Wormies is released :)

Wormies is now available in the app store, ready to accept your money :) . I forgot to post about it here when it first came out, so better late than never. Here is the iTunes link:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=329545695&mt=8

Thanks for supporting my tedious, time-consuming hobby. I'm now starting to plan out another iPhone project... hopefully a fantasy action-adventure game of some sort.

Hooray, Wormies has been submitted!

I finally submitted Wormies to the App Store yesterday. It's been a long development process... I hope it fares well in the vast competition. The ~5000 apps and updates submitted per week will dwarf it pretty quickly I imagine, but oh well. Here is the large App Store icon:

Moving Along to the Finish Line

I've been finalizing some little details in the game before release. The title menu now has proper buttons, with a copyright message, and no more FPS display:













I've also made a nice help menu slideshow explaining how the game works. Predator attacking now works pretty nicely, with predators moving along a curved path and a health bar at the top:



Really all that's left is testing and tweaking the game to be a bit more balanced. I've recruited my friend Paul as a beta tester, and the game seems to run properly on his iPhone 3G. Almost there :) .

Awesome Title Screen

I finished making the game title out of moving, randomly sized and tinted worm sprites. It looks pretty sweet:



Now I need to improve the other main menu "buttons" (aka, make actual buttons instead of boring text). As for the actual gameplay, I need to finish making the curved paths for predators, and make sequences for winning and losing the game. Progress is happening, though slowly :) .

Worm Movement

I've been working on making the worms follow your finger as it drags along the screen. This will be used in predator mode to attack or retreat. So far, I've used the vector angle of the normalized touch point (assuming each worm is the origin) to rotate worms, then moved them in a straight line to the destination. This works, but it seems a bit choppy. I need to come up with a way for them to smoothly follow paths.

I've also made some tweaks to improve collision detection efficiency. This helps a lot with large worm counts.

This game is sure taking me a while to finish. Hopefully I'm getting close by now.

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.