BullsEye Trailer - iPhone and iPod Touch

I worked hard on this game and on this trailer. Watch the thing and rate it! And buy it when it comes out! Hope you will give me comments either here or and / or on youtube! But that is enough introduction.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen... I give you, Bullseye!

<object width='425' height='344'><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/f3amtD83CPg&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/f3amtD83CPg&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width='425' height='344'></embed></object>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3amtD83CPg

(mods, please feel free to move this to the "gaming" section if necessary)

 

You made that ha? Interesting, but I lol'd when I saw all those bullseyes in the end. You can't honestly expect anyone to be able to shoot all those.
I get the feeling the ipod/iphone is making a lot of new developers rich.

 

the ending is just for kicks and to show how creative and awesome the game is. i lol'd when i made a coding error that caused the target launching object to glitch out and start manufacturing thousands of targets all at once... and had to find a way to include it in SOMETHING

i dont think that specific part will make the game. maybe a cut scene if you hit 1000 targets hah.

 

looks nice

 

Nice job Masterchef! I'm ready for it when it gets here!

 

very nice. is there an option to change guns or are you stuck with the one in the video? GL on sales.

 

just the one gun model- im a better programmer than a 3d modeler.

if you have maya or blender talents to lend and you can make more low poly gun models for me, please let me know!

 

Hey, there's nothing wrong with an M16.

 

Nice work, looks good. How long did it take you to set up the game? I'd definitely recommend trying to include accelerometer-based (along with using the magnetometer api, that should improve horizontal shooting) and touch-based shooting. I've been waiting for someone to do accelerometer-based shooting right with a natural sensitivity and intelligent calibration. This looks like the right style to develop accelerometer and magnetometer-based shooting. That was a smart choice keeping the camera behind the gun in the view of the game, it makes the game look more interesting.

Oh wow, it is tilt-based. I didn't realize that the first time I watched that. I'm not sure if you have magnetometer support to improve the sensing on the iPhone 3GS, but that could improve an intelligent calibration system and horizontal sensing if you haven't already decided to add it.

Is there a way to efficiently do this? That might be kind of hard to do with the access Apple gives developers.

 

I'm all for protecting ones own intellectual property, but in all honesty, any form of DRM is bad for consumer masterchef. I don't personally have an ipod, and all those "apps" just aren't my thing, but if they were, I would in all honesty not buy it, just as I refuse to purchase games with any form of DRM sans cd check/key (I purchase all the software I use). But if you're insistent on it, then all the best of luck to you. I just personally think you're hurting yourself in the long run. It's an unfortunate fact that piracy will always be there, and you can't really prevent it 100%.

 

@ michaelsd01:

like you said, it is accelerometer based. i'm still optimizing the calibration for that input, but i will say that as a developer, there are plenty of options to get smooth, tight control. i can poll the thing as often as i want, so its almost a non-issue to average the data over a few polls, and then additionally smooth out the gun and camera paths.

i don't have access to an iPhone 3g s for testing, so it probably wouldn't turn out well if i tried to implement magnetometer motion, but that is *the route* to go. to be honest i didn't look at the magnetometer API even though i have had access to it for about a week and thought about it. Without the hardware to test it, its a long shot to think I could include it in the final release.

i've spent a lot of time trying to model the players position in real space based on just the accelerometer data, so that you could move your iphone left and right to turn left and right in game AND tilt the phone to tilt in 3d space (this is currently how the game works)... the math was not that simple and it ended up being time prohibitive especially for version 1.0. - but any time i hand the game to someone else, they always immediately try this because it *is* more intuitive, and it takes a few seconds for people to get the tilt controls down.

the magnetometer in the iPhone 3g s would make that kind of thing trivial. you could literally turn left and right to turn in game, and tilt to lean in 3d space. but the iPhone 3g s still isn't out, so that will have to be something for my next game, or maybe an update to this one down the road.

i might consider making an iPhone 3g S exclusive game using that type of control scheme in the future (it would also work on the corresponding ipod touch yet to be released)

but a) this app will need some degree of commercial success
and b) an iPhone 3g S only app would cost more because of the smaller market

making it iPhone 3GS only would be interesting because i could do some more advanced AI and more polygons in the scene, and probably pull off an *actually* decent full fledged 3d shooter. (not *pretend* decent like we currently have available)


@ talin

it's not going to phone home or anything, there won't be any CD keys... the protection check is just going to do its best to locally check on startup whether or not some key files (of the application itself, not of your phone) have been modified that are commonly modified to break the iTunes app protection. this will take essentially 0 processing power and 0 time on startup, it won't increase the file size of the final app (it won't be more than a few lines of code) and no legitimate users will EVER have to deal with false positives... the tradeoff is that the protection will be weak and an intelligent cracker could dominate it pretty easily, given a bit of time. i am banking that the crackers won't find it worth their time to deal with 2nd layer protection that will only break one application given the number of apps without a 2nd layer of protection. and even then i will still let it run a few times for the *few* who legitimately want to try it and then make a buying decision.

i have heard that piracy rates run as high as 40% for games

given that there are apparently programs you can download that can batch destroy the itunes app encryption with one click, i *think* this is a fair amount of drm? but i don't know for sure! maybe my perspective is skewed because of my position... let me know if what i said changes your mind.

-----

LOTS of apps on the store collect runtime / usage statistics silently, without ever requesting permission from you or informing you that it is happening. these statistics include your iPhone's (or iPod Touch's) unique ID and if you aren't connected to the net, sometimes they will write data to a local file and upload it once you run the app with a connection. just to put things in perspective. i vouch i won't go down this road for several reasons, the main one being that i don't believe it is right. there also isn't really much of a point with a game like this, i clearly already know what you are doing with it.

if i ever wanted to implement something like this for a productivity or utility application, i would need to have the thing ask if it is OK first, for my conscience. but i have no problem doing an "isCracked()" check on startup.

 

thank you.

with school and such, its taking longer to wrap up than i had hoped, but i am still working hard on it!

i stopped working on the website and it may be down... sorry bout that. but this will be done and on the store relatively soon. i should probably get a website up with a simple mailing list to tell people when i'm done... i'll work on that.