Neo Circuit 2 update


Well most of you (probably only a few anyway) thought  Neo Circuit 2 will probably never  see the light. Well as I have not written a single word since July here, I would have thought the same. But actually you are wrong! :)

 

As I have only a very few hours a week left to work on a side project and unfortunately their are so many good games out which have to be thoroughly tested, it really took a lot of  time to port the game to Starling.

 

The good news it. It runs currently at 60fps on an iPad2. The first version of Neo Circuit was performing really bad on iPad2, actually around 20-25fps and worse on the later levels. I tried one of the most critical levels with lots of nodes and powers on the screen but the frame rate was very stable at 60fps.

 

To make this work I ported parts of the Flixel to Starling. But there is not much left from Flixel  to be honest. Most of the classes are completely refactored. I removed TweenLite classes and replaced them with Jugger.tween from Starling, which  pools the tweens. Without pooling you are going to have horrible lag spikes on mobile devices. This change plus some other small optimizations actually made it very stable on the iPad2.

 

I did not work on the AI yet, but I tackled one of the most important parts of the game play,  the node take-over. It was not really well done in NC1.  As you can see in the screenshots, its kind of implemented, but still WIP, as the whole art is as well. The node has now to be captured with 50% of its available space. If this happens you get the node loaded with 50% of its power. I have to play around with numbers, but it already feels quite ok. It slows down the game play but I think that is a good thing. The game gets much more tactical because of this.

 

For the UI there is a really cool extension for Starling. It will greatly improve the UI look and feel of the game. You can find an example here: http://feathersui.com/examples/components-explorer/

 

Still lots of work has to be done. But the cool thing is, the main game-play loop is working and I can now focus on making the game better. I will hopefully post more updates in the following weeks, but I won’t promise, as my day job is taking 120% of my time already ;) .

Popularity: 7% [?]

Development of Neo Circuit 2 started today!

Today we started working on Neo Circuit 2.

We will work with the starling framework and abandon Flixel. Adobe is really supporting the framework and is developing Flash and Air for mobile further. Recently they introduced concurrency to flash, which will end the single-threaded times of AS3. Soon they will support compressed textures in starling which is quite cool. We did also have a look at the nd2d framework from nullsoft, but it does not seem to have a very big community yet, so I decided to start with starling for now.

Neo Circuit 2 will definitely take quite some time, as  we got a very cool full time job at flaregames which does take most of our energy. Nevertheless we will try improve Neo Circuit 2 as much as possible. Neo Circuit 1 earned us 6000$, it currently has around 1.800.000 play sessions and is still played around the globe about 2k-3k times every day. The average play session is 25 minutes, which is cool! The iOS version does not make much money yet (30-50$ bugs a month), because there are too much flaws and we did not promote it because of that.

 

Here is what we probably going to change:

  • scrap Flixel and use starling framework for better performance on desktop as well as on mobile devices
  • new art style and better UI
  • adding cool particle effects and other nice gfx effects
  • lots of new levels
  • improved AI
  • difficulty levels will be redone  (variation is missing yet)
  • player color selection
  • re-balancing of all nodes to make the game more strategic
  • new nodes and level elements
  • conquering of nodes will be reworked
  • upgrading nodes will be redone
  • tutorial improvements
  • neutral (grey) nodes do not have to be conquered anymore
  • node info screen showing strength and weaknesses
  • new music and sfx
  • integrated unlock-able level editor
  • even more unlock-ables and easter eggs!

SKU’S

  • sponsored flash version of the game (probably with a reduced feature set)
  • a purchasable AIR application
  • free Android app with Ads
  • paid iOS app

Features which we will evaluate

  • allied AI
  • replay mode
  • levels can be uploaded to servers
  • player can vote on levels
  • node tech tree coupled with achievements and unlocking more features in the game as e.g. the editor
  • multiplayer mode (probably too difficult to do with our limited time)

Please let me know if you have more ideas.
More infos will follow ASAP!

Popularity: 26% [?]

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