The modern/futuristic setting in this game is intriguing, and I like the looks of the icon so far. Can't wait to see the Youtube video when it is released.
RPG elements in a dual stick shooter is such a win. I just found out that you guys submitted an update to Meteor Blitz for retina display graphics. So happy it's finally out! Is this game going to support Game Center?
Yeah, it's definitely going to support Game Center. Learning from our previous games, this time around we have a dedicated guy working on things like Game Center, Retina Display, iPad port, flip screen, etc. so that we can ship most of that kind of stuff in the first release.
Update #7 - Bump Mapping Sorry, I owe everyone a YouTube demo, but we realized that our lighting system isn't going to work. We wanted to have precalculated light maps but it turns out that there's not enough memory on the hardware to support it. So we're implementing bump mapping instead, which has the two-fold advantage of letting us have arbitrary angles of light, and making us sound like real game developers =D. I'm a little worried that bump mapping might cause the game's framerate to drop, but I'm optimistic that we can optimize around it. The benefits of writing our own engine! If it works, then combined with the dynamic shadows that we already have, the combat engine should look really great (hopefully to the point of looking better than any existing shooter). ------------- We have a Facebook page now. Please support us by hitting the "Like" button: http://facebook.com/RogueElementGame
Update #8 - Dealbreakers It's been a hard few days. We're really close to killing Rogue Element because we've run into a couple very difficult technical problems. We want to load thousands of textures in our game, but it turns out that each texture seems to have quite a bit of memory overhead. We're running out of memory, especially on the iPad and 3GS. We're working now to put multiple textures into one bigger texture, but if that doesn't work, I'm not sure if we'll be able to continue development. Also, framerate is taking a big hit. We want to have dozens of enemies on screen at the same time, and we're just not able to keep a high framerate right now. We're trying to figure out what we can optimize and cut. But coupled with our memory problems and high internal expectations, I'm not sure if we'll find a way. If we have to kill Rogue Element, I'm sure we'll try to reuse what we have in one form or another. But I'm really hoping we don't get to that point!
Optimizing is tough. I'm sure there's various guides out there for developers on tricks you can use to cut down. Things like using solid colors, pre-rendered objects, lower quality textures...
Wow! If the game is anything like the concept then colour me excited! I really love these dev blog type threads. Keep us posted!
Update #9 - Lessons Learned, Haven't Given Up We got the texture atlas code working (it puts lots of smaller images into one big image pizza). It definitely helps reduce our memory usage, but it didn't fix the major problem. The major problem is that we didn't test the maximum memory usage correctly at the beginning of the project. iOS lets you allocate a lot of memory (and this is what we tested), but almost immediately after you do so, it asks for most of it back, presumably to handle phone calls and other background tasks. If you don't give enough back, it force closes your app. We didn't take that into account! So after several meetings, we now have a semi-plan for how to cut features in Rogue Element to get us under the new memory limit. It hurts pretty bad to kill off features that we worked hard to implement, but I suppose it's got to get worse before it gets better.
Be sure to hang onto them on your end for re-implementation. You never know when iPhone 5 or 6 comes along with more power, and they would make for a convenient update.
Hyung showed me a build of Rouge Element today, it's looking really sweet! I told him he should post a video ASAP... Once you see it in action you'll be excited for this game, even the screenshots don't do it justice...
Sorry, Rogue Element is on life support at the moment. We basically just ran out of money to make the game that we wanted. At the moment, we have some art and an engine (that I really think is pretty kick-ass), but we're short on pretty much everything else. We're considering starting a Kickstarter project around it, so there is still a slim chance we can resurrect it. TL;DR The real world kicked our ass.
