You may have noticed that we are working on Archibald’s Adventures sequel. The work was delayed by the PSP port of the original game, which took more time than we have expected, but it’s finished now and we can fully focus on the sequel. I would like to write some introduction of the game and its basic features and how the game should differ from the original one.

Platforms

When we were developing the original Archibald’s Adventures game, we made several decisions based on what platforms we wanted the game to run on. This affected both gameplay and technical implementation. Looking back, all these decisions turn out to be based on wrong assumptions and didn’t do much good to the game. Also they were limiting us while making iPhone and PSP ports of the game. That’s one place when we want to make difference with Archibald’s Adventures 2.

The former Archibald’s Adventures was released for huge amount of platforms: Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Palm OS and PSP on the way. This was great experience and at least we know to never do it again. It’s funny that the game was initially focused on Windows Mobile and Palm OS and only later ported on iPhone, while profits were just opposite: the game was most successful on iPhone, mediocre on Windows/Mac and total flop on Windows Mobile and Palm. And we will yet to see how the PSP turns out.

So Archibald’s Adventures 2 will be released for iOS (iPhone, iPad), Mac OS X, Windows and possibly PSP (if the sales of the PSP version of the original game won’t be good, we won’t probably bother to port the sequel to the PSP because the process of getting a game to PSP is quite complicated).

Controls

The controls is the main area we want to improve, mainly on iPhone. When we were making the iPhone port of the original game, we didn’t have much experience with the device and the plan was to get the game released as soon as possible so the controls are not ideal. The virtual cross-pad is too small for many people, the switching to second mode when the cross-pad is hidden and the hero can be controlled by touching the screen is not much intuitive, and I suspect many people didn’t find the option to configure the controls because it is visible only in the in-game menu, not in the main menu.

In the sequel, we want let the player to choose from several control modes: virtual cross-pad (with customizable size), virtual analog pad, swipe controls and touch-the-screen controls. Also the game logic will give additional support to the controls – for example if player input can cause two or more different moves, the game will choose the safer one (it is safer to stay stick to a wall instead of jumping into a pit etc).

The bubble is dead. Long live the lifter.

There won’t be the bubble in the Archibald’s Adventures 2 any more. But don’t worry, it will by replaced by a robot, which we call “lifter”. Lifter is flying robot which can be remotely controlled and which is able to grab and move crates, push levers and do other things like the original bubble. But many people have found controlling the original bubble frustrating because of the slow movement and its weird bounciness. The lifter will move similarly to hero, will have properly defined collisions and won’t bounce. It is also possible that the lifter will be able to receive new features during the game, but this is still undecided.

Levels

We want the sequel to be more focused on exploring. We really like games like Knytt or Lyle in Cube Sector and we were thinking about creating one big continuous map, made of many screens joined together. But such solution has several drawbacks: The most common is backtracking, where players need to (or have to) return to previously explored areas. Also we liked the freedom to choose any level to play in the original game, so for example if you have a few minutes while waiting at a bus stop, you could select some small and fast level and keep any complex level for later. It is hard to keep this feature if the game would be one big map. We could put teleporters to the map which would allow faster transitions among unexplored areas, but it is still not ideal. Also one big map tends to contain puzzles and quest of type “bring here the item X from the other side of the map”, but most of the iPhone players prefer “casual” playing games for few minutes a day. And if you play games this way, you don’t want to remember each time you run a game what did you do the last time, where you need to go or study any quest log – you just want to play the game for a while.

So we decided to do something in between. The “choose level” menu will be replaced by a simple overview map. We want to get rid of the menu because the menu distracts from the game’s atmosphere and mood. The original menu in the game was a compromise to support all the different platforms and screen resolutions. Within the map you will be able to jump to any unlocked level. Each level will be standalone level with its own puzzles like in the original game. Completing a level will unlock surrounding levels on the map. This allows the player to skip the levels he don’t like or which he founds too difficult but still fits nicely into the game and adds at least a bit of exploration experience.

And more…

There are also many new gameplay features and improvements to be revealed (you will love Archie’s new animations and his new movement abilities), but I will keep them for future posts for now. So stay tuned!

On 8th Januray 2009 Archibald was released on iPhone App Store. It took almost two months from the time the game was running on our iPhone to the time is was released on App Store. But we are happy Archibald finally made it

Finally we have finished Palm OS port of the Archibald’s Adventures game. Few weeks ago I was decided not to bother with the Palm OS platform, although the game’s engine was 90% Palm OS ready. The game was randomly crashing on my Palm Tungsten E and if you have been ever developing for Palm OS, you know that debugging is really painful. Also the life of the Palm OS platform seems to be at its end.

But once we finished the Pocket PC version of the game, I thought to myself that it would be shame not to invest few more days into finishing the Palm OS version. More than two years ago when I’ve got first idea about the game, having fresh new Tungsten E in my pocket, I was eager to make some game for it. So at the beginning the game was aimed mainly for Palm OS, with intention of porting it to Pocket PC platform later. But things often don’t go as intended.

Initial graphic concept of the game

Because development for Palm OS wasn’t really easy (everybody was waiting for Palm OS 6 and for easy way of making fully ARM native application – which sad to say never happened), we decided to re-aim the game for PC, Mac and Pocket PC, letting the Palm OS version stuck in “we will see later” state.

So with Pocket PC version completed, I have decided to give the Palm OS one more try. We don’t expect many (any?) sales here. Finishing the game for Palm OS was just more a matter of making it done and beating the problems with the plaftorm than anything else

So we hope there will be at least few people who will enjoy the game on the Palm OS, even if the requirements of the game are relative high.

Also note that the Palm OS version of the game has all features included, no feature was stripped from the game. This includes:

• 8 different music tracks (MODs)
• more than 80 ingame sounds
• all 114 levels

There also few restrictions of the Palm OS version:

• movement in the game can be controlled only by stylus, hardware buttons are not supported
• only low-resolution graphics is included, I think there isn’t Palm OS powered device with VGA resolution 480×480 or higher anyway

Boovie

We are proud to finally announce Archibald’s Adventures for Pocket PC and Windows Mobile platform. You can now enjoy the game even on your handheld devices. The mobile version includes:

- All 114 levels from the original game
- Support for both low-resolution and high-resolution devices, including but not limited to 240×240, 320×240, 320×480, 480×480, 640×480 and 800×600
- Support for any screen orientation (landscape, portrait)
- Support for Pocket PC 2003, 2003SE, Windows Mobile 5 and Windows Mobile 6 powered devices

Of course you can try the demo version, which includes 30 levels from the game. The game requires stylus and touch screen.

If you have already ordered PC or Mac version of the game, you don’t need to buy the game again, although we would appreciate any support. Just use the registration code from your PC or Mac version and it will unlock the mobile version. Although we know that this decision can make the game more subject to be pirated, it just feels right to us.

The game supports virtually any screen resolution and orientation. The minimum supported resolution is 240×240. If your device’s display has smaller resolution than 480×480, the game uses low-resolution graphics (tiles 25×25 pixels). If your device’s display is 480×480 or bigger, the game uses high-resolution graphics (tiles 40×40 pixels, same as PC and Mac version).

For now only English version of the game is available, but we are working on locatization for other languages too. Czech and Russian versions are already finished, German and French are in progress. New Archibald’s Adventures release with all languages is planned at the beginning of 2009.

Along with the multi-lingual version we plan to release update with at least 50 new levels. But don’t expect some easy levels for kids, that will the hardest levels in the game

For those of you who are wainting for the iPhone version: altough the game is completed, we have run to problems regarding Apple and App Store, so the game won’t be released on App Store sooner than in Q1 2009.

Boovie

Hello friends,

Here is the first video of Archibald’s Adventures running on my iPhone device. Only few things need to be fixed before the game can go gold:

We need to polish default controls a bit, we are still not sure how to combine virtual gamepad and mouse-like controls. Maneuvering Archibald using a finger the same way as using a mouse on PC can be a bit confusing if virtual gamepad is visible on screen, mostly for people who don’t have experience with PC version.

Also we need to go through all levels in the game and fix few places where the game gets more difficult on iPhone than on PC, mostly because performing several actions at once is not so easy with one finger

And of course we need to test the game on iPod Touch and original iPhone, but I don’t expect any problems here.

Several technical details about the game:- Archibald will run locked at 30 fps on iPhone. At this frame rate the CPU usage is about 35% on average, which is fine and won’t drain battery too much and the gameplay is still smooth enough. Without locking the frame rate the game’s fps varies between 45 and 60 (depending on amount of rendered graphics).

- All sprites and textures are loaded at startup and occupies 12MB in memory (textures are stored in format using 2 bytes per pixel). Only images from intro, outro, credits and ingame texts are loaded and unloaded dynamically on demand.

- Most textures are same as in PC version. Only fonts, intro, outro and few other images are special. Levels are rendered scaled down to 80% in comparison with PC. Bilinear filtering ensures high quality of the scaling.

- Sounds and music are not different from PC version. For music we use MODs with up to eight playing channels. Because of the MOD format we are able to keep entire music under 900kB in the application bundle.

- Size of the entire application bundle is 9.1MB so far.

Boovie

As you may have noticed, we announced Archibald’s Adventures for Pocket PC (Windows Mobile) platform coming soon. We were developing Archibald from the beginning with intention to release it for mobile devices (it was even running on my Tungsten E Palm).

Because of the nowadays boom with iPhones, we have decided to port the game to iPhone first and delay the Pocket PC version a bit. Even thought the Pocket PC version is 80% complete, the iPhone is more important for us because of these reasons:

- Everybody says “jump on the iPhone train while it is still moving fast, in a few months the boom will be gone.” For independent developers like us each dollar is important to be able to continue doing the work we love so we should take the chance. Pocket PC platform will still be here.

- Working with unified (and modern) hardware is always a pleasure. On the other side, handling software and hardware compatibility on Pocket PC devices can become a real pain and we should get prepared for that.

So here is one screenshot from current version of Archibald’s Adventures running on iPhone simulator. The graphics tiles are scaled down to 80% against PC and Mac version (iPhone tiles are 32×32 while PC tiles are 40×40 pixels).

Archibald running on iPhone simulator

The game is running fine under the simulator, including sound and music. The most important tasks we still have to do are special controls for controlling Archibald’s movement (and movement of his bubble) and testing the game on real iPhone device. By default the game will be controlled by semitransparent virtual gamepad on screen as you can see on the following screenshots. Each part of the virtual gamepad can be configure and positioned on screen as you like. It will be also possible to control the game the same way as on PC using mouse. The game will support both landscape and portrait modes.

Landscape mode

Portrait mode

Although my iPhone device is lying here on my table in front of me, we are still wating for certificate from Apple to be able to test the game on the device itself. Until then I can’t upload the game to the device so I can only hope the game will run fine

It seems than waiting times for both iPhone Developer Program and releasing an application on App Store can get up to one month. It’s not a big surprise for me, there must be really many request on Apple because I was browsing App Store for a while and it seems to be flooded by so many “made-in-one-day” applications (and the people and even charging money for them :-O I hope Archibald won’t get lost in this clutter.

Also we are thinking about the price we will charge for Archibald on iPhone. It seems we can’t get higher than 10$ because there are not many games with such price. I’m afraid that many people will complain even for $10 as there are so many games for just 1$, ignoring the fact that Archibald will have more than 110 levels and hours of gameplay. We will see…

Boovie