Viridian Games

Guess who’s an official Apple Developer now?

Go on, guess.

I’ll wait.

But that’s not all. Oh, no, that’s not all.

I’m employed, and have been for the last two weeks. I’m working for a company called Warped Productions, making (of all things) iPhone games.

It’s currently a temporary gig with no benefits, but I have every intent of proving that they cannot get along without me.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you guys earlier, but I wanted to clear with my bosses how much I can talk about (which boils down to, yes, talk about Warped and talk about our development process but give no details of the games we’re making).

Now, this is not going to affect Inaria one bit – I made absolutely sure of that before I signed on. Inaria will still be published, and it will be published under the “Viridian Games” label. (Label! Tee hee!) But after Inaria is done I won’t be making any more of my own iPhone games while I’m working for Warped.

And here I have to give huge thanks to Ryan Clark, who convinced me to port Inaria to the iPhone and even lent me a Mac Mini so I could do so. If he hadn’t pushed me in this direction, I wouldn’t have gotten this job.

So Ryan, thank you. Bottom of my heart, man.

Today I registered my sole proprietorship, which means I can now do business using the name “Viridian Games”. Before this it was just the name of my blog, but now it’s the name of my company – something I rarely thought I’d ever have…

Tomorrow I’ll pay the $100 to become an official Apple developer and fax them the registration form. Then I’ll be ready to submit Inaria when it’s done.

I will tell you what I’ve learned over the last eight months – never have a single revenue stream. I wish I’d learned this when I was twenty.

After two stupendous days of work, it’s really starting to come together. Not only do combat, inventory, talking and buying and selling work (along with the graphical enhancements) but I just got MP3 support in for music.

Could this be the week? We’ll see.

Okay! One of the reasons I haven’t been posting regular updates about Inaria iPhone is because it’s been changing SO FAST. But this was just too good to pass up.

This update is being guest-written by my friend/graphics programmer/tester, Ryan Clark. I’d tried to solve two problems at once by putting the towns directly on the overworld instead of having separate maps for them. I thought I was Clever Dan…until Ryan got a hold of the new maps. Take it away, Ryan!

All subsystems are now working – indeed it is possible to play the game all the way from beginning to end. You can even save and load!

But as a lot of people suspected, the vertical layout just looked and felt bad. So I’m trying to get a horizontal layout going. Here’s a current screenshot:

I wish I could finish this project faster, but lots and lots of extraneous stuff has conspired to keep me away from it. I am hoping to have the landscape version complete by the end of this week, then spend next week adding the new content and making the demo…and then hopefully I’ll be done.

And now we’re on the device – or at least the simulator.

The game loop is now running on the iPhone Simulator on the Mac. All drawing is now being done by OpenGL instead of SDL (which has been completely purged from the project). I haven’t implemented the new input controls so you can’t actually play the game yet, but there it is. I expect quick progress from here.

Getting there.

Frankly, this code base is just awful to work with. Drawing in the input function, magic numbers everywhere – who wrote this crap?!

Oh, right.

On the upside, I have now made sure that all tiles in the game are either public domain or ones I’ve created myself, so I’m not worried about infringing anyone else’s copyright.

I think the way I’m going to do the interface is that you’ll play it GameBoy style, with a virtual D-pad under your left thumb (and I’ve recently discovered that virtual D-pads actually work really well on the iPhone) and the four icons for Fight, Look, Pick Up, and Talk under your right thumb, with your stats in the middle. Above that will be the area for the game strings (I’ll switch to a smaller font so I can get more text in there) and above that, of course, will be the map view. Since I don’t actually have an iPhone, can anyone out there who does tell me if this sounds viable?

Jules Winnfield: So tell me again about the disc images.

Vincent Vega: What do you want to know?

JW: They’re legal there, right?

VV: Hell, yeah, they’re legal. When you download an application you’ll usually get it as a disc image. And I’m talking about perfectly legit applications, not the Bittorrent stuff. You can write these images to a disc to make an installer, or you can just mount the thing straight on the Mac as a new volume and install it from there.

JW: They don’t consider disc mounting software a tool of piracy?

VV: Naw, man, it’s built into the operating system.

JW: Oh, I’m goin’! I’m definitely going.

VV: I know baby! You’d dig it the most. But you know what the funniest thing about Maccyland is?

JW: What?

VV: It’s the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there that they got here, but it’s just – it’s just there it’s a little different.

JW: Example?

VV: All right. When you launch a program – sorry, an “application” – from the dock, you don’t get another icon telling you that program is running. The icon on the dock just gets a white dot next to it. And if a program on the dock needs your attention, it doesn’t pop up and grab the focus. It just bounces the icon and waits for you to click on it. Also, windows in Maccyland are double-buffered, so you’ll never see the awful tearing that you see so often over here.

JW: That sounds cool. Anything you didn’t like?

VV: The one menu bar thing screwed me up for a long time. Since the menu bar is not connected to the app it represents, you can’t give an app the focus by clicking the menu bar. You have to click the app’s window or its icon on the dock. Plus, Ctrl-V doesn’t paste.

JW: What?

VV: I’m serious. Ctrl-C doesn’t copy and Ctrl-V doesn’t paste. Instead it pages down in your text file. That’s doubly bad because it looks like it did something when all it did was lose you your paste location. Plus the Home and End keys jump you to the beginning and end of the current document, instead of the current line.

JW: Aw, man. I usually copy a URL in my browser’s location bar by hitting Home, holding down Shift, and then hitting End to select the whole URL. How’m I supposed to do it now?

VV: Triple-click.

JW: What?

VV: You triple-click the URL. That’ll select the whole thing.

JW: Seriously?

VV: Yeah, man, that shit even works over here – at least in Firefox.

JW: Triple-click. Man, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a triple click. Does it work in Opera too?

VV: I dunno, man, I didn’t go into Linuxville.

Because two people demanded it!

Yes, it’s true. My new current project is Inaria for the iPhone. I was greatly encouraged to do this by my good friend Ryan Clark, who has just been incredibly supportive during my entire time of trouble. He even lent me the Mac that I’ll be doing the development on. (And that I’m currently posting from.)

Porting it to the iPhone probably won’t take long; the hardest part will be making sure the new interface works well (and finding some music and sound effects I can use with the game). I will be adding some extra content – new maps and a much better leveling system. I hope to have the project done by the end of May.

And now I finally have something to blog about on this blog again!

Google “iPhone RPG” and this is the first link you get.

Take a look at this screenshot:

Do those tiles look…familiar to you?

Now, I’m not saying he stole them from me. He obviously got them from the same site I did. And the tiles are listed as being in the public domain.

But it does chafe a bit seeing someone charge $4.99 for a game that, in all my horribly egotistical honesty, probably isn’t as good as mine.

I really need to start making some games I can sell.