thank the beta testers!

Hey,

So, I’m finally announcing Galcon Fusion to the world.  Fusion is a port of iPhone Galcon + Galcon Labs to the desktop.  This time with hi-def graphics and a full interactive soundtrack.  It’s going to be coming to Steam and direct on my website on Feb. 11.  Users who supported me when I was first starting (as in, you bought desktop Galcon), your license is compatible with Galcon Fusion.  Thanks!

There are a few technical things that were challenging, dealing with endiannes for my network code, supporting fullscreen vs widescreen resolutions, and supporting a wide range of resolutions (from 800×600 all the way up to 1920×1080.)  To make it short, here are a few conclusions: best to support endiannes from the start, fullscreen vs widescreen is a pain, and baking lots of image data into your binary is a pain because it requires a ton of recompilation.  Oh, and installing VC++2008 is waaaay easier than installing mingw32, but keeping code working on both takes more effort.

I think my biggest conclusion comes along with this announcement, is that doing “secret dev” work isn’t really that sensible.  If you look at that last paragraph, there are a ton of issues I could have documented in my blog that I didn’t because I was all being secretive.  And hey, since I was so mum on this, nobody has heard about it until today.  I guess there might be some benefits to this (??) but I can’t think of what they are.  I think blogging about my progress is a good way for me to be able to see what I’m doing and not get lost in the haze myself.  My recent article on VC++2008 is a great example of something I’m going to get quite a bit of value out of just for my own reference.

One big different thing I’m doing with this project is my wife Nan is doing the PR for it.  She’s contacting all the reviewers, the general press, the newsletters, the announcement blog, twitter, and everything.  I’m trying to take a more dev-only role in the announcement.  This is nice, because I’m not very good on PR.  I try .. but I really don’t do it as well as I want to, largely because on a launch of a product I’ve always got about 50 technical things I’m trying to do along with the PR!

-Phil

Two weeks ago, the price of Galcon @ $3, Labs @ $2, and Lite @ $0.  This past week, I changed them to Galcon @ $5, Labs @ $3, and Lite at $1.  I wanted to see how this would impact revenue.

…

And the big surprise is …

…

It didn’t!  Much.  Best I can calculate, revenue was down 10%.  The most dramatic change was Lite, which went from $0 revenue to a few bucks a day, and from a few hundred downloads to almost none.  So this week I’m changing the prices back to Galcon @ $3, Labs at $1, and Lite at $0.  What have we learned?  It seems that people who want a free game want a free game, and people who are willing to buy would rather spend less.  Since I’m not going to run this sale for a month I can’t say for sure what the long term effects will be, but I’d guess word-of-mouth would be reduced as the pool of Lite players shrunk.  Who knows

Cheers!
-Phil

Hey,

So Galcon Labs is now available on the App Store! Check it out

Anyway, I just got back from 360iDev where I gave a talk about Galcon Multiplayer.  The two main points made in the talk were about managing community, and test driven development.  With so many devs talking about App rejections and other problems, I wanted to make sure the app was approved first time through the system.  And it was, in an excellent 7 day turn-around  So a real big thanks to all the folks out there who pressed me into reading the Kent Beck book on the subject!

-Phil

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

(I should have posted this earlier, sorry blog-reading folks!)

Rev up your design skills and make a Galcon T-Shirt!  Top entries win a FREE T-Shirt and the admiration of the world!!

http://www.galcon.com/misc/compo.php?cid=2

Here’s some graphics, logos, fonts, and other goodies from the new iPhone Galcon that you can use on your T-Shirt:

http://www.galcon.com/stuff/tshirt2.zip

Contest Starts: August 25th
Contest Ends: September 8th
Voting Ends: September 14th

Fine print: T-Shirts must be family friendly.  Unfriendly t-shirts will be DQ’d and will incur the wrath of Nanno.  Upload a hi-res (300dpi) image, if trouble ensues, use the Contact form and bug Phil.  T-shirt designs become property of Galcon.com.

Preview entries here: http://www.galcon.com/misc/compo.php?action=ipreview&cid=2

Have fun!
-Phil

So .. Yeah.  Check it out.  Realtime multi-player game .. in flash!

So on a more technical note .. The game involves quite a number of technologies!

• AS3 – of course – for the Flash client itself
• C++ – for the server
• PHP – for the web API and rankings system
• python – for the bots

If I did the project over, I’d probably do the server in python as well.  But all in all the project went pretty well.  After things were done, it only took me a morning to write up the python client.  There’s a very good chance I’ll release that code in a few weeks and let people try making bots for the game.

Anyway – have fun checking it out.  I’m a bit wiped out from wrapping all this up, so I’ll try and post some more interesting details later!

-Phil

So .. who thinks flash + Galcon = win?  I don’t know yet, but I’m giving it a try.  I’m not actually developing the flash version.  An awesome friend of mine has been doing the time on this one.  Though I’ll probably be doing the LAMP end of the deal.  At present the game is non-networked, but we’re been considering the possibilities.  A TCP/IP edition of the game could be made, but I wonder if that would end in tears.  TCP/IP isn’t ideal for gamedev IMO.  Flash doesn’t support UDP as-of-yet.

This isn’t the first time Galcon has reared it’s head from within the browser window.  (See my earlier blog posts …)

I haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to do with this once it’s completed.  Probably a few things.  Throwing it on facebook is an obvious one.  Throwing it on galcon.com is another one.  Maybe mixing it with something like The Maze of Madness is another one.  Or maybe something else!

One idea that I have that would be really cool would be if the tinypy vm were ported to ActionScript using Alchemy* .. and then somehow people would be able to script Galcon on the web and share it with their friends..

*I don’t know if you caught that .. but I think my weekend just got booked

I’ve just created a couple twitter accounts for myself!

philhassey is going to be my dev twitter account, where I might be posting real-time stuff about game-dev, python, and whatever else comes up.  Should be interesting if I get into it

galcon is my twitter account for news about Galcon, galcon.com, new games, etc.

P.S. Galcon for the iphone is an IGF Mobile finalist!  Check it out!

Hey,

The Galcon Prize contest is finally over!  Congrats to mewo for his great entry!  You can get the results package here.  This includes all entries and all datasets and all results.  It also includes some explanation on how I judged the entries, as well as the script I used to aggregate the results from the various dataset runs I did.

Now that the compo is over I’d love it if everyone who competed wrote up some postmortems about their entries, what strategies they used, and how they came up with the solutions they did.  Please post those in the forums.

Thanks again!  I’m going to try and get this added to the Galcon-iPhone rankings system ASAP

-Phil