Predator Paths

I'm trying to determine a good way for predators to move along a non-linear path. So far, I've tried making a custom action in coocs2d to traverse an array of points, which can be set up to follow curves. It works, but this is a bit clunky and requires a large point resolution. Maybe I'll play with some splines / bezier curves later (making use of my Numerical Analysis skills from college).

Better Gameplay Video

Here is a (somewhat) better gameplay video:

http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/entertainment/watch/v18645959zhg2S3eg

The predator system still needs work. I want to have better battles involved.

Gameplay Video

I used a screen video capturing utility to make a gameplay video (with the iPhone simulator):



It's really just a run-through of the available tools to mess with the worms. The starfish predator also makes an appearance. I still need to work on the menus and create the help option.

Sound Approval, Pixel Formats, About Menu, and Loading Indicator

I've managed to get approval to use a few sounds from http://www.freesound.org/ in Wormies, which is awesome (thanks to Jan 'fresco' Ripper, Ben Hillyard, and 'junggle'). Still waiting on responses from two other sound creators. If I don't hear back, I'll have to record the sounds myself. I'm doing all this because the license for using sound files from Freesound is a bit odd with commercial products. It seems to be okay if I "sample, mash-up, or otherwise creatively transform" sounds, but not if I use them in their original state (unless I get permission from the creators). The wording is a bit ambiguous, so I'm taking the safe route.

I messed around a bit with pixel formats for my sprites. It's much more memory efficient (and a bit faster) to use 16-bit textures instead of 32-bit for sprites, but they tend to look bad with gradients and details. I ended up keeping 32-bit depth for everything but the game icons (such as food items, predator warning graphics, etc), which are generic enough to look about the same either way. Hopefully this will be a good reduction in memory use.

Since I'm trying to round things out nicely, I created an about menu option. It brings up a sprite (with pre-rendered text/graphics) with information about the author (me), sound attribution, image credits, and the cocos2d logo.

Finally, I added a nice loading icon using Apple's standard UIActivityIndicatorView (the awesome swirling wait cursor thing). I think this is a nice touch, since the CocosDenshion sound library added a bit of time to the loading (which was near-instantaneous before). Not bad for a day's work.

Sound Ahoy

I finally managed to compile and integrate Steve Oldmeadow's great CocosDenshion sound library into Wormies, with some help from the man himself for getting around linker bugs. Right now it just plays a splashing sound whenever the screen is touched, but it's awesome to see it working. After adding some sounds and a bit of polish, I'll finally be able to release the game.