Action Go “in action”

Here’s a video demo of my latest project, Action Go, in progress. I’ve got all the code from Go-Tetris (the flash version) ported, and capture / territory counts are updating correctly. Now it just needs a bit of visual polish, a way to switch between game modes, a help / tutorial screen, and maybe some GameCenter leaderboards and achievements. There are a lot of other things on my wishlist, like score multipliers when you make more than one capture/territory at once (super easy), or one I just thought of today — a bonus/multiplier for when you clear all of one color or, better yet, the entire gameboard.

Anyway, here’s the video:

ActionGo – Quick and Dirty

I’m still trying to finish up Catchup, the board game conversion that I’ve been working on for literally about a year now. (Obviously not full-time.) But I decided the week before last to take a quick break from it and update DrawCade to support the new MFi controllers. That took me all of about three days, (the second update, version 2.1 that fixes some issues from the 2.0 update is now live, yay!) But most importantly, what I got out of those days was a wrapper that supports iCade style controllers (pretending to be bluetooth keyboards), as well as the new GCController style controllers. (The Moga Ace Power and Logitech Power Shell are the only two available at the time of this blog post, but the first Bluetooth one has also been announced, but is not yet available.)

Anyway, I promptly decided I MUST create a game that would use the new controllers. The obvious choice is to port Go Tetris to iOS. This has been on my TODO for a long time, calling it Action Go to match Action Chess, but the big holdup was that I have never been satisfied with touchscreen controls for Tetris. It can be done okay, but not great. I’ll of course have some “okay” controls in there, but now that there are some viable controller options, I’m super excited to get it playable, and decided it was worth putting Catchup off for a few weeks to do so.

I started the project a little over a week ago, and promptly spent a day getting some cool menu animations (using AGGeometryKit) in there. I made the following video:

Then I spent three days preparing some changes to my GDC speaker proposal. (Which still hasn’t been accepted, but also hasn’t — yet — been rejected.)

If we were counting today, this would be the 5th day I’ve worked on it. I’ve got the tetris aspects pretty much done, but the piece capturing and two-eye breaking aspects are not yet complete. That is the bulk of the code that needs to be “ported”, and consists of about 800 lines of ActionScript. I’m maybe an 8th of the way there. Ironically, I’ve got the touch-screen controls finished, but still need to shoehorn my shiny new controller class in there. I decided I wanted it to be playable first. I’m guessing it’ll be another week or so of work.