BlockAssault: Now Available

My first iPhone game is now live in the App Store. Get it here for free.

For details, see here.

BlockAssault

UPDATE: It’s now available for free. Click here.

Coming soon, my first iPhone game.

It’s an old-school block breaker style game, but takes advantage of the powerful iPhone hardware to add some new features.

It includes:

• Realistic physics
• Power ups that let real world gravity affect the in-game physics
• Moving blocks

Still Alive

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything on here. But then it has been a long time since I’ve done any work on home projects.

I have finally got back to making some changes on my 3D Breakout project. It now has per-pixel lighting through using shaders with the ball acting as a point light source.

This first image shows a basic per-pixel lighting effect.

This second image shows attenuated lighting where the distance from the light source affects the brightness of the light falling on the surface.

Some more Breakout progress

I have now finished the refactoring I mentioned in my previous post. This has immediately led to a drastic decrease in memory and CPU usage.

Just as importantly, it has made it easier to make changes to the appearance of the game. Adding the lives and level display was very straight forward and improving the look of it is simply a matter of getting some better art assets. I’ve also added some indicators on the walls that make it easier to see where the paddle is.

Breakout Progress

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my game project (or anything), but I am still managing to get bits of work done on it now and then.

I’ve added displaying of the level and number of lives, although it’s only with text so far and no fancy images.

I am currently working on refactoring the rendering system as the original drawing code had some problems. I spotted this when I tried increasing the number of bricks in the level and watched the frame-rate plummet as a result. By doing a quick test of commenting out first the drawing and then the physics code I was able to work out that the drawing code was responsible for the slow down.

Technical details below the fold if you’re interested in how I’m fixing this.

Picture sorter tool

When I recently got asked if there was anyway to make the Windows file manager (a.k.a. explorer) permanently remember the re-ordering of files in a folder, I knew the answer was “no, you have to rename all the files”.

Although I suspect there are tools out there for doing this already, I decided to have a go at making my own version. It only works with jpg images as the original question was about sorting pictures that came from 2 different cameras and so had different naming systems.

The lack of updates

It might look like I’ve abandoned this blog, but I’ve just been very busy over the past few weeks.

I started a new job a couple of weeks ago, after a few weeks of forced holiday due to my former employer going into liquidation. I have had to hit the ground running in the new job and am learning a lot of new stuff as I come to need it.

Coupled with putting some big efforts into learning Objective-C and iPhone development in my spare time, I haven’t really had time for much else. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find more time as I get back into a schedule with work and home time.

Ray Tracer

Since most programmers should write a ray tracer, I decided that I better have a go at it. Using this series of articles as a guide to the maths I set about writing my own ray tracer using C++.

And here is the first image it produced.It just supported direct, diffuse lighting in this first version. The image shows 3 spheres and a plane.

3D Breakout

This project is an attempt to create a 3D version of the Breakout game. It uses the XNA framework and so has to be written in C#.

I started working on this earlier this year and it is still work in progress. I’ve been struggling with motivation recently, but hopefully seem to be getting some back now and I plan to have regular updates.

Anyway, here’s an early game play video:

The textures are just place holders and should look much better when I get some decent ones together.

Mobile Tetris

As promised on my original Tetris post, here’s the mobile version. It is written in C++ and uses GDI for the graphics.

It features a high score table and faster falling blocks as the level gets higher.

The graphics are resolution independent and it is high-res aware so it will look good on any Windows Mobile device with any screen orientation.