Shovel Shuffle: Dev. Update

It's quite obvious now that Shovel Shuffle won't be released this year. It failed submission last month and there hasn't been much movement on a solution. It may or may not be scoreboard related.

If I can't get it sorted out by the end of January I'll consider taking scoreboards out, which is a shame because it took about 10 evenings across about a month and a half to put it in. I was making improvements to other parts of the game at the same time, so it's not a total loss.

On the flip side there's time for the art to be changed. Does anyone want to make a little bit of 2D art? I don't think I have anything of value to offer in return.

Introducing Shovel Shuffle

I can now reveal my second PlayStation®Mobile game is called Shovel Shuffle. It's a number puzzle set in an underground mine. The objective is to dig as much as you can without crossing your path.

You dig by selecting a square in the direction you want to travel. The distance you travel is the same as the number written on the square.

I think this is a game for all ages. You can try it for free. If you like it, consider buying the larger stages.

Stay tuned for more details.

Next Game Progress Update

Good news, I've got to the point where my next PSM game is almost ready for release.

Bad news, I jumped on the scoreboard bandwagon and like a few other developers I'm sitting on my hands waiting for the next SDK update because scoreboards are slightly broken at the moment.

Text Rendering Optimisation

I finally got round to optimising the text rendering in my PSM game. I was seeing around 75 ms frame time on my text heavy stats screen because of the large amount of text, it's now down to around 3 ms.

Still here

I'm continuing to make slow progress on my next game. All the core game mechanics have been completed.

I'm now trying to figure out the best way to display scores and various other stats for the user while making it as simple as possible to develop. I thinking of some kind of split between online/offline stats like Vita's trophies app. Fiddling with UI placement is so time consuming. In comparison the UI in Touch Treasure only lets you choose the game mode or proceed to the next screen.

The game is quite ambitious for my attention span but I think it's still possible it will see a release. There's so much left to do. I was going to list it all but ended up deleting that part of the post because it looks like too much work.

Touch Treasure: One Month On

One month has passed since Touch Treasure was released. It's definitely exceeded expectations and higher ones will be set next time.

Progress is slowly being made on a new PSM game. It's not feature complete so there isn't much to show yet. It will probably be freemium. A timed trial sounds nice, but it's probably unenforceable because this is not built into PSM and the system clock can be changed by the user.

PSM Development: Time

I've seen some people describe PSM games as "looks like it took less than a month to make". Well, the "looks" part is probably true for Touch Treasure but it did take longer than a month to make.

Here's a breakdown of where the time was spent making Touch Treasure.

You can see a small proportion of time was spent on creating and tweaking the actual game play  Putting together all the supporting elements like results screen, mode select screen, statistics tracking and save data took longer when combined together.

About half the time was spent on the framework and optimisation. Not particularly surprising since it was my first PSM game. The framework should make a good starting point for future games.

Introducing Touch Treasure

Touch Treasure is a simple touch-only game where you have to touch as many treasure boxes as possible while avoiding the bombs.

You can play against the clock or for as long as you can before you run out of lives.

 

Touch Treasure will be released Summer 2013 for PlayStation®Mobile in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, UK and US.

Post titles are so hard to think of

My first game for PlayStation®Mobile-compatible devices should be appearing on the PlayStation®Store shortly.

In addition to announcing games I'm thinking of using this blog to share some of my progress with PSM development.

To begin with I'll explain where I'm coming from. When I came across PSM it looked like a good way to have some fun making games and sharing them with others all while making good use of my PS Vita.

I'm more interested in the programming side of things and from my experience this usually ends up with lots of unfinished ideas and projects that never get a public release. So for my first game I tried to keep it as simple as possible so it stood a chance of getting released.

Hopefully at least one person can have as much fun with my games as I do making them.

Welcome

Hello! You've managed to come across my blog. I'm not quite sure how this thing works yet so please be patient!

I'm going to be using this as part of the PlayStation®Mobile Developer Program (a website is required to publish).

I plan to release something simple on PSM soon.