Hey All,
We are now 2 months into the development and moving along nicely. This week I finally faced what I thought would be the biggest hurdle in the development and that was getting the game compiled over to my phone.
Fortunately this was not as difficult as I thought it was going to be. I had some very good articles to step through the process of generating the Apple certificates and setting up Xcode. Once I got that all configured, I configured GameMaker for the port and glad to say that on the first try everything worked!! It was a very cool moment in the development to see our game playable on the phone for the first time!
So in order for this to be playable, I had to create the touchscreen controls. Went with a virtual stick for movement and virtual buttons for action inputs. All I had to do was map everything over from keyboard and mouse to the touchscreen and MFI controller. Yes the game is coded for touchscreen and MFI controllers, as well as game pads / keyboard and mouse for PC.
For now the main menu is not interactive on the alpha phone version. I have it in place so once you tap on the screen it auto selects new game. I will have this interactive in the next week.
Touch controls that are complete are:
- vstick
- action button for attack
- 1 power use button
- pause button(accomplished by tapping the coins counter in top right of screen) will add a pause icon for clarity
- the whole pause screen, inventory, is interactive with touch controls.
What I need to add is one more power up button for the 2nd power up slot, as you can equip and use 2 at the same time.
The graphics for the buttons and vstick are not final. These are just placeholders until the final design.
Also added a fade out effect to the game over screen when you run out of health.
Over the next week I will be finalizing all the touch controls and main menu. Once that is done it’s back to finishing the design of the levels for world 1.
The following gameplay video is recorded from my IPhone 7 Plus. All videos and screenshots will now be from the iPhone version of the game.
Thanks for reading and checking it out.
