Insight VR

A bunch of indie Mac and iPhone developers have gotten together and are going to donate all proceeds from the sale of their software tomorrow to various charities in Haiti.  The site is at http://www.indierelief.com/.  I tried to get in on the official effort but I guess I heard about it too late as they’ve closed off submissions.

But I won’t let that stop me from participating. In fact, I’ll go them a few better and donate all Battle for Vesta proceeds from today, tomorrow, and the next day to Healing Hands for Haiti. That’s the 19th, 20th, and 21st of January. I’ll post totals when they’re in. I’m guessing that they’ll be modest, but if you want to have some fun blasting asteroids and help out people in need, here’s your chance.

I’m doing a pricing experiment today. I’m dropping the price of Battle for Vesta to $0.99 to see if that increases revenue at all. Given that $0.99 is pocket change it should increase the total number of sales, but it will have to more than double them to increase revenues. Of course there seems to be a massive race to the bottom in the App Store, so maybe I have to price at $0.99 to be competitive.

About 12 years ago I had a CS assignment to write an asteroids game called Blaster over the course of a week using OpenGL.  Technically we were using Brian Paul‘s Mesa3D library on Macs that didn’t have any hardware graphics acceleration.  The assignment only had a few requirements, such as 3D asteroids that broke into smaller asteroids when you shot them and other simple asteroids gameplay features that you would expect.  Most implementations were pretty vanilla, as time constraints and performance problems limited what could be done.  Each time the class was taught somebody would go overboard and make a fancy version of the game that performed well, had some particle effects, and perhaps an enemy ship and then give it a name such as Super Blaster.

I started working on my 3D asteroid code first.  While we could simply use a GLUT primitive for the asteroids and get full credit I thought it would be fun to try to write a 3D fractal routine for the asteroids.  That went quicker than I had thought it would and soon I had some very dangerous looking asteroids floating around the screen.  It seemed a pity to shoot them in a 2D plane.

I had recently picked up a freebie Rubik’s cube at a job fair.  Some company whose logo has long ago faded from my cube was claiming that they were only going to hire geniuses and were using a 3x3x3 cube to symbolize that.  I was wondering how to make a compelling 3D asteroids game and staring at the cube when I had a realization:  a 3D implementation would be fundamentally different from a 2D one in how you handle the edges of the world.  In traditional asteroids you can fly to the edge of the screen and you’d pop out on the opposite site.  In 3D with a first person view you still needed to have some sort of world boundary or you’d need a limitless number of asteroids to fill the area.  In order to get the same wrapping effect in 3D I imagined that the world was the Rubik’s cube and my ship was always in the center of it.  If I moved forward in reality all of the asteroids would be moved backwards.  If an asteroid left the bounds of the cube it would “wrap” to the other side.

I coded this up pretty quick and began to play with it.  Then I had another realization:  It takes a lot of asteroids to fill a 3D space.

In a 2D asteroids game if you’ve got ten asteroids on the screen, that is a lot to have going on.  In 3D asteroids if you have 10 asteroids in the world you’re luck if you ever see one, and hitting one doesn’t happen by accident much.  So I increased the number of asteroids a great deal (around 100) and then things began to look like something.  But then I faced another problem.  Shooting 100 asteroids isn’t fun, it is work.  Finishing a level would take forever and would definitely not be fun.  Clearly I needed an objective other than clearing the world of asteroids.  So I put in some enemy ships and gave them some simple AI.  The objective became to shoot the enemy ships while dodging the now plentiful asteroids, which you could shoot if you wanted to.

I wrote this on a 16MHz Mac Performa using software rendering.  Moving all the objects around didn’t create a performance problem, but making the screen very large did.  But it ran fast enough to be playable in a 320×200 window on my Performa and luckily it was graded on a 300 MHz machine that could run it fullscreen at 640×480.

I got a good grade and one of the TA’s even got me into the SGI lab and we did a quick port to an SGI machine.  By quick port I mean about 30 minutes to get the input stuff moved over.  Other than that it just ran, and ran quickly at high resolution.

A few years later I had a ThinkPad for work which had a mediocre graphics chip in it, but that was better than nothing, right?  I ported the game to Windows and suddenly it flew.  I had to implement some timing routines to slow it down to 60 fps.

Here’s a screenshot of it running on Windows:

As you can see I’ve changed the original ship design for reasons that should be fairly obvious.  For those that can tolerate the ugliness of an old Angelfire page you can find a working download of the Windows port and complete source code here.  About that same time I did a quick port to Linux as well.

Now here we are 12 years later and I have more computer in my pocket than I had on my desktop in college.  The iPhone has more powerful processor, more RAM, more storage, and a decent graphics chip.  Once I got a dev kit I began porting the game.  It took about a day to get a stripped down version of it working on the iPhone.  So my college project began its journey from Blaster to being Battle for Vesta.  The main change was the move from display lists to vertex arrays for OpenGL ES.  That didn’t mean that I had something I could put on the App Store, but it meant that rather than starting from scratch I had a core engine around which I could build a game worth putting into the App Store.  One thing worth noting is that the bulk of the code is still C++.  I have yet to learn Objective C and really didn’t have any need to do so for this project.

Several weeks ago I ported the iPhone version over to Python.  This involved a lot of searching and replacing to remove the C++ syntatic sugar but didn’t require an substantial changes to the OpenGL code.  That effort took about 8 hours and allowed me to quickly experiment with different collision detection optimizations in Python, which was much easier than doing the same experiments in C++.  I’ll admit to having become a Python bigot and that my C++ skills are not what they once were.  Having a Python port also allows me to use my strange pySight and wiiMote stuff that runs in Python to control the game.  That version runs on Mac, Linux and (I assume) Windows.

Now imagine if instead of OpenGL (ok, Mesa3D) we had used some early version of Direct3D for my graphics class.  Not only would everything I wrote have been deprecated five times over by now and what platforms would it run on?

There really is something to be said for open standards and libraries built on those standards.  While there isn’t enormous value in an ultraportable 3D asteroids game the same principles apply elsewhere.  If you are writing something that is going to have a useful life beyond a couple of years you should consider carefully the core technologies that you use to build it.  Don’t be distracted by buzzwords and whatever the most recent flash in the pan is.  Even if what you are working on seems like a throwaway code, writing it for portability can allow for opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise be available.

For the curious here’s what it looked like on the iPhone at version 1.0. Now it has some textures to liven things up. [EDIT:] I’ve lowered the price today to $0.99 in case anybody wants to try it out on a whim.

Several weeks ago John Gruber linked to a web comic about app rejections and made a joke of his own about the efficiency of the App Store. My experience is that after the iTunesConnect site went down for maintenance and a holiday break on December 23, 2009 and came back up on December 28 things have been considerably more efficient. My game was submitted just before the site shut down on the 23rd. I have no idea if they were working over Christmas and the weekend while the site was off, but the game was approved shortly after it came back up on the 28th. The first update was approved in four days. The second update was submitted at about 4 pm today. Email notifying me that it was approved arrived at 8:19 pm.

I have no idea if this is unusual or not or if it is a result of changes implemented recently. I for one am happy with the results. In any case, after the amazing amount of criticism that has been directed at the approval process over the last 18 months, it seems only reasonable to point out when they’re doing something right.

So Battle for Vesta has been live in the App Store since December 28, 2009. In that time I’ve posted about it in forums, promoted it on this blog and Facebook and Twitter, given away a lot of promo codes, and posted on a lot of forums. I created www.battleforvesta.com and posted a trailer and videos of gameplay on YouTube and Vimeo. I’ve also emailed dozens of iPhone app review sites. So far one of them has been kind enough to send an automated acknowledgment of submission email, in which the site admits that it might never even look at my game and even if the game gets looked at it probably won’t get reviewed. There has been no response at all from the others.

In short, while I haven’t done a perfect job of marketing my game, I’ve done as well as I knew how to at the time and have learned some lessons. I’ve also set up Google alerts so that if the game gets mentioned anywhere I know about it and can respond appropriately.

Marketing an iPhone game is incredibly difficult right now. The market is crowded (much of it is crap) and it is very hard for casual users to discover new apps that might interest them. With this in mind I’ve priced the game at $1.99, so that it can be an impulse buy. While I think the game is worth more than that, I didn’t want the price to be a barrier to people that were merely curious about it.

So after being live on the App Store for a week I’ve sold about 30 copies and about the same number of people have turned in promo codes. I’m not ecstatic about those numbers, but I’m not surprised either. I will say that I’m a bit disappointed in the unwillingness of people to rate and/or review the game, especially if they’ve been given a promo code and agreed to.

This morning my Google alert told me that the game had started to show up on pirate sites. I had expected this and I was actually a bit surprised that it didn’t happen the day the game came out. In less than an hour one pirate site indicated that the game had been downloaded more than 30 times. No, I’m not going to link to any of them. I will note that I am amazed that they show up on the second page of a Google search for the game. Odd that pirate sites seem to have so much credibility with Google.

I’m trying to figure out exactly what it is that annoys me about this situation. I think there are a few aspects to this.

One is that $1.99 is cheap. That’s less than coffee money. If it entertains you for 30 minutes total you’ve gotten your money’s worth and then some. I’ve played it for countless hours and I fire it up just for fun every day. So I hardly think that price is an excuse.

Secondly, if $1.99 is really going to break the bank, ask me for a promo code. If you claim that you’ll post a descriptive review (I don’t even ask that it be positive) then I’ll give you one. I know full well that the chances of you actually posting that review are about 1 in 10, but that’s the way Web 2.0 works, right? If you pirate the game and love it there is no legitimate channel for you to rate the game, review it, or give feedback. So now not only am I out a sale (which I was willing to give up) but I’m also out any chance of your love of the game helping to make it go viral, or even your criticisms of the game being used to improve it.

Finally, it is immensely frustrating to put all the above mentioned effort into marketing this thing through legitimate channels and get very little response. Yet the game gets downloaded as much in an hour from a single pirate site as it did in a week legitimately. This makes me wonder if somehow the pirates know something that I do not. They’re able to make my game more popular in an hour than I am.

Finally, if this is just kids who somehow saved up $200 for an iPod touch and don’t have any pennies left to fork over for a game, I guess I can understand. Almost. ($1.99!) I’d still rather give it to you for free than have you steal it from me. But somehow I suspect that the majority of this isn’t being done by penniless kids at all but is perpetrated by people that can easily afford the game and just get some perverse joy out of cheating me.

While I’m at it, the first four people to comment on this article will get a promo code emailed to them.

I’ve put a bunch of Battle for Vesta promo codes up on Promo Dispenser. So if you happen to read my blog and are too cheap to shell out $1.99 for the game, then you can get it for free by visiting this link and grabbing a code for yourself. Either way you should review and rate the thing in the app store.

I’ve been getting some good feedback on Battle for Vesta over on the Touch Arcade forums. One user suggested that it needs a more epic icon to match the game. So I’m holding a contest to see who can generate an epic icon for the game. The winner will get a $25 iTunes gift certificate and 5 promo codes to show their work off to their friends. Here’s the link.

Approval just came through for v1.0.1 of Battle for Vesta. I submitted it late on Dec 30. That is pretty fast, especially considering that it happened over a holiday weekend. I have no idea why I’m not seeing the traditional two week wait times.