First the idea started out with just having a multiplayer game were you start at opposite ends of a map. And there are some sample projects that do that.

Then we say well lets control the firing independent of movement. So we could do a dual stick control one moves, one fires, and It just always fires.

And for no real reason, I just felt like I wanted to add an A* (A-Star) class to this project and test the result of sending fewer packets over the bluetooth connection, and ultimately online game center if later used.

Cocos2D has libraries to help here. We decided to download a copy of Tile’d and us the TMX tilemap class. Quickly tile’d let us drop in some Creative Commons tile art sheet and make a level with grass, some water, and walls. Another layer in the TMX would overlay the map serve the purpose of defining open nodes and closed nodes.

Relatively quickly we could condense the tank data object send over the non-wire to just a current point and a destination point only when a player picked a new path, rather than it sending location updates rapidly per-second. Each device would use the two points to path find the tanks travel.

Then this left us with controlling the tanks rotation with a radial touch drag relative to the tank, and firing button to launch an attack in the tank tops direction.

As it got later in the very early morning geometric math got to be less and less our strong suit (as if it ever was) and though we could match the bullet angle with the tanks, the radial to point slope was something that needed more time than we could bring our self to do for one night.

We stopped here happy with nearly 16 hours between two guys, and we could cruise about each other screen with just a tap to desired location, tank rotational aiming, and bullets that sometime flew in the right direction.

Bomb! Revisited is the third iteration of a simple twitch/reflex game inspired by Geometry Wars.  First written in JavaScript, then ported to C++ and Objective-C, now rewritten in 4 hours with Cocos2d.  Thanks to Ray and Rod for inspiring me to do this.

Thomson Comer

thomson @ <companyurl>

Electric Textiles, LLC —===— http://electrictextiles.com

Built in cocos2d, the game thankfully runs smoothly.  The controls are simple:  press anywhere on the screen to advance your Mariachi.  Do nothing and you can stand still or get run over.  Islands provide relief from oncoming traffic.

Have a good ride

Mad mariachi was inspired by 360 and came together thanks to the efforts of Joe Goullaud, Justin Kaufman, Greg Raiz, Ben Long and Jason Petralia.  Most of the team checked out around 5:30 AM but Joe completed the core functions around 8:00 AM.

As for the opposite theme, the user is faced with traffic going in opposite directions.  A weaker argument could be made that buses and a pedestrian mall are not paired well but that discussion should probably wait for another place and time.  More updates to come.  Happy post more information if people are interested in how this came together.

Grab a taco

——————————————
Update from 3:08 am
I’m too lazy to explain how my game works right now, but here’s a work-in-progress screenshot:

The idea is you’re a mad vocab scientist who is building an army of robots moving along a conveyor belt.

Each robot has two parts. The first half has a word on it, and the second half has the word’s antonym. Correctly matched, the two will magnetically attract and snap together. The more matches you make, the more robots you add to your army.

Then you get to take your robot army and go kill stuff!

12:12 AM

The mockup art working in Cocos2D

2:40 AM

If you drag a word's robot half to its antonym's half, they join together and make a robot!

4:30 AM

We’re calling it done for now. Animations for when the robots are matched, sounds, and music (by the awesome Phil Hassey – thanks!) have been added. Gameplay has been tweaked to include less words on the screen at once. A title screen and credits page have been added.

Screenshots

Title page

Less words on the page, less confusing

When the robots are completed, they light up and blink

5:34 am Minos is complete! …as complete as it will be for 360iDev 2011. Start time: ~11:15 p.m. Tuesday, September 13 End time: 5:35 a.m. Wednesday, September 14 Project stats care of Xcode Statistician :

• Number of lines: 1,243 (1,050 excluding whitespace)
• Number of lines in main files: 1,009 (873 excluding whitespace)
• Classes: 9
• .m files: 10

I was the only developer on this (partially because I was late to get started, partially because I didn’t try very hard to round up a team). I created a playable game that can have any number of levels in roughly 7 hours – I’m happy with that progress. What went right:

• Got lots of feedback on the idea of the game before coding, and had a clear idea of what the game would be
• Cut, cut, cut – cut features I really wanted just to get the game into a demo-ready state (including a Coming Soon screen for those features I can picture, but didn’t have time to implement)
• Exciting and lively atmosphere of so many other devs working – Game Jam was fun!
• Red Bull’s various ingredients

What went wrong:

• Had surprising problems with UIView animations – couldn’t get a couple of the effects I wanted, but thankfully gave up and just finished the app to some demo-worthy state
• Sleep… if I had been more awake, the errors I spent most time debugging would never have happened

Post-360iDev plans I’d like to polish it up by:

• Add levels with 4, 6, and even 8 colors
• Sound effects – it should play up a musical scale as you get close to the end of the pattern (not just a sound associated with the color, but playing a scale indicating progress to the end)
• Difficulty levels – show the pattern faster/slower, or just ramp up the speed the pattern flashes the more / better the player plays
• Implement better animation and effects for user feedback – give the app much more of a personality than it currently has
• Time trial mode
• Point system
• Two-player mode over Bluetooth so a friend on an iPhone can tap out a pattern and the friend has to play it back… and adds one more to the pattern.  First one out loses.
• Better physical idea of what the Nomis thing is – is it a light dome? Is it a flat color wheel? And where the heck is this thing? The black background is very mysterious… could definitely do some things with that.
• Maybe change colors in the middle of a pattern?
• Maybe change the rules one at a time on each round or at each color change – introduce more colors, different tap points, etc
• Possibly change the name, or modify it a little – I found out there’s an app named “Nomis” on the store already, but it’s for finding music… Nomis Game? Nomis Ball?

12:18 am Started at about 11:15 pm. Have random patterns being created, finishing up level and new game creation. Waited to hear what the category was, and have run my idea by Steve, Jim, James, Aaron, Jonah, (Twitter handles tbd) and a few more I didn’t catch the name of (if I talked to you, let me know so I can post your name and Twitter!).

How it works: Essentially, this is a two-player game, so you play on one side or the other. On your side are six fairly large buttons, one for each color. The colors that are situated across from one another are opposites (in the standard color wheel, google for “color wheel” if you don’t know what I mean), and they cancel each other out when they contact. You press a button, to select a color, and then touch in any of the six rows to “send” a piece down that row. The gameboard is only 6×6, so it’ll fill up pretty fast. Right now I’m thinking two game modes, both limited to 100 moves, or “sends” of pieces across the board. Mode 1 will be “real time”, where you are basically sending blocks as fast as you can to out-race/color match your opponent. Mode 2 will be “turn based”, where you make a move, then your opponent makes a move. When the 100 moves are over, whichever side has the least pieces on it is the victor’s.

Todo list:

• keep track of moves and actually end the game after 100 (or some other arbitrary #) of them
• show the selected color on either side
• better animations for the pieces as they are sent to the other side
• background image that shows the center “grid” while still emphasizing the “rows”
• menus and game over screen
• gameplay video
• submit to app store ;)

Sept 13th:
Nothing much to report yet, but this will be played on a 6×6 grid. It may morph from real-time to turn-based as the night progresses, not sure yet…

Whoami? Martin Grider is an iPhone/game developer from Minneapolis, MN. This is his first 360iDev, and his first game jam! Read more about his games at his blog chesstris.com.