Lords of Midnight – Update

MorkinI finished some work on the character select screen last night, which means that that is now good to go. I also built a version that was uploaded to my iPad, which means we are back up and running on the device. This has been sent to our potential artists for them to look at. It also means I have a test to see if we can get the app out to other testers…

I now just have the load & save screen to be implemented before we are green light on functional testing. That is, test the game for gameplay issues. You should be able to fully play the game through on the iPad. This is prior to some new features and the relevant eye candy changes, not to mention final graphics. But it should allow me to check for device and porting issues.

Once the iPad test version goes out I will spend a little time making sure I have dealt with the iPhone4(s) and prior. This is mainly an asset issue and dealing with different resolutions.

After this I will likely make a Windows and OSX version available for testing. Again this is to just increase the scope of gameplay testing, and not necessarily to focus on what a desktop version would look like.

I will spend a little time on an Android tablet version and Playbook version. I will not be looking at Android handsets during this phase.

I am now hoping to be ready to start pushing test versions out from the end of this month.

We have a collective of artists potentially prepared to work on the game, which means we can start honing in on the visual requirements of the game. I can hopefully announce more about that in the coming weeks.

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Slow development week

I got a new iPad on release day, and I have to say it *is* lovely. The screen is just amazing. Can’t wait to fire LOM up on it, and also I can’t wait to see LOM running with some proper higher res graphics on it. ( BTW: Mike and I have had some discussions with a collective of artists who currently develop on iOS, and it is possible that they will be picking up the reins on the project – more of that in the future )

Anyway, tried to add the new iPad to my develop setup only to be told that I needed a development version of iOS 5.1. So, I did the usual and updated XCode. XCode has been supplied from the Mac App store for a couple of updates now, and Apple took this opportunity to finally change the installation. It used to install to a set of folders inside /Developer but now it installs as a single app inside /Applications.

The knock on affect was that it removed my /Developer folder, which removed the Marmalade SDK. No problems really, I needed to install the latest SDK anyway.
Only, after I did, nothing worked anymore! So not only was I able to target my new iPad, but I was unable to compile and test anything!

I could of course uninstall everything and go back a few versions, but I figured that I would post a support issue on the forums and hope for a quick resolution. Turns out that there was a simple fix, telling the system where the XCode tools now reside using xcode-select. Only it took me until last night to get it actually working.

The knock on affect – no LOM development since last Friday! 🙁

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Lords of Midnight – Lord Select

Screencast of Lords select screen concept demo. Running in the simulator.

This shows grouping.

** Work in progress **
** Placeholder Graphics **

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Lords of Midnight – Video Footage

Ok, sorry it’s taken so long… but here is a bit of video showing the app running on an actual device. Some caveats…

1. this was taken by my daughter using my iPhone, therefore the quality is poor. But then it wasn’t about showing you the graphics! 🙂 – I will try and do a proper one later. But it may just be that screencasts from the simulator will be better in the future.

2. none of this is final. Placeholder graphics, placeholder ui, placeholder placeholders…

3. this is the first time I have run in on the hardware for some time. I have been through a number of Marmalade SDK changes in that time. This was one of the reasons why it has taken so long – I couldn’t get the deploy to work!

Subsequently, there are a couple of issues. The main one that dragging the main view around doesn’t work, thus the default to click on the left and right side of the screen.

Also, the character selection screen was mid working. So all that you could see was dragging one lord around, with his grouping circle on!

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Lords of Midnight – Video Footage Follow-up

I spoke with Mike about releasing some video footage, and he’s up for it. I just need to put the process together. I have a few things I want to finish off on the character selection screen and then I’ll do it. I’ve been busy over the last 2 weeks with client work, so progress has been slow. But things should return to normal by then end of this week.

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