posted
Correct, updates are automatic and free. The financial rules are:
* you 'buy' the game (but you are not charged yet, they just verify your credit card)
* you play the game up to 24 hours
* you 'return' the game, and then are never charged.
or
* you 'keep' the game (no action required, just don't return it)
* you DO get charged $1.99 (of which I get to keep about 40%, after google and taxes)
* Thereafter you own the game for all time, even if you uninstall it (you could then reinstall it later at no charge)
It's a pretty nice economic model (except for the 40% part :-)
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The only guessing game for something like Rune Runner is: When it's completed (and fantastic) I will probably raise the price, at least a little, but it will depend on how amazing it turns out.
At that point, if you hadn't bought it at the $1.99 price, you would be stuck buying it at the new price.
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Oh, and for the larcenous readers, no you can't just buy it and return it within 24 hours, day after day. Once you return it it, you lose the right to return it again. So if you DO buy it a second time, you are stuck with it (well, you will really get charged for it.. you can still uninstall it to make room on your phone, etc.)
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But if you DO uninstall it, you will lose all your character data (that's where I get you!)
But you can 'move' the game to an SD CARD (and then remove the SD Card to 'park' your characters)... I haven't actually tested that yet but I think it works :-)
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And for the larcenous readers, moving it to an SD Card is how you can ultimately attempt to steal the game. (Please don't, of course). Today you would be successful, but eventually Android games will all have dynamic revalidation at run time at which point it would DEFINITELY be more hassle than it's worth to steal a $1.99 game. Other than for entertainment purposes, so I fully expect to encounter people willing to take on the challenge anyway.
But please don't. Thanks!
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10560 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
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posted
Minor achievements in modelling for Rune Runner
A simple 'tent' I expect to re-use a lot:
My first tomb stone:
Lots of quests need tombstones, right?
I need 'lots' of little set pieces that can be reused for camps, villages, etc. Main emphasis should be on "you are pretty much always outside" so you are always walking "on the ground" (no flat marble floors) so the set pieces are discrete things that look right 'on the ground'
Someday, I hope, I can have interior 'dungeons' that are probably a single (infinite) large floor (marble), without stairs, and a maze of walls.
Well, I say "without stairs" but of course what I MEAN is a very specialized stairway object that links two floors, so you can wander the maze of level I until you find the steps to level II, etc.
Then I can generate those randomly, if needed, for 'infinite boring replay' :-)
posted
Are you planning to tweek the graphics on your own, or are you going to get someone else to do them, like Josh did for the Well of Souls graphics?
And I fixed a bug in my particle system which only became apparent when I had more than one campfire going at the same time.
Some random shots (these are not layed out in any particular nice way, I just dropped the new pieces on a grid for testing). I might need to add some sort of 'set designer' tool just to make my own life easier.
So, a sunken temple sort of shot, with 2 wall pieces, one 'broken'
A guard tower, with a nice wooden floor up on top. Imagine four of these connected with walls for a sort of 'fort'. I guess I should make a matching 'gate' sort of piece. Hmm, a functioning drawbridge maybe.
Is it Doric? Is it Corinthian? Is it Ionic? I bet it is 'none of the above' but hey, I can put these at crazy angles for a ruins. I should make a 'broken' one though.
Everybody loves crates, right? GOTTA have crates. The new campfire is a Very Nice Model, though it doesn't look all that great in this screenshot. Artistically though, it was quite an achievement for me :-)
IN addition to actual model/texture contributions (MilkShape super-low-poly, of course), I'm also completely open to suggestions for set pieces, monsters, etc.
I'm extremely tempted to make a sort of plastic 3D 'foot' (like a 'stratego' piece holder) and make some monsters with Josh's 2D art as a texture on a flat surface in 'the boot' :-)
Though I guess it would be completely WoS-ish to just 'float' them :-)
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10560 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
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posted
I just downloaded it on my HTC Incredible. It looks like you have the beginnings of a great engine here. It runs beautifully on my phone (in case you were wondering, since there's so many variations of android hardware).
One thing I would like to see at some point would be for the ability to tilt the camera up and down, though. I oftentimes found myself losing my sense of direction as I traveled around, as it was pretty difficult to see where I was going, particularly at night (which, might I add, the day/night system is another great feature.) Overall, great job so far and I'm definitely interested in seeing where else you plan to take it.
posted
You can control the camera by sliding your finger along the edges of the screen. The right hand edge controls tilt. bottom controls pan, left controls zoom.
and thanks for the kind words!
I hope to add some amount of auto-tilt, but it's tricky since it can easily lead to sea-sickness. My thoughts were
* when you click on a monster, auto-tilt to bring it completely into view
* when walking 'forward', determine elevation X meters ahead of you and tilt a little if outside of some comfort region. This one would definitely need to be an option you could turn off.
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10560 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
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posted
Well, now I feel dumb. =[ Looks like that starting map was appropriately named!
Edit: Looks like sometimes, the big text in the center of the screen gets cut off when it's too long. For example, when I finished the quest to obtain the Lv. 2 Shield, I was informed that I "ompleted: Defend Yourself Bett".
I cranked the settings way up to see how much the phone could handle, too. With draw distance maxed and mipmapping on, and all other settings set to High, I average about 10 FPS. Restoring them to their defaults gives me 18-20.
I'm tempted to make prettier icons and buttons for you. Do you have the filetype and size listed somewhere? =x
posted
no problem, you inspired me to improve the tutorial a little.
I am shocked that you would criticize my buttons!
But which ones in particular do you find the most egregious? I know I need to ultimately redo all the buttons on the New Character screen, but I haven't decided exactly where I am going to go with that screen. I am trying to avoid being a large-inventory game (since Android conspires against that) and yet I know people like to play dress up and collect stuff. So PROBABLY the new character screen will change and/or be available in-game to re-tweak your character later.
And I know the 'random selection' stuff is a cop-out for now :-)
I probably will just have to remove that 'completed' message (or remove the quest name from inside it) as I really can't guarantee to fit a large name. It's redundant to what I put in the scrolling text window anyway.
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10560 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
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posted
The ones that are most jarring to me are the icons representing the runes, which ultimately look more like brightly coloured rocks, or maybe crystals; and the battle icons, particularly the "stun" attack. What's up with the Z? Is Stunning the foe actually more like putting it to sleep?
Admittedly, it could just be that as someone whose job it is to create visual designs, I like to see very, very pretty buttons on a GUI.
And yeah, I was going for a 'rune crystal' sort of thing in eight colors named after gemstones (onyx for the black one, diamond for the 'white' one). It's a color mixing game where the primitives are red/green/blue, the secondaries are yellow/purple/aqua and the final is 'white'
The funky 'red/green/blue on one button' thing is to open the "Rune Weaving" mini-game.
And the three attack actions need to connote "big attack on one target", "medium attack on multiple targets", and "medium attack on one target, but with possibility of stun" And yeah, stun is like being put to sleep briefly.
Files are PNG, 24 bit color, alpha, as in these files.
I look forward eagerly!
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Wow, these PNGs are huge. What's up with that?
That's why I still love jpg, but PNGs are what I use for textures. I need all the detail I can get there :-)
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Here's the JPG 1/5th the size of the PNG, for those people in the audience who claim PNGs are smaller than JPGs. You don't get lossless at no cost :-)
Dang, I can't really see the difference. I expected it to be more obvious.
posted
Thanks! I'll download them and see what I can whip up! My own personal idea when I think of "Rune" is "some sort of rock with a glowing design emblazoned on it,"
Also, I see a HUGE difference between the PNG and the JPG, though that could also be the design student in me again. A few things that caught my attention right off the bat:
The color is faded throughout the image compared to the PNG. For the most noticeable aspect of this, compare the towers in the PNG to the towers in the JPG. The PNG towers are darker. Also, the little red thing sticking out from behind the wall in the foreground is hardly visible in the JPG due to the compression.
The JPG has significant distortion, particularly around the text. The compression is wrecking havoc on the image quality. Another noticeable part caused by the same effect is right under the wall in the background.
Once again though, noticing such stuff may not be something to expect from everyone. I'd imagine my pickiness is more relatable if you think about a programmer's tendency to look at someone else's code and wonder just what the HECK that guy was thinking when he coded it that way. =P
Edit: Oh yeah, and I also noticed that, when getting a new weapon/armor upgrade, the rune that's slotted inside said piece of gear gets recharged to 100% durability. I'm not sure if that's the intended effect or not (I read through the "manual" on the site), but I'm posting it here just in case.
posted
Yeah. I think I did that 'rune-recharge' on purpose, sort of like when I give you an hp refill on level-up.
But I am always looking for ways to spend runes (looking for rune-sinks, I mean, to keep the rune economy from being too inflationary :-)
It's important to me that the runes have those strong eight colors though. (if you're curious about the order in the table, it comes from this:
the 4x4 elements are indexed as:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
the runes are in 0-7, which when expressed as a binary number each of the three bits controls one primary color from RGB
code:
# RGB 0 - 000 - ... - black (onyx) 1 - 001 - ..B - blue (sapphire) 2 - 010 - .G. - green (emerald) 3 - 011 - .GB - aqua (aquamarine) 4 - 100 - R.. - red (ruby) 5 - 101 - R.B - purple (amethyst) 6 - 110 - RG. - yellow (I think I say topaz) 7 - 111 - RGB - white (diamond)
Also, I guess I am married to the 'crystal/gem' concept, so really you have to stretch it to call them runes...
I need "strong-colored-crystal-gems-possibly with a glowing rune carved in them, whose glow magically looks nice inside the available space :-)"
Anyway, the color stuff, and the "diamond is most valuable" stuff is all central to the game's mechanics. The crystal metaphor works perfectly... I just need to call them runes, coz the game's name came first :-) (My lovely wife suggested it :-)
I tried to etch a rune on the crystal image to no avail (not enough pixels to look right.. within my skill set, I mean).
I currently render the runes with a tiny bit of alpha to try to make them look more crystalline, but mainly it just makes them look faded. I suspect they need something more like the Apple 'jelly button highlight'
And, of course, I also need to cram that number in the corner (the count of how many you have). That has to actually be inside the image square (I mean, I draw it on top of the image, but has to be inside the square since it ends up using the same 3D texture.
Anyway, lots of interrelationships in every ugly bit of art in the game
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10560 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
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Upon receiving a new (steady) job and subsequently a smartfangled phone, one of the first tasks i took upon myself was to purchase the Syn-Real Android trifecta.
[you rock! Thank you! -s]
Warpath is a bit complicated for me just yet, and tairu is casual fun (widescreen support would be great) though Rune Runner shines. Just to note I get a smooth 20-30 fps on the Droid 2 depending on what's on screen.
[That's great, thanks -s]
I'd followed the thread through it's development but i've done a reskim recently. I've only completed the first few quests or so but I have some general notes.
I'm interested to come up with some models/textures/buttons myself, but i'm curious as to why text is grainy. Are these pre-formatted text bitmap images you've put a border around to pop up? Some vector based text would be welcome, can there be an option to make text smaller?
[The problem with text in a 3D app is that I have to render it onto a texture of fixed size, and then that texture can be zooomed in or out as needed to fill the portion of the screen required. If I could make that texture 1024x1024 then all the textu could be crystal sharp. But there are serious restrictions on the texture size, and the largest I was able to make it was 256 pixels wide, and that leads to the 'tutorial text' being as blurry as you saw it.
Now, as it turns out, I recently saved some memory (memory is critically short in supply on the Droid Eris) and I was able to increase this particular texture to 512 pixels, so in the next release the tutorial text is 2x as sharp. Still looks a bit blurry, but it's not as awful as it is in your version.
Now the OTHER solution is to have a separate texture for every letter of the alphabet (100 symbols times 32x32 px texture per symbol) and then render text as a billion critically placed copies of these symbols. I think this is OK if all you need is a high-score number or something, but for lots of text in lots of colors with the occasional graphical decoration, it's just way too much trouble for me. There are intermediate solutions (like breaking the full width into two textures.) I do that on the STATs screen with a separate texture for each section. Anyway, that's a 3D hassle I don't much enjoy having to worry about :-) Hopefully the next release will look sharp enough. The title graphic suffers a similar fate. I set up a Galaxy Tab emulator just to see how it looked there and it gets pretty darn blurry. OH, also in the next release I corrected a MIN_FILTER bug that was making the text particularly awful in the raw case where the texture was actually being shrunk, instead of enlarged. So several things should look a little sharper in the next release. -s]
Keyboard support (with keymapping). About 1/3 of the android phones out now have a keyboard slider, and while I understand this is a large undertaking, possibly in the future, after it's "finished" it would be a nice addition. Utilities like the Game Gripper (warning, gaudy flash) overlay a little rubber controller on the keyboard.
[The future holds surprises for us all, myself included. BUt at this point I am against physical keyboards. Well, that is to say if I end up with chat, I will clearly accept keystrokes from your physical keyboard if you have one, but I am resisting the urge to have any sort of keyboard use for casting spells, etc. Likewise I am avoiding the joystick, mainly since the Droid 1 joystick is pretty lame -s]
Multitouch in terms of zooming in and out in the world and on the map would be helpful if not camera view then surely the map! If i understand it you may have the Droid 1, which doesn't have native multitouch, but it sounds like you might have an incredible to test multitouch support. This is one of the first things i tried and was disappointed when it didn't work out.
[Yeah, now I am kinda glad it's not fully supported (my real fear is that Apple will successfully get it removed from Android entirely, even though they didn't invent it. I think they DID patent it.) I don't think I would ever use pinch zoom on the main window, as you pointed out, but it would be OK on the MAP screen (and I would still have the buttons for people who don't have multitouch)
My experience with multitouch has been a little less than impressive though, (on iPod and Mac laptop) with pretty frequent crazy mis-interpretations. Probably just my crippled fingers... I would like multitouch for stuff like "modifier keys" and "crafting gestures" -s]
It can get tricky knowing exactly how far off to the side of the screen i need to scroll to zoom, or to move the view. But for the most part it has been intuitive. Possibly a (very light) bar could make an appearance on the right side when you zoom in and out, and disappear when you take your finger off, with the ability to turn this on and off, of course.
[That zoom is not intended to be continuous.. I just react to individual taps with a fixed percentage in/out per tap. Do you think those percentages are incorrect? I think the only REAL reason to zoom at the moment is to see multiple NPC markers that might otherwise be overlapping :-) -s]
Stars in the sky would help to differentiate it from the ground, they can even be fetched from RC!
[I still hope to have a real skydome eventually.. clouds.. sun.. moon. And weather.. and ground cover... for phones that can handle it. -s]
Equipping runes to your equipment i forget what does the red do again? sapphire? etc.. When equipping runes it would be nice where it says how many you have left, to also note what it does for you.
[heh, yeah. I just fixed a bug in my color math where equipping a 3-color rune (diamond) would basically quadruple your hit. Not my intention. Basically, right now (next release). one color hits harder than 0 color, two color hits harder than one color, etc. And by two color I mean something like Amethyst, purple, RED + BLUE). My poorly formed thought is that each primary color (RGB) will be like an elemental association (fire/spirit/water) and the monsters would have similar associations leading to a rock/paper/scissors sort of effectiveness of things. So equipping the perfect rune would deal the most damage to a particular monster, but that might ultimately just be more complicated than I want to do in what is supposed to be a pretty casual game of hitting stuff. -s]
Tombstones are a nice addition. Even nicer would be some flavor text when you click on them! Or the ability to set your own with your own flavor. Is this game going online at any point? I understand not to the extent of WoS, but d/ling tombstones and their flavor text would be kind of neat.
[heh, I am always looking for model suggestions. I just made the tombstone coz I saw one somewhere and thought "wow, that model would be easy enough for me to do!"
As you notice I don't even have wall collisions, let alone hit-testing (tap-testing) on anything but characters. Being able to sense a tap on a tombstone (or a rock) would probably end up compromising the ability to tap on the monster. But I was thinking of SOME triggered actions, like tapping the tombstone (or whatever) might make the drawbridge go up/down.
I'll post my online plan after this
-s]
Small bug(?) I've tried using a red rune right around or at the time of my death against a foe. The rune doesn't get used up, but it still needs to recharge. I guess this isn't major as you'll probably implement more-serious-death in the future.
[probably :-) I have several bugs in those timers at the moment -s]
By the way, what are those floating witches hats over some camps...teleport locations?
[they are enlarged versions of one of the shields, before I had made any other models I lazily used them as 'something you could see from a distance' But recently (you noticed) I made them only present at teleport destinations, and I was idly thinking of trying to imply they were teleport arrival funnels and you would actually get squirted out of them on arrival.
They are also at a calibrated elevation to help test the flying mount physics. -s]
Is there no way to set your own character name? Any reason for this. I found an aptly named 'Her' and stuck with it, though i hadn't fancied the other auto-suggestions. \
[I have been pretty pleased overall with the name generator. I got "Soul" "Hero" etc on various occasions But mainly that's about my not having dealt with the keyboard issues yet (WarPath has text chat). But it also more or less solves the "Player X makes a rude name to offend Player Y" which I would love to avoid. But once I let you chat, I lose that protection anyway. -s]
Enabling elvish translation (i think) caused the game to direct me to download SpeechSynthesis Data on my device when i next tried to open it. Maybe a warning would be well suited, or for upon activating that feature, displaying a message about it then taking you right to the market.
[Yeah, that's why I made it an option. SOME people have the stuff pre-installed (I did, obviously) but MOST people don't. Only laziness prevents me from adding a confirmation dialog box. You go through several confirmations as it is, just none are 'in my name' so it's admittedly confusing. So confusing that having it on by default seemed a way to frighten people into not trying the game. Since it's optional, I can't really use the feature for anything TOO important. But I am using a little trick to make it sound slightly interesting (I think). But it may not last. -s]
I'm surprised you only end up with %40? what a gyp! Alas It's still something. I look forward to future development!
[%40 ? You mean my 40% of each dollar income (after google and taxes)? It's probably closer to 45% depending on my tax bracket at the time and how serious we get about deficit spending -s]
I feel like I did this before, but I am too lazy to look,so it will be fun to see if I end up saying the same thing or not.
"The Path to Multiplayer Rune Runner"
First off, my experience with WarPath so far is that MANY more people play it solo than online. Ignoring whether the game is fun or not (LOTs of people play it solo, so it's not COMPLETELY un-fun), I think people are not always looking for a multiplayer game when they have a few minutes alone with their phone. Possibly if I made it more facebooky and emphasized hooking up with your friends, instead of playing with random strangers, that might make the dynamic different. Still, it only gets played multiplayer a few times a day.
Anyway, so I am not 100% convinced that phones are a great multiplayer platform yet. But, of course, since when has lack of audience ever stopped me from adding multiplayer to any old game? CLEARLY the whole POINT of a PHONE is to interact with another person, so it WILL become a multiplayer platform, just one that needs to survive frequent loss of network connection.
With that said, here are the 'stages of multiplayer' as I see them occuring, roughly in order:
* no multiplayer at all (now)
* vague knowledge of anonymous others. In this mode you never interact directly with other players, but some server tracks general usage patterns and something in the game displays those stats in some way. For example some text "50 people played Rune Runner today"
* add demographic element "Today the GOOD alliance played for 20 minutes, but the BAD allianced played for 24 minutes"
* Add competition: "The GOOD Forces are winning the tug-of-war meta game that you see as some sort of map that is being taken over by one side or the other.. possibly reset every day/week as a 'campaign'
* Add Unlocks "Because the GOOD alliance is ahead this week, your GOOD characters can access ingame MAP x, Spell Y, monster Z, etc"
* Add Buddies/Guilds (or facebook integration) to give you some web stuff to do (and advertise, of course)
* Add Guild competition "Winning guild this campaign week is Blah" "Guild Blah has played a total of 23 hours.."
* Add buddy chat.. you don't see your buddy in-world, but you get notified when they are playing and can chat.
* Awareness of who is online. You see a specific list of who is playing, which guilds are playing, with some loose knowledge of where people are, but you still don't SEE them in game.
* DUEL mode. You can CHALLENGE someone to a duel. If they agree you both go to the same map (the Duel Map) and you duke it out just the two of you. No one else sees you. There are no monsters. no cooperative play. No questing. Results advance tournament ladders, etc
* MultiDUEL mode. Like Duel, but more than two players... Parties picked from people online. Duel launches when enough people have joined the fracas (like signing up for a dungeon)
* In-World Awareness. You see people walking around on the same map as you (when they are close). But you only see your own monsters. You have your normal view of the world, with a few other characters wandering around.
* Full-on synchronized cooperative Play Parties. You form parties, one player is the leader and THEIR game manages AI as the group wanders the world. But tricky visibility issues. You see the monsters the leader sees, so if you wander far from leader you see no monsters.
* anyway, around here it starts to fall apart and there would have to be a lot of success in the earlier phases to justify continuing.
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Anyway, my point is that I favor time-shifted play. Where something you do at 4pm makes a difference to what I see at 7pm. We don't have to play at exactly the same time to enjoy each others contributions.
Or if we DO play at the same time, we do our own things while chatting. With the occasinal really specialized interactions (like maybe a 'trade' dialog where we exchange goods)
Anyway, something like that. But I like the thought of a collective effort to unlock a new map, or something like that.
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But hey, you're right, one such interaction could be death notices. When you die in your instance, I send a gravestone to all other players and they can see it where you died :-)
Anyway, the trick is to do things that are actually fun, and not just things that are hard and maybe not fun....
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10560 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
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posted
NOTE: It appears Google followed through on its threat to reduce the free trial period from 24 hours (overly generous) to 15 minutes (foolishly short).
They SAY they did it at the demand of the developers, but there is a huge uproar over it with 99% of the developers thinking it was an insane move.
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10560 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
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posted
For $2 few people could expect a refund on anything.
I did get a new HTC Incredible the other day, and as soon as my screen protector comes, I'ma try out the trifecta of synthetic-reality games.
-------------------- SoV: Exalted Devout Oracle | World Developer | The Black Guard Outside is just a prank older kids tell younger kids at Internet Camp Posts: 9479 | From: NY | Registered: Apr 2003
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