Tiny Tim Games

It’s taken a bit longer to write this post than I initially anticipated, but I have a pretty good excuse: My wife and I welcomed our daughter Guinevere Katherine into the world on March 22nd. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind around here ever since!

As I mentioned last time, enemies are next on the agenda. While writing enemy AI on a spherical world is mostly the same as it would be on a flat plane, the biggest difference is determining where the player is and then finding the shortest path to him. Since the planets in our game aren’t going to have any obstacles (at least, not yet), all enemies simply need a direct path to the player. But how can you get a straight path on a sphere?

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Now that we’ve split the News and Blog sections of the site, I feel more at ease talking about more of the stuff we’re working on without feeling like everything is some big official announcement. Just warning you up front, the games/projects displayed on this blog may or may not ever be finished or released. Think of it as a development diary, where you’ll see the creative process in action.

As promised, here is the first in a series of posts talking about another of our games that we currently have in development. This one doesn’t have an official name yet. We’ve been calling it “Sol Defender” for the time being, though it may not ship with that name. Here’s a very early screen with some temp art to show you what we’re shooting for:

Click to enlarge

As you can probably tell, it’s a dual-stick space shooter (stay with me) set on spherical worlds (like Super Stardust HD, Super Mario Galaxy, or Ratchet & Clank). We’ve got an interesting gameplay twist that we’re working on that uses the spherical worlds in a neat way, but I’ll save that for another post. For now, I want to give a little background on the project itself, along with some code that shows how we’re pulling off the spherical world effect.

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So way back in January, we started a project called Safety First, and I wanted to blog about its development. The problem with blogging about indie development is that sometimes life gets in the way (day job, baby on the way), and there’s just nothing to write about for a long time. There’s also nothing to write about if you run into a creative wall.

We had put together a few quick levels, and while the general idea was fun enough, I found myself unable to come up with interesting level designs. Part of this has to do with the fact that I’m just not that into level design. I like creating game mechanics, but I don’t necessarily like coming up with interesting variations on them. I guess that’s why I became a programmer and not a designer.

So is the game canned?

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Hello, everyone! It’s been a long time since we’ve posted anything here on the site, mostly because there hasn’t been a lot of interesting Tiny Tim Games news to report. The thing is, we’re always working on some project. Many of these projects don’t see the light of day, either because they’re too ambitious or just not fun. Plus, I come from the console development world where you don’t show off anything until it’s good and ready.

However, I’ve been inspired by some fellow iPhone developers to bite the bullet and fully document the development of a new Tiny Tim Game from start to finish. Call it a New Year’s resolution if you wish. I’m hoping it’ll feel like a breath of fresh air from the super secretive stance we normally take about our projects.

So without further ado, I present our next game:

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I love Unity! The Unity iPhone engine is a fantastic piece of technology, allowing us to quickly develop games without having to worry about a lot of the underlying stuff. However, Unity is essentially an additional layer on top of the iPhone SDK, which means that while the iPhone SDK may advance with new features, the Unity engine is generally a step behind with adding these features in a manner that can be easily accessed through script.

Enter Objective-C: This is the language that iPhone apps are usually written in. Unity provides some support for calling native Objective-C code from Unity script, but only for Advanced licensees and only in one direction. This can be pretty limiting especially if you’re trying to use a lot of the fancy features in iPhone OS 3.0. Sure, you can pass around information using the PlayerPrefs trick. But this has the problem of not being instantaneous, and it forces the app to constantly poll for new commands, which probably isn’t a good idea performance-wise.

What follows is a method for immediately calling Objective-C code from Unity script (for both Basic and Advanced licenses) and also vice versa! That’s right, two-way communication between Objective-C and Unity script that’s instantaneous.

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