We finally have Tasty Planet: Back for Seconds available on iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad!
The controls are the same as the original Tasty Planet on iOS, which we thought worked very well. The hardest part to this port was getting the game running at a decent framerate on all the iOS devices. The iPad 2 and the iPhone 4S are very fast, and the game ran easily on those devices. However, older devices like the original iPhone are not as powerful. It took a lot of optimizations to make it happen – but I’m happy to say that we did it!
I spent some time adding Game Center to Tasty Planet for iPhone. Now you can compete with your friends for best times and achievements. This is actually a pretty cool feature that got Kris and me playing the game a lot more.
We have high scores in Tasty Planet: Back for Seconds but there have never been that many players competing for them. The neat thing about high scores on the iPhone with Game Center is that we instantly had thousands of people on the leaderboards. That means there is a much higher chance that people will really get into it and start competing for best times (and most cats eaten).
The other project that we recently launched is the Dingo Games Facebook page. If have a Facebook account and you like Dingo Games, then please “like” us on Facebook.
I made a few updates to the game. Most important was a fix that was preventing the game from working on some Macs (possibly all PowerPC Macs – but I’m not entirely sure). I also tweaked a few levels based on feedback from users. If you already bought the game and want the updated game, you download link should still be working so you can re-download. If it’s not email me and I’ll hook you up with a new link.
I’m going to send out a press release and some review copies now.
We’ve had many late nights, but we are finally finished the game. We sent out the pre-orders and you can now try out the demo/buy it. This is a what you would call a “soft launch”. We want to make sure everything is working well before officially releasing it, sending out press releases and doing all the other marketing stuff for the game. I’ll prepare some new screenshots, a new trailer, and other marketing material over the next couple days before sending it all out.
We’re really proud of the game. It is much more than we originally had planned to do with the Tasty Planet sequel. I hope everyone enjoys the game!
Update: Thanks for the Tasty Planet 2 name suggestions everyone, the name we went with was Tasty Planet: Back for Seconds. The game is now available.
We aren’t too far off from releasing Tasty Planet 2 so we really need to come up with a final name. For a variety of reasons we want to name it “Tasty Planet: Some Subtitle” instead of “Tasty Planet 2″. So far we haven’t come up with anything amazing. The game has you traveling to different time periods and eating them, so we have been trying to come up with a play on words involving eating and time travel.
“Tasty Planet: Snack to the Future” (a play on the movie “Back to the Future”) was one of our favorite ideas but we found out that another game already used “Snack to the Future” (and put a little trademark symbol on it), so that one is out.
A few other names that I don’t mind (but don’t love either):
Tasty Planet: Snack Time
Tasty Planet: Snack in Time
Tasty Planet: A Morsel in Time
Actually one of my favorites ideas is “Tasty Planet: A Link to the Repast”… Pretty funny if you’re familiar with “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past”. Unfortunately most people will not get it.
We could also go the Die Hard route – “Tasty Planet 2: Tastier Planet”.
Or how about Tasty Planet: Too Tasty?
What do you think of those names? We would love to hear your suggestions!
Tasty Planet 2 is really coming together. I took some screenshots to show everyone what it is looking like (note that the HUD elements are not in there). Usually when I take screenshots to release to the press I spend a lot of time trying to capture the perfect situation (sometimes I even play the game in slow motion to make sure that everything is just right). Not so with the screenshots – I just quickly grabbed a few from different levels (the goo’s eyes are even in the middle of a blink in one screenshot – the horror!).
There are still a few tweaks that we need to do, but overall we’re really happy with the look. What do you think?
During development it is extremely helpful to be able to enter “cheat” codes. Often I want to quickly get to a certain part of a level to test out a new feature – so I need the ability to grow the goo quickly to a certain size or to increase the game speed. To do this I implemented a console screen in development mode, which allows me to type in commands. These commands are actually processed by the scripting language Lua, so they can be as simple or as complicated as I need them to be.
In addition to cheat codes, I can also quickly implement rarely used or complicated editing features instead of going through the trouble of adding a graphical user interface. Using Lua makes this particularly easy because the console commands act as a true programming language. I can query the status of certain game elements, store things in variables… anything that I need to do.
Having a console makes many aspects of development of much easier – that’s why so many games have consoles built in.
The game is really coming along. A lot of the art and levels are done. I’ll be posting some new screenshots and maybe a video soon.
I’ve been playing around with my new computer. I wanted to see how much faster it is than my old computer so I’ve been doing some tests on common tasks that I do: compiling game, running scripts, booting game, reloading game scripts, etc. Everything is at least twice as fast, with some things much faster.
The most impressive result so far is compiling The Three Musketeers: The Game. On the old computer it took over 4 minutes. On the new computer it takes 2 minutes with normal settings. However, there is an option in Visual Studio to compile using multiple processes. Using the /MP8 directive causes the compiling to split up into 8 processes. This fully utilizes the 4 cores of my i7 processor (we use 8 processes instead of 4 to take advantage of hyperthreading). The build time using this mode is 30 seconds. Very impressive.
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