Bad news. Andy (user name TrueAxis on TouchArcade) has left the company to retire from game development after 25 years in the games industry. He was the one doing all the work on space tripper and was pushing for absolute perfection. Unfortunately, every time the game was running perfectly on all hardware, a new iOS update would come out which was slower then the last update, and cause more problems. That and constant distractions from JCS updates kept this game in a constant state of a couple of months from completion. I still want to find a way to get this finished, but things are very busy at True Axis with out Andy now. I will have to bring in some people to help. I have to find out exactly what has to be finished, I think it is just adding connectivity and fixing up a few small things. The last version I saw looked amazingly smooth at 60fps, but i think there is a troublesome iOS bug on one device where input occasionally lags extremely badly. Anyway, there are a few things that need to be organized and sorted out before I can announce what will happen with Space Tripper on iPhone.
You need some help ? 'cause this is really an incredibly work ...it will be a total failure to not put this game on the appstore... Give a beta for some users for testing, finding bugs etc... Andy has done such work on this...
Awww. That really sucks Best of luck Andy. Hope you find more success than what you did with iOS development
That does suck. Well, keep working hard. You're an awesome dev team (Jet Car Stunts was perfection) and we will be encouraging you the whole time. Good Luck.
Aww. I'm sure Andy has good reasons for leaving, but I have to say that is really disappointing. JCS is one of my favorite games, not just for iOS but ever, and that game alone has made True Axis one of the best developers around, so it's really a shame to hear the team has broken up. Well, I'm still confident that you will do a great job with your projects. Here's to hoping that Space Tripper is still coming...it's definitely one of my most anticipated releases, as anything from True Axis would be.
I think 25 years is a long time in the game dev industry, I've been making games professionally a bit over 10 years, and have seen a lot of people come and go in that time. It takes a lot of passion to do well, and it is hard to keep that up forever. Jet Car Stunts was kind of my game but I would never have chosen to do with with out Andy's encourangement, he was the one that sugested the iPhone was begging for this kind of a game. He also put in heaps of effort to make sure it would run absolutly as smooth as possible on every piece of iPhone hardware out there as well as with various different iOS updates.
Hopefully we will still find away to get this out, but things have been pretty crazy here with out Andy.
I've started working on Space Tripper my self recently and I it is starting to feel like it might see the light of day. The game was running beautifully when I took over from Andy, but quite a few things where left broken after the last around of optimizations. I've got the game stable again now and an working on the menus and connectivity at the moment. I'm putting in OpenFeint integration because I think it will let me finish quicker then using straight game center. I'll be putting in something similar to the challenge mode which is on the PS3 version of space tripper. Still need to get that fully working. Need to add some safe state stuff. Looking into cloud storage. Once that is all done and the game is finished, I will check the performance again and decide what hardware to support. We most likely will only support 3Gs and up, but there is a version the runs well on older hardware as well, however I'm worried that trying to support too much hardware will lead to more delays. I would be a pitty though, Andy did a epic amount of assembler optimizations to get this game running smoothly on the older hardware. Too bad that every iOS update slowed the game down requiring more optimization.
Still slowly getting things done in between all the crazyness. I got the Congratulations screen to animate correctly now. It wasn't working before after all the iPhone optimization. I've got the "Score Attack" mode working now where you can choose any level to play for score and post best scores online. There are still some menus not fully working. I am currently fixing up the options menu. I just got screen rotating and tilt calibration working but still need to make the sfx and music volume sliders work. I also need to get progress saving and options saving to work. Then I will need to get some QA done.
Space Tripper has entered Beta and is entering QA now!!! I'll be taking a bit of a brake for my self the next couple of weeks though. Basically, after that all we need is to get approval from Pom pom, test on all the hardware, and fix a few bugs, then we can submit for release. If nothing goes horribly wrong, we might be looking at releasing in october, or possibly even before.
Thinking about that, but it may not be that helpful considering it is a port of an existing game which is already well tested.
