Game Development

So a lot has happened since my last post. Even before EGX I was already in talks with Microsoft for becoming a Xbox One developer and maybe get Quest of Dungeons to XO. I was extremely happy when they accepted both, so right now I’m working on porting the game to Xbox One. I don’t think this would have been possible without all the gamers that have played and are still playing the game, that’s what brought all the positive vibe surrounding the game, so a big thank you....

During Gamedev Camp 2014 in Lisbon I got to talk a bit about the development of Quest of Dungeons, and some of the problems that I had making it while still having a day job. Most indie developers don’t have enough money to work on their game full-time so they have to keep a day job in order to support it, so this is a bit of my own personal experience doing it, some of the problems that came with it and mistakes I did during the development and launch of the game....

Quest of Dungeons was made in C++ and OpenGL, it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux in native code. iOS is not a problem either since I just have a thin layer of Objective-C to access some functionality like touch, accelerometer, etc and the rest of the code just runs. I never made anything for Android, in fact I never even used one before this, so when I decided to port QoD to it, I had no idea of what to expect....

I’m pleased to announce that Quest of Dungeons is finally out. I didn’t get to make a post on day one, and it’s been nearly two weeks since launch but these past 2 weeks have been one crazy roller coaster. It was released on March 25th, for PC, Mac and iOS. You can get it on Steam, iOS App Store or directly from the site via Humble Store. I released all platforms on the same day, which was something I always wanted to try, and I have to say that it didn’t went as bad as I thought....

A lot of stuff happened since my last post. I launched a GreenLight campaign for Quest of Dungeons on Jan 16 and it got greenlit on Jan 21, votes were coming in like crazy, I did not see that coming. Some sites posted about the game, like TouchArcade and PocketGamer, which was also very cool. So right now I’m working like crazy to implement everything from steam onto the game (Mac/PC) but I still don’t have an exact launch date, although the iOS version is 90% certain to come out this February....

I’ve been working on Quest of Dungeons and I’m nearing Gold. I’m attempting to release every version on the same day, which I never managed to do before but would like to do this time. I have both the iOS, Mac and Windows version very stable, the Mac and iOS apps were already accepted by the App Store, for Windows I’m still trying to wrap up the process of getting it on a digital store too....

I’ve been working on OpenGL for some time now and one of the things that some people have asked me is how to do that 2d camera with zoom and rotation in a similar way to a post regarding a XNA 2D Camera I wrote some time ago. Some of them where just subtracting the camera position to all objects drawn, but that’s just ‘ugly’ in my opinion. And the advantage of using a more complicated (at first glance) system as a matrix is that you can easily apply more complicated operations like scaling and rotation....

Hey guys, Decided to spend the afternoon making Puwang run on Windows, really don’t know why but I did it. Took me around 3 hours, mostly because I had to add Mouse and Keyboard controls. I also added support for an Xbox360 controller to control the game, it’s very cool. You can’t use the gamepad to control menus though, sorry. I decided to release it for Windows for free, because the game isn’t exactly designed for PC’s, has a smaller resolution, runs on window mode only and doesn’t have Leaderboards....

Around two years ago I made a tutorial for XNA in which you could render 2D games scaled to the current window resolution with proper letter-boxes or pillar-boxes. As many know since then I moved to C++ and OpenGL, and ocasionally people ask me “Can you still do that independent resolution thing?”, and yes it’s perfectly possible. I’ve used this on all latest Windows, Mac and iOS, in case you are wondering....

Almost 4 months without a post, this is the first time it happened. It was nothing in particular that held me back, I just kept postponing and, to be honest, I only write posts when I have something I really want to write about. Before going into the rest of the post, I would like to ask people to update my feed url on your RSS readers. I always used Feedburner to redirect feeds, and with Google Reader going down I decided to start switching, so in your new FeedsReader use this address: (</feed/>)....

Yay, so a milestone was reached with this project. If you follow my blog you probably already know that between small projects like Puwang and other mandatory freelancing stuff my big project in hands for these past few months is Dary’s Legend, a roguelike. Around two months ago I coincidentally bumped into a conversation about funding and the whole kickstarter thing where one of Desura staff members was participating, and while talking about my own problems funding a whole game out of my pocket he mentioned that he knew the game and that Desura’s Alpha Funding might be a good place for it....

So tonight, while I was sleeping, Puwang was approved and released on the App Store. I made a small gameplay video where, directly from the screen. and there’s another one, offscreen, on a real iDevice here Spread the word, buy it if you like =) App Store Link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/puwang/id566365237?l=en&mt=8