there's also this game coming from the creator of final fantaay and blue dragon, so that might up the quality a bit, maybe also graphically
We've got an artist from the Elder Scrolls series working with us on Ravensword II which is due out sometime this year. It should be a vast improvement over the first game.
You'll definetly see better graphics. I mean even the unreal engine is being produced or has already been produced for the iphone i do believe! Thats pretty epic.
But when it's out, a newer iPhone with rumoured full DirectX 10 and OpenGL 3.0 should also be out, which means you guys have to soon start developing Zen Bound 4G. Why not prepare for the future? Anticipate what might come by preparing higher res texture, effects, etc. Then make the game automatically scale down the graphics depending on which machine it's played on, eg. iPhone 4G, 3GS, 3G, 2G? I know some games do that. Of course no one knows how powerful iPhone 4G is going to be but you can still anticipate it and put it into calculation to make the next ZB more future-proof
We still need the hardware to buff up on screen resolution to do so. 480x320 can't really put you anywhere. You can only hope for it in the next iPhone this summer!
Our next game will be only for iPod 2nd generation and above... I think what is bad is that developers/publishers release games that are sub-standard on the lower end devices and con the public into buying them - even though the game suffers from bad slow down. Usually these games run fine on the newer hardware. So look out for Space Tripper in the next month Because this game will be the next step up in what to expect from the hardware!
This is a case of misunderstood marketing. DirectX is never coming to Apple products, and OpenGL 3.0 is a desktop API with no purpose on mobile devices. Yes, the new PowerVR chip may be capable of fulfilling the feature sets required by the above APIs, but that does not mean the features would be accessed through anything other than OpenGL ES on portable devices. The next ZB will be as future-proof as we can reasonably make it. Scalability is not as straightforward as one might think, and porting a game elegantly to another device or even just another screen size always brings headaches, both anticipated and unanticipated ones Just to clarify, the next Zen Bound will run on all iPhone and iPod touch devices. It has parallel renderers for OpenGL ES 1.1 (older devices) and OpenGL ES 2.0 (shader hardware), with the major visual difference taking place on the shader-enabled devices. The source code has been entirely re-factored, and we now have a good base to build on with any future device or platform in mind. It would not be technically impossible to think of Zen Bound in some form on a powerful game console (like PS3).
Me too, and this won´t change anytime soon as i´m still in contract with my carrier for 2 more years. I guess i´m not the only one around.
... thats definitely a non buy for me ... so far my good old ipod 1g never had a problem with lags and performance issues
I'd rather do this for this game because I feel that selling a game where the early levels run fine and the later levels have lots of slow down is not good business... it will generate a lot a 1star reviews on the App store. It will be an interesting experiment to see if it can gain sales and chart positions on the App Store. I feel it might because potential buyers of the game may want to see a game that is far more advanced than what the older hardware can do. There will be a point where the older hardware will be phased out by developers because nothing stands in the way of progress.
Devs to look out for Secret Escape check! Ravensword check! TrueAxis check! Any other publishers/devs like EA, Chillingo, Gameloft, NgMoco, and any other devs I forgot to put in
I don't think the next iPhone will be anything other than a 3GS with increased cpu/gpu-clockrate. It wouldn't make sense to add new features to the GPU while OpenGL ES 2.0 is still seldom used because of the lower userbase compared to the iPhone 2G - iPod Touch hardware, which is kinda the same, except for higher clockspeeds. Next iPhone will have a slightly higher clocked 3GS-Hardware and most likely a better display, which uses less power and might have a higher resolution (but i wouldn't bet on it). But of cource we'll see better graphics this year, the Unreal Engine 3 or the engine Gameloft will bring better graphics and more devs will use 3GS-hardware features.
