Penguins Invasion - DevLog

[Mathieu]

Last january we (Frogames (http://www.frogames.com)) decided to switch from TGE to Unity for our iPhone developments.
For our first iPhone game we're trying to make something very simple: a Whack-A-Mole.


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One of the first prototypes we made (we now have 7 iPhone prototypes, thanks to Unity!).
This one use 3d objects and a tilting camera. Later we decided that it's not useful for a game like our so will use only 2d elements.



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We have now 2 scenes : one for the menu and one for the game. The loading process between the two scenes wasn't satisfying for us so in later versions we merged them into 1 scene (1 script will manage the menu, 1 will manage the game. Each will be activated when needed).



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This is the last video to date. A lot of progress had been made.
- Final theme for the game
- Name of the game: Penguins (http://www.frogames.com/penguins_arena) Invasion
- Localization system (fr/en/de/jp/es)
- Achievements system
- Faster shaders
- Unity iPhone Enhancement kit (http://stinkbot.com/u3d/)
- Online scores
- 3 types of bombs + 1 bonus (1up) + 1 malus


If you want to follow the development of the game you can check my personal blog (http://blogs.wefrag.com/MathieuFROG/) (in french), you'll find 5 other videos in the archives (http://blogs.wefrag.com/MathieuFROG/tag/iphone/).

I'll try to keep this thread alive with new video from now on.

[Mathieu]

New video available!

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Penguins Invasion - Day 9 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YGDm10jiac)

- Music (menu + ingame)
- Localized elements added (fr/en/de/jp/es)
- Online scores now use Google App Engine (http://code.google.com/appengine/)
- A lot of time was spent optimizing the game. Those interested can get my personnal cheat sheet for Unity iPhone optimization here (optimisations.rtf) (http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/139959/optimisations.rtf).


http://img.skitch.com/20090319-ugj899aegnx9kg1df6gwnui4f.png
How-to in japanese

http://img.skitch.com/20090319-gwydwu9c51qmm86dtapsn3jryt.png
Achievements in spanish

[Paul@Tag]

Hey Matheiu

Great dev diaries! Just wondering why you decided to go with Unity over Torque Game Engine?

Cheers
P

[Mathieu]

We have a lot of experience with TGE (we made 2 games, one of them is on Steam) but at the time we decided to make iPhone games Unity was more advanced and offered better tools.
Don't get me wrong, if we wanted to make a multiplayer game for Mac & PC we would have make it with TGE(A), it's still a very good engine! :)

[han0007]

We have a lot of experience with TGE (we made 2 games, one of them is on Steam) but at the time we decided to make iPhone games Unity was more advanced and offered better tools.
Don't get me wrong, if we wanted to make a multiplayer game for Mac & PC we would have make it with TGE(A), it's still a very good engine! :)

Dude is this game out yet, ive been waiting my life off for this!

[Mathieu]

Yeah, Penguins Invasion is out (I should have mentioned it on this thread!) :
http://itunes.com/apps/PenguinsInvasion

Note that we will work on a big update for the end of the year. We want to add Universal support (iPhone/iPad) and OpenFeint. Later we would like to add a 2 player game mode for iPad.

But before that we're working on TITUS, a political simulation game:
http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=65690