Back Again In 2017!
After another hiatus, Buggyz is once again under development. Watch this space for more info...
Jules of Nature

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pixel skylines

tannertan36
DEAR READER
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

Love Begins
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Cosmic Funnies
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Today's Document
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I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
occasionally subtle

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we're not kids anymore.

oozey mess
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

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@buggyz3d
Back Again In 2017!
After another hiatus, Buggyz is once again under development. Watch this space for more info...
And so it continues in 2016!
Well, its been a while since i’ve written anything on this blog - although i do wonder if anyone still comes back as its been about 6 months since my last post!
I took a bit of a hiatus from Buggyz development due to work commitments - primarily doing more stuff with the Oculus Rift with Unity and some other immersive projects. However, this has given me a new lease of life to resurrect Buggyz in 2016 and move away from the development with Codea and plough my efforts in redeveloping it with Unity.
I think i took my prototype as far as I could with Codea in the end. Whilst there was some sense of pride developing it on the iPad. Although as many Codea fans will tell you, it quickly becomes quite a chore to develop a large project with its rudimentary IDE and debugging capabilities. This also coupled with often having to code very basic functionality from the ground up (curves/beziers, UI libraries, 3D etc..) was proving to be less and less fun and slowed the whole process down to a crawl rather than concentrate on gameplay, mechanics and ‘look and feel’.
After doing more and more stuff with Unity, I realised that my development speed will be much quicker going down this route as well as being able to deploy to a much more diverse range of platforms. I’ve had a number of requests from Android users and will now be able to support this in the future. I also want to do an AR version, possibly with Vutopia, something Unity will let me do quite happily so watch this space.
Exciting times this year. Buggyz is back - so watch out for future updates over the next few weeks/months..
Cheers,
Andy Mc..
p.s. Feel free to ‘like’ this post if you’re still following this blog.
400+ Twitterers! Thank you for your support!
Once again, we hit another landmark.. 400+ Twitter followers - pretty good going and thanks to everyone who keeps coming back and checking the blog.
Its hard work at the moment as I’m pretty busy with refactoring everything and making the most of the some of the new features of the latest Codea build which should hit the shops shortly.
I’m now on the beta test list for this, so its great to have some input and give constructive feedback to the guys at Two Lives Left.
Hopefully, I can post a few new screenshots real soon..
Keep coming back or drop me a line if you like what we’re doing!
Cheers!!!
Buggyz back on the move again..
Its been a frustrating few weeks in Buggyz towers will some performance issues relating to the latest #Codea build. This caused about a 50% slowdown and thus proved difficult for me to continue testing temporarily. Luckily, there's been lots of other cool stuff to do in the interim to beef stuff up behind the scenes.
All credit to Simeon and guys at #twolivesleft who've been amazingly reactive in trying to fix the problem and i'm now officially a beta-tester for #Codea which is great. We've now got a beta-build thats fixed the performance issues and should have some news soon re: updates.
Most notably, the two player mode is well advanced and just needs the new GUI stuff reintegrating into the main code-base.
More news reeeeal soon... :-D
When GUI's go bad : Introducing gameGUI !
As mentioned, I've been re-writing much of the GUI handling code over the last few weeks as it quite frankly had become (as we say in England) a complete 'dogs breakfast' ;-)
Basically, game prototyping tends to go for quick results, rather than efficiency which leads ultimately to messy (or smelly!) code. It came to head when I was trying to implement a 2 player mode and it was just too painful to bolt on another GUI bodge.
To cap it all - Codea doesn't come with any UI toolkits or libraries as standard - so everything has to be coded from scratch.. groan.
gameGUI to the rescue.
Unlike grown-up iOS app developers who tend to want to use predefined Apple UI widgets that conform to Apples draconian design guidelines, game developers often want something far simpler and customised to the graphic look of the game. Hence, I wanted something that was easy to setup and allow me to create a whole range of customisable dialog boxes, buttons etc - something like this:
This shows a good illustration of my gameUI library in action - with buttons, a live numeric indicator and a simple gauge created as a 'collection' to form some sort of floating dialog box and took me about 10 mins!
Its written for speed of setup and lightning performance in the main draw() loop - certainly something I'll be using on other games in the future!
I've also migrated all the 2D graphics/UI development stuff from iDraw and Photoshop to Serifs excellent Affinity Designer on the Mac.
What I like about it, is it is a cross between Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and allows you to freely mix vector and pixel ops speedily with an easy to use interface. You can then easily export your assets/layers/slices automatically to individual images at the requisite Apple specs for Retina and non-retina displays (@1,@2,@3 etc..)
Adobe had better watch out, this is going to start nibbling at their heels.. Oh yes, its only £30 as well. A Bloody amazing and powerful package and a dream to use if your a game developer without the bloat of Illustrator or Photoshop!! Well done macaffinity !
Next week - the troublesome 2 player mode....
Buggyz : turned 1 today! Thanks for everyones support so far!
80 posts, 3,000 lines of code, 10Gb of data, 350 Twitter followers.. we're getting there...
More updates soon as we prepare for the big push towards a release in 2015!
Refactoring time once more at Buggyz towers - some nice views here of Buggyz running on the iPhone 5 and in the simulator in Xcode on the Mac.
I'll have to say its really coming on and the latest dev-build looks great on the iPhone!
p.s. Currently doing a major UI rewrite at the moment as most of the 2D stuff (score, laps, controls, feedback text etc..) was getting fairly cumbersome to add new functionality too.
Will shortly have a nice new shiny UI class to add simple modal dialog boxes, buttons etc. - coming to a futuristic slot racing game near you reeeeal soon! :-D
300 Followers on Twitter : Thank You!!!
Thanks to all our followers on Twitter - 300 followers in a little over 6 months with not much publicity.. Brilliant!
I haven't posted much on the blog lately due to refactoring and some other minor projects and tools I've been building (some to help support Buggyz)..
Watch this space for future updates!
HI There: Thanks for the favorite on twitter,We also just added your upcoming app to our facebook page Also would you like us to add your upcoming app to our twitter feed as well. Thanks Iwantitapps
Thank you so much guys that would be fantastic! We'll keep you posted when were close to release! Mr Buggyz
But what about the music?
I've had a few queries over the past few months about the in-game music for buggyz3d as I've written very little (or absolutely nothing!) thus far on the dev-blog on how i'm going to approach this..
I made a conscious decision not to be too prescriptive early on until I'd got a couple of development prototypes finished. I'd then gauge the feel of how these were working before I wrote myself a brief on what mood i'd like to set with the audio - as obviously this will enhance the game to a large degree. The temptation to 'sub-contract' this is huge, but as a musician, I've been pretty excited about getting stuck in and composing something for quite a while.
I've started writing over the last few weeks some musical 'sketches' of how things may sound - i'll put the 'best of' up on the blog in the next few weeks. But generally, I'm looking at some sort of funky/jazzy 50s/60's retro tune (and incidental riffs and loops) that goes with the retro-fururism vibe.
So I've been looking at distilling the essence of 50/60's cartoon tunes, Gerry Anderson themes (Joe 90, Captain Scarlet, UFO etc..), Lalo Schiffrin, Jonny Pate and a whole raft of Hammond Organ/Vox Continental inspired tracks - but with some sort of modern beat. Early days - but a good starting point.
As for composing/arranging, I'm using a few things - arrangements worked out first on 'real' instruments (my trusty Fender Jazz Bass and an old Yamaha CS1x) - I can then arrange these ideas in more detail on the iPad using mostly Cubasis, NanoStudio and Figure.
A special mention and shout-out to Cubasis (see picture!) - as an old Cubase VST user from the late 90's I'm amazed by the clarity and simplicity of its user interface and how well it works with the iPad.
I heartily recommend it if you're looking at something thats a notch or two up from Garage Band and want to dabble - despite the 'ouch its expensive' price!
Anyway, lets see how we go...
The Need for Speed (and coming off the rails!)
I'm slowly bolting on new elements to the game mechanics from previous prototypes. As well as some other cosmetic bells and whistles which really seem to help the gameplay.
This version (V37b) has:
- Buggyz now have the additional hazard of flying off the track if they hit a bend too fast.
- Controls have been changed a bit. The players buggy now automatically moves at a constant speed, but has a 'turbo' button and a 'brake' button that helps modulate the speed.
- A new smoke/dust effect when any cars collide and/or the buggy spins off the track.
The RED zones are visual indicators that the bend is quite sharp and the player should take care (see top view below):
Techy stuff:
So I hear you ask, when would a buggy fly off the track? Well, there are 3 criteria that need to be met:
1) Speed > Some Critical Speed
2) Angle Delta (the change in curvature between frames) > Some Critical Angle (as indicated by the Red Zone)
3) Duration in Red Zone > Critical Duration
Number 3) is important, as without this the Buggy spins off as soon as it it hits the Red Zone (which is particularly unfair and gives bad gameplay JuJu!). This gives the player a chance to correct their speed before they spin off. I guess this is probably equivalent to having better tyre grip - the better your tyres the longer you can ride a sharp bend before you fly off. This is something we can use to our advantage should we incorporate 'tyre' power-ups to give better grip or cars with different attributes (i.e. handling)
All in all, these 'core game mechanics' updates have really enhanced the game. It was far too easy before to win if you got ahead of the pack, now you have to keep an eye on your speed constantly!
Also, when a Buggy spins off, it can also wipeout other Buggyz as it effectively a collision object. This then can cause all sorts of carnage and pile-ups - which is really quite fun!
The smoke/dust element also works surprisingly well. Not only giving visual feedback that a collision has occurred, but obscures temporarily the route ahead, causing the player to re-adjust their strategy. This adds a nice game-play touch without too much coding effort and processor load.
I'm going to be bolting on more of these 'successful' prototype elements over the coming weeks as the game starts coming together.
Its really satisfying to see all the hard work in trying to get a playable game starting to pay off! :-D
p.s. the framerate of the video is around 23-26 fps. In reality, its double this running in stand-alone mode on the iPad. Codeas recording mode seems to drop the frame rate by half - so the speed of the game is far less languid than it appears!
The number one question people tend to ask me when they find out I'm developing a game is 'So, what will you spend your bucket loads of cash with after it's released?' I tend to smile wryly as I know the real answer ;-) As this article ( and my other dev blog posts) have highlighted - it's getting increasingly tough, even for hardcore developers to make any money, even to cover dev costs these days. I think iOS appears to be a marginally better platform than Android for at least making some money - although, the number of developers that make zilch per month is still worrying high. However, the article appears not to single out 'games' per se - so it would be interesting to see similar stats for 'games only' on both platforms. As I've said from the beginning, the formula for a degree of success still tends to be: Great product + extensive social media presence + solid marketing Let's see...
Another Demo Video!
Here’s one from a month or so back - powerups integrated and some other behind the scenes enhancements.
Who follows the Buggyz Blog?
After 8 months since the blog's been up - i'm always interested who (if anyone!!) keeps coming back for more..
Google Analytics tells me theres a few of you out there - but really interested where you're all from, what you think about Buggyz and iwhat you're up to!
Either send a message here or use the GET IN TOUCH button!
Thank you!!
p.s. The best response gets a free promo-code when Buggyz is (finally) released!
The majority of iOS users prefer iOS games that are available for free and supported with advertisements, according to a new study conducted by Wild...
Interesting article, but I guess bleeding obvious really.. (as we've discussed at length on this blog).. people just like free stuff. period.
Half way there : 6 things I've learned...
Well, after a good 9 months or so of coding, designing and generally plugging away on Buggyz, it looks like we are about half way through!
While the tendency would be to crack open the Asti Spumante and pat myself on the front a number of times - theres still not much call for celebration just yet.. as progress is, just as it was a number of months ago..bloody slow!
Interestingly such lulls in morale and paranoia relating to productivity tend to be fairly common amongst bedroom indie-developers - especially those with demanding day jobs and numerous other distractions. For this reason I'm not going to let it beat me up just yet - I just wish my 'to do' list would get just a bit smaller!
Some things I have learned is:
To try and do something on the project every-day - even if its s looking for useful articles/links relating to game marketing/design, designing an icon or commenting spaghetti code (of which there is a lot!)
Social media is fab. The Tumblr Blog/Twitter has been essential in keeping focussed and getting feedback - especially when theres something new to show. Its also the precursor to any marketing i'll do later. Followers = potential customers, reviewers or people to spread the word!
Game development is hard.. I mean, really hard. Coding and graphics are my strengths, but the game-play aspects are challenging.. Huge respect to other one-man-and-his-dog indie-devs who manage to crack this without cracking up.
I don't get hung up anymore on writing the perfect code, especially when i'm prototyping and trying out new gameplay or mechanics. This is really important. Re-factoring? Whats that?
Beautifully written code that takes weeks is wonderful, but it wont get your Granny excited. Get some pretty pictures out there regularly to boost morale of how it will eventually look. If they are moving - even better!
I've realised i'm an optimist and constantly delude myself that my deadlines are reasonable.
A few interesting articles from people in the same boat you may find useful!
A nice article to stem procrastination whilst coding and keeping things on track by John Resig can be found here.
How long does a bloody indie game take to make by Joseph Mirabello is here.
Both have great advice that I'll ignore..lol
Anyway, time to get cracking for the second half!
Ladies and Gentlemen, we now have Power-Ups!
I wrote much of this code originally on holiday (on the beach!) a few months back and after some unit testing have integrated it back into the main Buggyz code-base as I start refining the game mechanics.
Running clockwise we have:
TURBO - Increases the speed of the players buggy by a certain speed factor giving a few seconds of 'turbo boost'.
FREEZE - Slows all the opponents Buggyz down by a 'braking' factor for a certain duration.
SWITCH - Forces all the opponents Buggyz to switch lanes immediately if possible
HORN - Forces only the opponents Buggy directly in front of the players Buggy to Switch lanes (i.e. a ranged and focussed version of SWITCH)
While doing some initial testing, it was possible to win the race by simply using TURBO and getting ahead of the pack very early on. Hence, I've been pretty careful to ensure all the Power-Ups are balanced in terms of game-play and have some degree of jeopardy if used at the wrong time.
e.g. TURBO might be great when trying to overtake on a straight part of the course - but could make you fly off the track if you try and use it on a bend etc.. and using SWITCH might even make things harder to overtake once they've all switched, especially if the track narrows to two lanes etc..
I've still got a fair few decisions to make regarding how they ultimately will be integrated into the game. Most notably, How often they appear and whether I give the opponents the opportunity to use them as well - although this would add some extra loading onto their AI to use these strategically.
Its all coming together......slowly.