It seems that after the Christmas period popularity of Survivalcraft picked up.
We are now at #2 in Amazon App Store, squished between a pair of 3D and 2D giants of blocky games:
We are #6 in Google Play, #8 in Apple App Store and #13 in Windows Phone store (no pictures because it’s not as impressive as #2, he he).
That’s nice and very humbling. Hope I’ll be able to keep the quality high and features coming so it stays that way!
For the last several days I’ve been playing with a new explosion system.
The current system is reasonable, but it doesn’t do what I want it to. When I was working on it about a year ago, I had to abandon further development and keep whatever was there, because I needed to make a release. We have been stuck with it ever since.
Unfortunately the work on the new system is not going all that well. I had a seemingly brilliant idea that took me a couple of days to implement and another couple to realize that it’s fatally flawed :-(
As a result, I am pretty much back to square one. I really wanted to show you something with this post, but alas it was not meant to be.
Anyway, I will go on trying. I need to upgrade the explosions, otherwise the new weapon will not make much sense.
The admins of the forums are organizing sweepstakes where you can win free copies of Survivalcraft on iOS. Please have a look at this forum post:
http://survivalcraft.lefora.com/topic/19404442/2014-Sweepstakes-have-Begun-Participate-here
Unfortunately free copies for other platforms are not available – Google Play, Amazon and Microsoft do not allow publishers to give away free copies :-(
I have a new video for you:
I am working on a new weapon and it’s rather powerful. Unfortunately, it does not sound very well with the audio engine in 1.24, so I had to upgrade it a little and introduce proper sound delay system. The only thing that was delayed with distance in 1.24 was thunders. In 1.25 everything gets this treatment, should add a bit to the realism.
The speed of sound in the world of Survivalcraft is quite a bit lower than in the real world, to make the effect more pronounced with the small distances we have in the game.
I am sure many of you will be able to guess what the new weapon is :-)
Survivalcraft has been selected as one of the best apps for kids & teens in Austria, Switzerland and Germany.
http://bestekinderapps.de/kids-teens-apps-2013-kinder-app-preis-51554
Nice of them!
I finally finished working on the new weapon for 1.25. Here’s a video for you. Typically, it ends with a bang.
There are two types of ammo for it, even though only one is shown in the video. The player died before I could show you the other :-)
One of the first additions to 1.25 will be a new weapon. I know the game has recently become much more difficult, mostly by introduction of large numbers of vicious animals like lions, tigers and hyenas. In 1.25 I hope to mitigate it a bit. Stay tuned, I have the weapon almost finished. And yes, it will need a whole new UI panel to operate.
For some days I have been working on converting most of the bitmap-based UI in Survivalcraft to procedural drawn one. Along with that I am doing large refactoring of the code that handles the UI to be less rigid and easier to extend.
To give you some background of that work, in 1.24 every panel was hand drawn. Furnace, crafting table, inventory, chest, vital stats etc. As you can imagine, to maintain these panels required a lot of work. Horrible, mechanical work mostly. Bitmaps are inflexible, ugly in high-res, and are increasing download sizes and memory usage. I knew for a long time that they will have to go.
Because one of the features in 1.25 will require me to extend the list of these panels (hint, hint), I decided now is the time for a change.
For example, here’s how the procedurally drawn furnace panel looks like:
All the slots, text and even the arrow is procedural, everything declared in my homebrew XAML-derivative. For the coders out there, I even have attached properties. How cool is that :-)
Fonts are still bitmap-based unfortunately, even though they use a much improved rendering engine compared to what’s built into XNA. I’m not really up for making a cross-platform vector font renderer…
All this has interrupted my work on the actual game features, but I should be back on them shortly! Some major refactoring is needed from time to time if the game codebase is to stay healthy.
Survivalcraft 
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