Dweller passed 10k active Android installs!

Today when I uploaded version 1.10.6 of Dweller to the Android Market I noticed in the statistics a significant increase in the number of installed games. The number of active installs went from around 8k to 10k. The total number of Android installs is 35000 so it's almost one third of the users who decide to keep the game installed!

Dweller 1.10.6

Yet another minor release is out of the door. With this one done I should be able to focus on new features again! The new release brings back the message history again and it also fixes an issue with missing text in some textboxes.

BUG FIXES

• The message history is now available again
• Some lines of text in textboxes were sometimes incorrectly hidden

Steambirds for Android

If you enjoyed the Flash version of Steambirds you will be thrilled to hear that the developers have teamed up with Halfbrick (the people behind Fruit Ninja) to release a sequel to Steambirds for Android devices! The game is scheduled for release in October and it's said to be free.

Offical trailer

Dweller 1.10.5

I had to do yet another release. It may seem silly to release as often as I have, but I believe that it's better to release incremental fixes and make the game better in small steps instead of waiting too long between releases, especially now that I've made big changes to the underlying framework. The new version solved a component layering issue. On small screens some components overlapped and the wrong component handled input. I've also finally gotten around to improving the Define keys screen. The define and show keys view has been combined and you can now redefine individual keys instead of having to define all keys at once.

Dweller 1.10.4 - speed, finally!

I finally found the cause of the performance issues in the 1.10 release. The problem was caused by excessive redraws when there were off-screen animations (sleeping monsters). I have also decided to reintroduce the message prompt as it was asked for by users.

Starling

Thibault Imbert from Adobe posted about a very nice initiative by Adobe and Austrian Gamua called Starling. Starling is a 2D game development framework that sits on top of Molehill to allow developers to leverage the GPU without having to know anything about the low-level details of the Stage3D API. I expect a lot of never before seen performance intense games and demos to come out of this and I'm eager to try this out myself.

Diablo III beta has started

Two days ago the offical Diablo II beta program launched and the first lucky people have been invited. People who have opted in for the DIII beta are first in line, but Blizzard will also hand out keys via different promotions. The things I've seen so far of the game really makes me drool and I can't wait to try it myself.

Source: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/3542796

Dweller 1.10.3 - speed, again!

I've become really familiar with all the profiling tools available for Android, J2SE and J2ME these last couple of days and I think I've managed to improve performance quite a bit since 1.10.0 was released. I still have things I need to fix, but it's getting better. Please send me your feedback on how the game is running on your device!

Dweller 1.10.2 - speed!

The recent changes to the Dweller user interface and some under-the-hood changes to the rendering did unfortunately slow down the application significantly. I've done some performance profiling and made several improvements that should increase the frame rate quite a bit and make the game feel a lot snappier. I'd be very grateful to hear how the game is running on your device. Please post back here or send me an e-mail!

CHANGES

• Made Vampire Bats and Spiders a little less dangerous

BIG FIXES

• Clicking on the action bar at the bottom of the screen in portrait mode moved the player
• Several big performance improvements

Roguelike Radio episode 4 - DoomRL

A couple of days ago a new episode of Roguelike Radio was published. I've really come to look forward to the beginning of each week to hear what the guys have to say. This time around it's Darren Grey, Andrew Doull, John Harris and Ido Yehieli doing the talking and they discuss the popular Doom RL by Kornel Kisielewicz. Kornel is also the guy behind Alien RL and he's well known at r.g.r.dev for his never ending project (is it vaporware?) GenRogue.

Dweller 1.10.1 bugfix version

I had to release a bugfix version that solved some input problems preventing movement on touchscreen devices in portrait mode. It was also not possible to start a new game after death.

ARRP 2011 Summary

The Annual Roguelike Release Party 2011 is coming to an end and it's time to sum up. We had 27 pre-announced releases and the number of actual releases are getting close to those numbers have surpassed those numbers. Here are the ones I'm aware of:

• BOSS by Michal Bielinski
• Bushudo by Kevin Harris
• Cataclysm by Arca (blog)
• Diggr by tkatchev
• DungeonRL by Jacob Sadow-Reinshagen
• Dweller by yours truly
• EmoSquid by Eben Howard aka deej
• Expedition by Santiago Zapata
• Fall from Heaven by Jolly Roger, GoodSir and Psiweapon
• Into the Dungeon++ by 7h30n, Foox and Psiweapon (post at Rogue Temple)
• js-like by Ondrej Žára
• Legerdemain - This wasn't announced as an ARRP release (and it was released a day early) but I'll include it anyway
• LumberjackRL by Seaweed Factory
• Magog by Risto Saarelma
• Mysterious Castle by eclectocrat
• The Legends of Siegfried by Xan
• POWDER by Jeff Lait
• Prospector by Magellan
• pyromance by jice
• Rings of Valor by Tainthe
• Rogue Assassin by numeron (the linked page doesn't exist and his blog has vanished as well)
• Run from the Shadow by Darren Grey
• Stellar Edge by Smith
• T-Engine/ToME4 by DarkGod
• Traction Edge by Mongrol
• Unangband by Andrew Doull
• Vapors of Insanity by Z
• X@COM by Josh Ge

Quite an impressive list. Now I need to find the time to test all of them...

Dweller 1.10.0 ARRP release

Well, I guess I missed the ARRP by an hour or so, but at least I managed to release a new version of Dweller. A lot of work has been done to rewrite and improve the UI. There's still a long way to go, but now I have a much more extensible system that will be easier to build on.

IMPORTANT

• The J2ME version now require CLDC 1.1 support (was CLDC 1.0)

NEW FEATURES

• A lot of changes have been done to the user interface, but there is much more to come!
• Your current position on the minimap will blink to make it easier to find
• It is now possible to bind a key to show/hide the minimap
• "Tip of the day" will be shown on the loading screen
• Quickslots for easy item access

CHANGES

• Changed the fireball cast animation
• The minimap will be smaller on large screens and always positioned in the top left corner
• Undead are immune to poison attacks
• Poison has now become more lethal as it ticks for damage each turn unless resisted
• D-pad is now semi transparent to not cover vital things on the map

BUG FIXES

• Trader and healer names were always the same after a clean installation of the game
• Improved message feedback when trying to equip an illegal combo of items
• It is no longer possible for the player character to be charmed/pacified by a dark wizard
• Trap doors will not be generated at the bottom of the dungeon (nothing happened when you fell through)

320x480 Overworld

32x480 Inventory

320x480 Dungeon

ARRP mayhem, need more time!

I've been coding more or less all day to get Dweller ready for the Annual Roguelike Release Party tomorrow and ran into a snag a few hours ago. The J2ME version refuses to run, failing with a ClassFormatError! Gah! It was a while since I tried the J2ME version and I really have no idea what is causing this. I've decided to do a clean install of the tools (and in the process upgrade to Eclipse Indigo) and giver it another go since it could be a preverification problem. The J2ME tools were a bit dodgy on my previous installation since I was running the 64-bit version of Eclipse Helios, and some of the wireless toolkits weren't compatible.

Hopefully I'll be back on track now and still have a chance to make a proper delivery. I've got some good music, tea, a nice whiskey and some candy so there's a good chance of success. Here we go!

Roguelike Radio - Brogue episode

A couple of days ago the third episode of Roguelike Radio was released. This time it's hosted by Scott Edgar, Erez Ben-Aharon and John Harris and the topic is Brogue by Brian Walker, aka Pender. I haven't played Brogue much myself, but my memory of it was that it felt like a very well designed roguelike with some pretty unique features. Hearing Scott, Erez and John talk about Brogue really confirm this. The number of ways to tackle the different monsters in the game is staggering and there seem to be a lot of unique items and spells to discover. I'll definitely give Brogue a try again.

AARP soon, better get a move on!

I'm getting really stressed out now. I'm intending to release a new version of Dweller for the Annnual Roguelike Release Party on the 18th of September. That's only four days to go, gah! I have made a lot of changes and experimented with the UI, but nothing is really finished. I'll figure something out though and do some real crunch-time coding on Saturday. Wish me luck!

Dig-N-Rig

Dig-N-Rig is ascii gaming at it's finest. You control a Diggit 6400 mining robot on a mission to drill your way to the earth's core. While diggin' and drillin' your way down you need to send the rare minerals and other resources you discover back up to the lab on the surface by constructing a network of conveyor belts. The resources you discover will be refined in the lab and used to purchase upgrades to your rig. As a fan of old-school ascii roguelikes this game really hit home and I'm thrilled to see the use of ascii graphics in an indie title!

Download Dig-N-rig from Digipen

Roguelike Radio pt. 2

A new episode of Roguelike Radio was posted yesterday. In this episode Andrew, Scott and Erez Ben-Aharon discuss Desktop Dungeons and it's roguelikeness. There's some interesting discussions going on and I'm not really sure where I stand myself regarding Desktop Dungeons. The game sure does condense the roguelike experience into a game where every move matters, much like in the most critical and memorable situations of a Crawl or Angband game. But in my opinion it also drive point too far in the sense that a lot of the RPG element is lost in the process, and by that also the attachment to your character.

Infestor

Infestor is a really nice platformer with beautiful pixel art and rockin' chip music. You take on the role of a amoeba-like biological weapon with the ability to infest and control humans. Your goal is to move from entrance to exit on each level by clever use of infestation of enemies. While in control of a human you can move faster, jump longer, push items and shoot other humans. Once a host has served it's purpose you can release control by exploding your host and move on to the next one.

Play Infestor over at Kongregate

Hammerfight

Today I had a chance to try to the demo of Hammerfight available on Steam. The game is all about brutal air combat using small flying machines with large weapons such as blades, hammers and metal balls attached to the machines using chains. Imagine yourself being a flying medieval flail kinda weapon wreaking havoc to other equally deadly machines. It is a lot of fun!

One of the real strengths of Hammerfight is it's controls. The game is fully mouse controlled and as you move your mouse in a circular motion your machine swings it's weapon in the same way. Combine this with realistic physics and you get some really intuitive controls where you really need to time your swings for maximum damage.

Forget Me Not

Forgot Me Not is a game that reminds a lot of PacMan, but with a lot of twists. How about procedurally generated levels, many different monsters, the ability to shoot and monsters being able to shoot you? Sounds like fun? It is!

Forget Me Not by Nyarlu Labs

Skillz

Skillz is a new DJ game by Playpen Studios for iOS and Android tablets, scheduled for release on the 8th of September. Judging by the game play videos Skillz is a perfect example of a game very well suited to the tablet format. It probably doesn't beat having a real mixer and turntables as in DJ Hero, but I think it will work well enough on a 10" tablet (maybe not as much on the smaller 7" tablets though). It's also great to see more tablet only games as I believe there's a lot of compromise that has to go into a game if you want to target both the smaller 3-4" screens as well as the larger 7-10" tablet screens.

Skillz Hands On Video: What's On Your Mind? from Playpen Studios on Vimeo.

Mario + Portals = Mari0

What happens if you cross the old NES classic Mario with the innovative Portals puzzle-platformer? Well, you get a lot of interesting ways to kill Koopas, that's for sure...

http://stabyourself.net/mari0/