This afternoon the lovely Aysha Iqbal from BBC Spotlight (South West) visited the Mutant Labs HQ to find out a bit more about what we do.
Aysha asked us about starting a business, how we work together and our ambitions for the future. We also showed off our hilarious voice-controlled game demo’s and real-time multiplayer mobile games.
The Mutant Labs team are no strangers to the spotlight, here you can see Art Director Chris Mayoh perfecting his award-winning “camera smile”.
On Saturday the Mutants braved gale force winds and torrential rain to attend Gamehack UK. Held at Pinewood studios over two days, the event brought together over 100 games developers, artists, designers and musical peeps under one roof to see what can be chucked together in 24 hours. Here is a quick video overview of our games – read on for a full breakdown.
Things kicked off in the morning with talks from Facebook and the main sponsors in Pinewood’s state of the art screening studio, Theatre 7, before returning to the building where the jam was taking place, littered with a maze of tables, chairs, extension leads, bean bags and a lot of very expensive kit.
The Mutants, plus our buddy and top illustrator Drew Turner, split off into three groups (Rich/Chris | Ben/Tom/Drew | Andy/Myself), each picking a category and began brainstorming ideas. We quickly set to work and got stuck in, only stopping for food, bathroom breaks and the odd potter around the room to see how the other contingent from Plymouth were getting on (Gaz, James, Mike, Luke and Robin).
As evening drew nearer we settled in for a night at the keyboard, fuelled by beers, red bull and jelly beans. By 4am things were looking pretty hazy – I bailed out for a couple of hours of shuteye, leaving Andy at the helm of our game.
By the time I awoke at 7am, Rich, Chris, Drew and Andy were still at their desks, wired on enough tea and Capri Sun to take down a small elephant, Tom was facedown on a beanbag (but still breathing) and Ben had similarly succumbed to the temptation of a fitfull sleep curled up under a desk.
With the deadline fast approaching, we frantically worked to cross items off our to do lists and squash as many bugs as we could. At 11am we were given the order to stop working, and shortly after each group got two minutes to present their projects to the assembled crowd of judges and slightly dishevelled participants. These are the results of our efforts:
1. Burger Rush
Group Members: Chris Mayoh, Rich Searle
Group Name: Burger Boyz
Categories Entered: Best flash game for iOS, Best Use of Mobile
Game concept: Burger Rush is a cross platform Android and iOS multiplayer game of Jet pack tag. Airborne burger junkies battle it out for precious time holding the meaty treat, whilst building up their burger bar. Players must avoid other hungry Jetmen and hold onto the burger for 30 seconds, to be crowned the beefy champion.
Bits we want to finish: Tweak the net code, optimise connection algorithms, add a single player mode with simple ai. SHIP IT OUT!
2.ChaseBook
Group Members: Alex Ryley, Andrew Sargeant
Group Name: Zuckerpunch
Categories Entered: Best use of mobile, mobile social game
Game Concept: What if all your Facebook friends turned on you? What if you wanted to avoid any social interaction? It’s up to your finger to save your lonesome existence in this iPad game built in iOS Flixel by avoiding all your friends and staying out of the way. However, with Facebook, we all know there’s only one true winner, and he’s waiting for you, with all of your friends Facebook data, and all of his delicious money. At the end of time, who will be the one true victor?
Bits we want to finish: Get names of friends into the sidebar in round 2 (the sliding wall level). Add soundtrack and sound effects. Update fonts and a few visual tweaks.
3. Treated Accordingly
Group Members: Ben Reynhart, Drew Turner, Tom Platten-Higgins
Group Name: House Rules
Categories Entered: Best flash game for iOS, Best cross platform application
Game Concept: Treated Accordingly was inspired by the dedicated security team at Pinewood studios who serve and protect the star-studded list of actors and actresses found on set – mess with them and you will be treated accordingly! In a multiplayer top-down game, one player sneaks around the map taking photos of celebrities, while another plays a hardened security guard with a hatred for paparazzi. The catch? The happy-pap-snapper looks just like all of the other innocent tourists on set – until he takes a snap that is! Built using cutting edge peer 2 peer networking in Adobe AIR, the game encourages players to use a shared radar screen on a mobile device to assist them in winning the game. 3 Player AIR multi-platform top-down strategy game.
Bits we want to finish: Drop in AI characters, implement collisions and level dynamics. Expand to internal buildings?
The long road home
After sitting through some really impressive presentations, and congratulating the winners on their prizes, the lack of sleep and abundance of fast food and sugary drinks finally hit, and we decided it was about time to start the 4 hour trip back to Plymouth. Overall it was a great weekend, and a big thank you to everyone who helped put it together – we are looking forward to the next one!
This weekend the Mutant Labs team are heading to the Gamehack event at Pinewood studios for a weekend of game-creating action! We will be working with other indie game developers and rubbing shoulders with industry leaders, while loading up on unhealthy snacks and at least one trip to Nando’s.
From the Gamehack site:
It’s an overnight hackathon at the world famous Pinewood Studios and it’s all about making games! Big, small, native, web, single or multiplayer we think that together we can make something amazing.
Read more about Gamehack on their website.
Watch this space, we’ll be posting up the fruits of our labour to this blog!
The lab has rather predictably been a place for experiments recently…
Cross platform development seems to be ‘all the rage’ at moment. The very thought of being able to deploy a game across a wide range of targets without re-iterating code for each is something all indies’ are interested in.
Indies’ are interested because in principle, it means they will not only save money on development time, but also reach a wider marker and potentially make more revenue.
There are plenty of products out there that claim to be ‘cross platform’. Here are some of the more popular ones:
All of these technologies make claim of deploying applications across multiple targets from the same codebase. Exciting right?
The main difference between them is they all have their own syntax. Luckily for us developers, the syntax is mostly based on languages that we may already be familiar with (AS3, JavaScript, Lua).
As a developer, an obvious first move here would be to adopt the tech that is most suited to your skills, this makes perfect sense. This is exactly what we did.
Between the fellow mutants’, skill-sets are varied; with people specialising in AS3, Objective-C and JavaScript it was difficult to define something we all had in common. Rather than settle on a particular style of syntax, we decided to just lead with something that was Object-Orientated and strictly typed. This ousted Corona (Lua).
At the time of starting our research into these technologies, it was apparent that Haxe (pronounced ‘hacks’) was something that people were excited about.
Haxe is a ‘Universal language’ that can output to AS3, JavaScript, C++ and PHP (with C# and Java just hitting the latest nightly build). For those who are familiar with AS3 (ActionScript), this won’t look much different to you.
Although the Haxe API is very extensive, you have to rely on using either Flash or JavaScript libraries if you want to draw something onto the ‘stage’ when using Haxe in it’s primitive form. Unfortunately, platform specific libraries will only compile to their native target (flash.display.sprite will only work in the Flash player).
This leads me onto NME. HaxeNME is a layer on top of Haxe that introduces a fully-fledged ‘Flash like’ display list. In principle, this means that a developer who can write Haxe, AS3 or similar, can now compile native applications to iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and WebOS.
We benchmarked Domrein’s HaxeNME port of the Flixel demo ‘Mode’ against an AS3 version on an iPad 1:
HaxeNME port: 60 FPS
AS3 (Adobe Air 3.0): 12 FPS
As you can see, the performance is very impressive, even on older devices!
One bugbear for Mac/Linux users is there really isn’t any good IDE’s out there that fully support Haxe. FDT5 introduced support for Haxe, but it was very basic, with no auto-completion, refactoring or debugging. IntelliJ IDEA 11 introduced a Haxe plug-in – this was slightly better than FDT but still very immature.
We recently started building a game that is eventually going to be launched across both iOS and Android. This was our main drive for experimenting with some of these technologies. Our first prototypes were built in HaxeNME with the dodgy FDT plug-in. The process of setting FDT up with HaxeNME was really frustrating, coding blind even more so. We eventually agreed that unless there was better support for Mac or we worked in Windows, HaxeNME wouldn’t be a real world solution.
Thankfully, within the last couple weeks, Joshua Granick (@singmajesty) has been working on a new Haxe add-in for MonoDevelop. For those who are familiar with the wonderful FlashDevelop (Windows only), MonoDevelop will feel very familiar. Joshua’s add-in already supports auto-completion, syntax highlighting, compiling and debugging – quite impressive for a couple of weeks work. We tried out this add-in last week and it is awesome! We had some demo code up and running across HTML5, Flash, iPhone and native Mac within about 10 minutes. Thanks to Joshua, Haxe development on Mac is looking much more user-friendly!
Stay tuned for Part Two, where I will be looking at the routes we’ve taken to develop cross-platform applications for real (not pretend) clients.
To be continued…
The Apple AppStore needs high resolution images at 960px x 640px or 640px x 960px. Now if you’re like me, and developing on a 13″ MacBook Pro, you’re going to see the problem immediately… your screen resolution doesn’t go up to 960px in height. Uh Oh!
Luckily, there is a really simple solution to fix this. When you open your iOS Simulator, ensure that your on the iPhone (retina) in the hardware -> device dropdown, and also make sure you’re at full res in the window -> scale dropdown. If your simulator is off the bottom of the screen, you’re doing good so far.
Now for the magic, press Cmd + Left to rotate the phone, boom, now it fits on your screen. Use preview, or if you’re the Adobe type, Photoshop, to rotate the image to the correct rotation, and crop the screen.
There you have it, crisp, hi-res, AppStore screenshots on a 13″ MacBook.
