Minigore dev diary John isn't depressed anymore, he's surrounded in das INSANE mode! Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel Seems like several people are having problems with music and crashing on 3.1, that bug should be fixed in Episode 2. The inner workings of the OS keep changing and it's pretty hard to test 2.2.1, 3.0 and now 3.1. sic: Score duplication is a bug, it's fixed now. ttursas: I bought iDrop Dead and it's a pretty good game - you have much better font than ours As a game developer you probably know it's much harder to do 3d game than 2d so the content comparison is a bit misleading. There's another thing called effort. If your game was high end 3d like Stair Dismount Touch ( http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=6645 ) I don't think you would be adding 7 levels per update and the whole game probably wouldn't be ready yet I can do 10 helicopters like this in a day: This one took 2 weeks from me and the texture artist: You could say "well, that's one helicopter" but effort difference was insane. I think what people are noticing about Minigore is the effort. Even Apple has told us they like the quality of the content in Minigore. We probably COULD have put 10 guns in the first release but after 20 minutes of gameplay you'll notice only one of them is good because they're not properly play tested. As for money we had to take a loan to finish Minigore, that was a big risk. We do have some good connections but that hasn't helped us to get any updates out since releasing the first version. SimonWitton: Some features in the update: New OpenFeint, expert and insane achievements & modes, new difficulty curve to go along with it, flaming versions of the bigger furries, improved shotgun, extra health, furry sense, resume & save ability, "3.. 2.. 1.." counter when returning from pause, refined minifurry deaths & blood, fixed bug of shooting nearby furries, OS 3.1 fixes etc. Sceneshifter: 8 PM is evening for me, now it's 10:51 PM in Finland which I consider night. Fortunately the lens cap was automatic otherwise the video wouldn't be up yet ArtNJ: Hehe, that's a good reason to improve scores Cheers, Timo
Omg, the new update is definitely going to help me out. With improved shotgun firing rate & 3 lives now, I can finally pass my current score of 18.082 which it has been for forever now. Hopefully I can take back the leaderboard, haha. Great job Timo, now I just can't wait until I can play as Lizzie.
Yeah, I've created 3d model guns for Fallout 3 and the process really made me appreciate the difficulty and the time put into it. A lot of people don't know the steps involved and just think it's easy. First you have to create the model, and then do the grueling texture map (which might take as long as creating the model, at least it feels that way), then the texture, and then you have to animate it. Although - I'm not knocking your effort - I think the helicopter was a lot harder than your game content Minigore's models have significantly a lot less polygons than the helicopter, and less polygon = easier everything (still not quite easy, but easier).
Thanks Timo! Yeah, well, you can call me old fashioned, but for me graphics don't make a game. Give me 10 different exploding 2D choppers now instead of one Crysis-quality supersweet 3D chopper that cannot fire next Christmas. But well, the markets dictate what sells and what doesn't. And yes, it's much harder to do a full 3D game than a 2D game, but only little harder to do a 2D game with 3D graphics; All your logic is still 2D, only the rendering code is 3D (and we do render 2D sprites using the 3D hardware on iPhone, via OpenGL ES)... I really like your art style, and your game looks really sweet in the video. In fact so sweet that I feel like I've played through the whole game just by watching it. Oh, BTW, are we going to see that super cool 3D helicopter in MiniGore?
Awesome video Timo! I love how the furries fly off when they're killed! Can't wait! Just watching the video alone made me smile.
yea, if the blood could stay on the ground, that would be epic, at like 10000 you would be wading through blood
hey timo you know itd be awsome if you could make me a 3D John Gore with a shotgun and only one life left (with the cuts and stuff and the angry face) with a transparent background, for my theme if its not too much trouble?
Minigore dev diary Happy to hear that you liked the gameplay video Let's talk about zombies for a minute! For a good while now we've been trying to figure out a way to put them into the game. The problem has been how to make it run on anything older than iPhone 3GS with reasonable amount of zombies on the screen. We did some heavy optimizing during the last few days and I think the zombie apocalypse could be closer than you think! (Head pops open when you shoot once - check lower left corner - and the top of the head flies off if you shoot more - brain splatters when you shoot even more) There's some new stuff we're doing with the achievements. Example: The base achievement is unlocking "Character X" by killing 1000 zombies. There's gonna be several sub-achievements that award you OpenFeint points while your making your way towards 1000 kills. First subgoal is at 100, second at 250, third at 500 and the grand prize is revealed at 1000 kills. Of course that's just an example but you get the point. Aldex Oun: You're the original leaderboard number 1, right? It could be said that insane mode was built because you went over our magic limit Magic limit is higher now and it's harder to pass ...in case someone DOES pass the new limit we'll call the next level of existence "inferno" Or maybe we should just get you or some of those other 15 000+ scorers into the beta team hehe reinhart menken: Texturing and modeling was harder on the helicopter model than John Gore model. Optimizing, concept art and animating was harder on the John Gore model so the total work amount is pretty close when you take all that into account. ttursas: I can kinda see where you're coming from in the discussion. I've talked to a lot friends about game design and how to locate the "line" between gameplay and graphics or audio... They're all part of the same equation called "game". We humans mostly use visual and aural sensors to probe the world so that alone dictates that you gotta have at least some graphics OR sounds to make a game. But how much? That varies from person to person and it varies a lot! My perspective as a visual person could be explained like this: 1. Your character jumps from 1m tall roof. There's a small puff of dust and a faint sound. 2. Your character jumps from 2m tall roof. There's a big puff of dust and a loud sound. 3. Your character jumps from 3m tall roof. There's a huge puff of dust and the sound is very loud <-- for me details like that improve the thing called "gameplay" greatly. If it's a multiplayer game similar to Crackdown and I see huge puff of smoke on the street corner I know someone just landed there and I can prepare my my next move according to that. If the game didn't have that level of feedback I wouldn't know what's going on in this particular situation. I personally would make these 3 heights quite carefully before implementing more heights. Another comparison could be made from filming an event: Person A plants a camera in a tripod and records an earthquake. The event is recorded exactly how the camera saw it. Person B records the earthquake with 5 cameras. In the final footage this person captures "the feeling" of being there as a human by using editing, music and sounds. Watching it is like being there. Some people prefer the mechanical approach and some prefer the emotional approach, some prefer combinations of the two. My favourite games have strong characters and lots of artistic expression that are built on solid technical foundations. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are the two all-time favourites for me. If you compare those two games on paper to something like Final Fantasy XIII you'll notice that they don't match well with quantity. But it wasn't their intention to do 100 different enemies, instead in SOTC they made a horse that acts almost like a real horse. Ico had only two hero characters but the level of interaction went above and beyond anything seen on an FF game. In Minigore we've tried to develop an interesting & coherent world and a recognizable lead character with lots of charisma. The keyword above is coherent. Final Fantasy has green slimes, blue slimes and pink slimes among the Tetsuya Nomura designed masterpieces. I would never put filler characters like the slimes into my own projects. The characters have to look like they're from the same universe. All our co-op characters that are visiting from other games get Minigore art treatment so they fit the style, and they were carefully chosen. We made the choice to include characters from other games because players like customization in multiplayer. For story mode we will only use Mountain Sheep creations because that is the only way to make sure the pieces fit 100%. That other helicopter was from our earlier game Super Hind, this is the helicopter heading to Minigore: (notice more cartoony proportions) From a business perspective strong intellectual property is the best thing you can have in the game industry. Our last game was about helicopters and it's just very hard thing to sell to publishers when it's not about living beings "Ok, so the player is... a helicopter?" sums it up. If you propose Jason Bourne Helicopter Action it might be more successfull in their eyes Dark NRG: Yeah, we're improving the gore effects bit by bit Vester: Blood that stays on the ground is quite resource intensive once you start having hundreds of blood splatters but maybe we'll figure out a good compromise. On Xbox 360 you could easily draw it into the background texture and have infinite amount of blood. Azrael: It's submitted and has the new OpenFeint. (plus a couple of achievements) Combzzz: I hope this is what you're looking for: Aaargh, what a long post!! -Timo
Perhaps a less graphic intensive zombie minigame on the older iphone and ipod versions, and a more graphically pleasing minigame for the ipod touch 3gen and iphone 3gs?
Timo is my hands down fav dave here! Followed only by Slapshot, CEO of slapshot games! You guys rule!!!
