What I’ve got coming down the pike for you (hopefully mid-week next week) is this:

As promised, a new gameplay mode called “Energy Monger” that has 30 levels and 2 bonus levels. The goal of the normal levels is to collect blue energy units littered throughout the course. If you miss four in a level you will have to replay that level and it will take one life. There are also gold energy units in each stage. If you collect 8 in a stage you will be given access to a bonus level at the end of the stage (its randomly chosen which one you get). Both of the bonus stages are extremely hard (I’ve only beaten them a few times, partly because you don’t get to practice with them) but if you manage to beat one you will receive updwards of 2500 points. 

The Energy Monger mode also uses a complete rewrite of the game engine which has a faster framerate and cleaner code. I have also found that some instability issues in the iPhone are caused by applications using too much memory. Unfortunately StarSmasher needs a lot of memory to run, but I’ve reduced its memory footprint drastically and implemented better texture management to get things out of memory that aren’t currently needed. This won’t clear up the dreaded App installer issue that people are having (there is nothing I can do about this, Apple has promised a fix in the 2.3 firmware update in September) but it should improve the overall stability of a clean install of StarSmasher.

Also, I have added more sound effects to Energy Monger as well as some background music. I made the background music myself, but if people have suggestions for Creative Commons background music to be included in future releases I would love to entertain them.

I hope you like this latest update. Let me know what you think so I can continue to improve.

Oh, and a few things I’m going to work on (but since I’m moving to Uganda for 6 months in 3 weeks they might take me a little more time than the last releases):

• Online score boards.
• Jump to level. (If you have already beaten stage 5 go ahead and jump there)
• Pause button.
• New bonus levels (maybe a mini-boss level, for example)
• MAYBE: mutli-player face-off mode, but that is going to take a significant amount of work (a.k.a. time)

So, that being said, there are problems with Apps and there may be problems with StarSmasher, but random crashing issues seem to be the fault of Apple at the moment. I’m updating my development device to 2.0.2 and might do a restore, which hopefully will clean up the problem. I’ll post updates as I have them.

• Invertible controls
• Gradation of game difficulty
• A basic calibration routine
• 50% faster acceleration for the controls.

I’ve been playing with the 1.0.3 update since I sent it to Apple and I’ve decided that I like the less sensitive controls so I’m going to ship a 1.0.4 update as soon as possible that adds a setting to switch between more or less sensitive controls.

I’m also going to post a road map page to outline my ideas for upcoming releases.

“We are excited about the release,” said 22 year old developer John Bowers, “and we hope that people will really enjoy the game.”

The game is only $2.99 USD and is available for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

espressoSoft
StarSmasher

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Based on some of the feedback I received on the gameplay video, I’ve already crafted a 1.0.1 release (which is the version used in the production of the video) that adds the much suggested (and much needed–thanks to all who suggested it) auto-fire option and also speeds up the gameplay just a bit (for that high-octane punch). The 1.0.1 release also allows more aiming direction freedom. The 1.0.1 release has already been built and is currently out for review with Apple. I think that Apple’s team is pretty swamped right now but I have high hopes that the release will be available within the next week.

I love StarSmasher and I hope that you will too, so please feel free to make suggestions and leave questions/comments on the feedback page.

You can find it in the iTunes App store here.

-John Bowers

I have been listening to suggestions in the meantime, however, and working on a few improvements of my own. I’ve completed a new version of the game (which will probably be 1.0.1) which includes the following:

• Faster gameplay (The ships speed has been increased to make the game slightly more difficult). 
• More fluid controls.
• Auto-fire mode. This is initiated by holding down a tap instead of tapping repeatedly. It will cause the ship to fire 4 times per second.