StarSmasher

Okay! I’ve been kind of quiet lately on both this site and the TouchArcade forums because I’ve had my head down low working on the 1.1.0 update (previously called 1.0.4 but I decided it was a big enough change to update that 0 to a 1). The 1.1.0 update was released to Apple last night at about 1:45 a.m. (after having to completely rebuild the project in XCode due to some weird XCode bug–but that is another story). 

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)

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 11:29 am and is filed under Announcements.