Pseudo Playgrounds --iArena

Hello everyone, it is due time that Pseudo Playgrounds introduced it's self to the Garage Games community. We are a new indie game studio in the Twin Cities area working on such titles as iArena and Metal Migration both will be using Garage Games iTGB. We are a small studio with a few artists and a few programmers working diligently to create fun and new games.


iTGB has been great to us in that it allows for easy level and GUI creation and other simple engine features like saving and so forth. It has allowed us to spend more time on the important things while programming, like the game itself. That was one of the reasons we opted to use an engine instead of building our own.



We have experience with Torque, so right out the gate iTGB seemed like the engine to go with. Also, iTGB is a 2D engine, and we did not want to get another engine that is primarily for 3D and make it work for 2D. iTGB seemed like the over all best choice when it came to picking out our engine to be used in our first game.








The first game we put into production is iArena. In iArena we are trying to accomplish a nice set of features. The best way to describe this game is that it’s a casual game for the hardcore player. In reality that is exactly the kind of games that the iPhone is made for. We spent a lot of time designing iArena around this mentality. Some of the features included in iArena are 3 different modes of play, one of which is locked at first, a fun scoring system with global high score lists, achievements, and mini games to break up the general flow of play.





When you actually play iArena you are fighting off waves of enemies as you advance through the levels in the game. You are fighting in an arena like the name of the game would imply. After each wave you get to upgrade your health, armor, or defense. This small amount of character development helps add an RPG feel to the game. With the game being as simple as it is, you can have a lot of fun messing around with how you want to advance your character.



The game is going to be fairly challenging in that you only get one life. If you die, the game is over. So you really have to fight hard to get to the end of the game and fight through all 20 waves successfully. With 5 boss fights and 4 mini games the player will have a lot of fun fighting through the game and racking up his score. There are lots of ways to score and get bonus points.






The game is really simple at its heart, but it does have some of the ambitions of a larger scaled title. We really put a lot into the design, art, music, and gameplay. We really hope people enjoy it and hope it can become a hit!

Prior to production on iArena we submitted the concept to Gamepro Labs. For those not in the know, its Gamepro Magazines new publishing label. We luckily got selected as one of their flagship developers in their new publishing label. This really came as a surprise to us. Our brand new company is going to be getting some help from with in the industry.





When June comes around you will be able to read about Pseudo Playgrounds and iArena in the July issue of Gampro Magazine. They are show casing iArena and our young company. Though this is exciting for all of us here it is also great for Garage Games. The kind of exposure our game will be getting will also give that same exposure to Garage Games and their products. This is also putting an insane amount of pressure on us to make a good game.

We are pretty far into production at our current state. All the art and audio is completed. The bulk of the programming is finished also. The engine has been great to work with, but as of right now there are a few issues we are having. We really could use any help from the community to help us solve them and get the best game out that we can.

The game so far has:
-11 Different hand drawn enemies, all hand animated
-Over 30 different animations
-5 Different hand drawn levels, each with 4 stages
-Global High Scores
-3 Game Modes

yet to be implemented:
-4 Mini games
-Achievements
-Upgrading System


The problems we are having at the moment are not only slowing us down as far as releasing the game goes, but in some cases making us not able to release the game. My hope is that they are all able to be solved.

The biggest problem we are having now is that when we add an additional image to our game things start going pretty crazy. Triggers that were set up in the editor cease to function, and enemies start colliding with each other for no perceivable reason. Taking the image out fixes it, putting it back in breaks it again. Unfortunately at this time only about half of our assets are in game, so it is a pretty huge problem for us.

Also, when we attempt to build upside down it does flip the game but it also seems to shift it halfway off the screen. Based on how we expect people to hold the iPhone when they play our game we would like to get it working upside down so the player’s hands don't cover the speaker and ruin the audio (which is pretty sweet stuff).

A third problem, not necessarily related to the iTGB itself but definitely related to some combination of iTGB and the PSK is that I can't get the players attack animation playing. The PSK uses a finite state machine that works pretty flawlessly for all of the pre-built states, but when I add one in (attacking) it does not work. I had Phillip, the creator of the PSK (an all around sweet product by the way!) take a look at the project and he said the attack animation I have plays for him in TGB as I have it set up, so my only thought is it must be some difference between TGB and iTGB.

Other than that, we have also been running into some framerate issues and will soon begin the process of optimizing the engine pretty thoroughly in hopes of fixing some of them. Any hints and tips of any kind to help improve framerate would be greatly appreciated.

We also began to implement custom level loading but have not found out a way to unload previous loaded levels.

Thanks for your time and if you have any questions from us as to how we got certain things working feel free to ask, and if you have any advice for us, please give it.

Thanks

-Pseudo Playgrounds