Tyrus: posts

Super Robot Space Fight! has been submitted to OUYA for approval! Given that the OUYA’s official launch date is… tomorrow, the reviewers are probably pretty busy and it may take a few extra days to get through the system. Hopefully you’ll be able to jump around on planetoids and laser your friends in the face within a week or so.

I got some friends to take the 4 player versus and co-op modes through their paces this weekend and came away with a page full of improvements and bug fixes to make. The most important of those was to take advantage of the latest OUYA Unity plugin’s new control input. It’s much faster than it was before now.

This list is twenty items long… that was a tiring weekend.

OUYA CREATE Game Jam, Day 11:

Submitted! I think. I got a screen saying “We’re honored you took the time to enter.” after trying a couple times and watching a progress bar complete. Some sort of further confirmation would make me feel a bit better, but I’m still super pumped to be done!

Today I just worked on the menu screens and did a couple test matches of the game with my wife before filming about 6 minutes of gameplay for the trailer. I cut it down at the points where the music loops so it’s nice and smoove :P.

I did a lot of work on this, but it would’ve been a lot harder to make something this nice without folks like Kevin MacLeod, Arruku, and Jorick Bronius putting out quality audio and icon work with friendly CC Attribution 3.0 licenses. Nymphont’s stylish fonts were also available with a very reasonable commercial license.

Working on an in-progress console was a challenging and exciting thing; being able to talk with the developers behind the OUYA Unity package directly helped a ton. Those guys are doing some good work, and it feels like the community’s helping a lot with the testing during this jam.

The amount that I bugged my wife the last couple days was somewhat terrible. “Aaangie can you play the game for another video?”  "Angie I need someone else to move the other player to make sure the AI chase code is improved now,“ and there she is studying for her math doctorate comprehensive exams. Her feedback and help were excellent. This game would have been notably worse without it. It also would have been a lot less fun to test by myself :P.

OUYA CREATE Game Jam, Day 10:

The game is done! I’ll be prettying up the start menu tomorrow along with some last minute testing, but that’s probably about it. I’ve gotta leave myself lots of time to make the required trailer tomorrow!

The main additions today were two floating UFOs you need to attack and kill to win the game.

My wife and I tested out the game quite a bit. Some really good AI improvements were made as a result, and one pretty nasty bug where the next round would run crazy slow some times.

The desktop I’m working on was out of commission for a bit today while I installed new video drivers on it to fix some pretty nasty crash issues I was running into, so I recorded about 36 different sounds for the game today. Most of the sounds were just me saying goofy lines for the robots. There are hit sounds, but there actually aren’t weapon sounds still because of how much shootin’ is generally going on in the game. You wouldn’t be able to hear anything else! The hit sounds give you most of the feedback you’d need, anyhow.

When I first imported the sounds into my Unity game and sent it to the OUYA, everything tanked and ran terribly slow. Fortunately, setting them all to decompress on load saved my arse. I’m still not sure if the original “compressed in memory” setting is really that much slower on this device. It could just be that decompressing all of that audio finally got the Android OS to give me a bigger chunk of memory to play with :P.

OUYA CREATE Game Jam, Day 9:

Rockets and lasers and respawning enemies, hell yeah! You can buy weapons with the coins dropped by your enemies now, which is pretty fun. The rocket’s probably too good at killing massive amounts of enemies at once… I’ll either make it more expensive or just shrink the radius.

At this point I’ve got something I’d be pretty comfortable submitting. There are unfortunate bugs in the sound when the player goes to the home screen and back in Unity on an OUYA, though, and I haven’t found a way to test four player yet. I may warn people off that but leave it there for giggles any way.

I’m definitely glad I have one more day to go. It’s not even possible to win yet! That could take a while.

Also, I’ve decided to call this game Super Robot Space Fight. I think. I alternate between liking the name and hating it. That probably means it’s good.

OUYA CREATE Game Jam, Day 8:

Welp, it’s late. I’ll let that todo list speak for itself! And this video from earlier today.

Here’s a video of my wife and I playing my OUYA CREATE jam entry together on the dev OUYA! It runs great, although the anti-aliasing isn’t quite as pretty as it is on my PC.