Flickitty iPhone game

[Dan East]

I thought it only appropriate to post this here at PM, given the history both Randall and I have with this community.

Randall and I have released an iPhone / iPod touch game called . It uses a new game engine, 2Dex, which is a partial reincarnation of the Varium project (very little code is actually recycled into the new engine, but the entity / handler concepts and Lua scripting was all worked out as part of Varium). The engine is very versatile and we expect to release several more games powered by 2Dex (as well as possibly licensing it to 3rd parties).

The game itself is all Randall's creation - the art, scripting and gameplay. It uses a unique control system, and takes advantage of the realistic physics simulation included in 2Dex. I was concentrating purely on the engine development in parallel. The art is very original and unique, as is the gameplay and control scheme - Randall really broke new ground in this game. We're really proud that this game has been approved and is available through the iTunes App store, as it is an arduous process to be approved as a developer, create an application, and actually have it approved by Apple. The Free version has been available for a couple weeks now (including an approved update), and we anticipate approval of the full version (which will sell for $0.99) next week.

The game and engine are purely 2D, but use OpenGL rendering. Eventually I will likely extend 2Dex into 3Dex for full 3D rendering (and in a way bring the Varium project full-circle), but we will be concentrating on 2D titles for the immediate future.

Visit for screenshots and a video of gameplay.

Dan

[refractor]

The iPhone almost makes me want to get a Mac to code for it. Almost. I just can't bring myself to do it.

[randall]

Hey refractor. Developing for the iPhone has actually been a pleasant process. We had a few obstacles, but nothing too harsh.

Dan actually had the engine running fairly quickly, after having the MacBook for only a couple days.

I still use Windows for development along with my iPhone 3G; Dan had a few different builds to juggle. A large portion of Flickitty was written in Lua, so I personally scripted over 26,000 lines of code.

We just released the full version of Flickitty today, and initial response is good.

[Caesar]

If I had an iPhone, I'd probably end up buying this. It looks like a good time killer and I like the art style.

[sponge]

I had spotted Flickitty somewhere else a few months back, and was surprised to see two familiar names in the development.

Still rocking Windows Mobile somehow (HTC Touch Pro) so I wasn't able to check it out. Awesome stuff regardless!

[Dan East]

I ported 2Dex back over to Windows Mobile. Performance is on the low side, because the engine currently uses a lot of floating point math, especially the physics engine. Flickitty won't run on my Touch Pro 2, because it uses a couple really large textures (instead of breaking things up into many small ones), and the GPU of this device can't handle textures of that size. The content can be tweaked to run, but performance would be very, very bad because of the amount of physics going on.

I have updated Pocket Quake for new WM devices, and need people to help test. I have a few more things to tweak, but it should be playable on your device. Send me a private message with your email address and I'll set you up.

Dan

[refractor]

I actually did bring myself to buy a Mac, and only then did I realise just how much I hate it.

[Dan East]

Well, I have a basic Macbook, and the first thing that drives me nuts is not having any decent navigation keys - End, Home, Page Up/ Page Down, etc. I use those CONSTANTLY while coding, viewing web pages, etc. In some apps you can do combinations, like ALT + ARROW to do similar functionality, but not all apps support it, and some use entirely different combos so it's not consistent.

I like the underlying Unix OS for sure, but GUI-wise, I find it is too mouse-centric. Keyboard navigation will always beat out mouse, unless actual analog input is required.

I also have two eMacs (1 GHz Power PC) that I bought at our state's surplus sale for $10 each. They make great web browsers and DVD players for the kids, especially since no-one bothers to write spyware for that OS. I actually set one of them up for iPhone development, and have a few hacks here and there, I can develop on these Power PC devices, even though it is not officially supported.

[Jadam]

It seems pretty cool! Got it running on my iPad and it scales very well.

As for mac programming, I hear you... I actually have a hacked copy of OS X.6 running on VMware, but because of the lack for native VM support on OSX it was unbearable. However I managed to get my parents old 1.83ghz Core Duo iMac... It's 4 years old, but its great for coding.