Buscamos ilustrador/a para juegos iPhone y iPad. Trabajo en Montevideo, dedicación part-time y horarios flexibles.
Enviar portfolio a jobs [arroba] kalio.net.
To celebrate TriDefense’s first year we’re reducing the price to $0.99 (66% OFF) until the end of july.
Don’t miss this opportunity!
To celebrate TriDefense’s first year, we’re joining forces with makeuseof and handing out 25 promo codes!
Instructions here. Don’t forget to tell your friends.
Almost a year after the original release of TriDefense we want to say thanks to the more than 200,000 users that downloaded and played our game. We’re are really happy that our first game was so popular and loved (and hated!) by so many people.
Now we’re hard at work with the next release for the iPad, codename: TriDefense 2.
The upcoming iPad release has two main objectives:
All the models of the game are being done from scratch to take advantage of the increased resolution of the iPad. The modifiable terrain is also something we are improving, as with the original iPhone we were limited to 3 textures in order to reach an acceptable frame rate. The particles and FX are also being improved.
The level structure we’re planning is the original one that we had for the iPhone but for many reasons did not end up being completed. There are three phases, the first one is securing the main bases, the second focuses in attacking the enemies, and the third is taking over their bases. The difficulty curve will also be eased a little bit at the beginning, allowing for more time to learn the different strategies and reducing the frustration that we feel people are experiencing now.
The core ideas of the game and the interface will not be radically changed, but we will be improving here and there, along with some surprises.
If you have any ideas or suggestions, please feel free to drop by our forums
Thanks!
I’m sure you’ve already noticed that when you enter sites that have Flash content, your notebook starts revving up the fan to cool down the CPU. Most of the time, this Flash content is just useless, blinking, scrolling things that serve the only purpose of wasting energy.
Well, the other day we were wondering how will this compare to the CO2 emissions of a car… our rough numbers follow. This is not a thorough research, it’s just a quick calculation, but we believe it communicates the general idea.
The first thing we did was measuring how much energy was drained from a notebook [1] battery, while browsing the nytimes.com. Two measures were taken, one with Flash enabled and the other with a Flash block plugin.
Browsing nytimes.com for ten minutes gave us these numbers:
That’s about 0.52Wh of difference (Flash consumption) in 10 minutes.
According to alexa.com, the average daily time on nytimes.com is 4.8 minutes, so if every visitor had a a similar notebook, they will consume 0.25Wh per visit, just for Flash content.
According to compete.com, the nytimes.com site has about 60 million visits monthly. Just multiplying the numbers gives about 15 MWh in a month (that’s mega watt hour).
According to Wikipedia [2] the amount of CO2 emmitted while generating 1kWh of energy with coal is about 1kg, so 15 MWh amount to 15,000 kg of CO2.
To put the numbers in perspective, a new Toyota Prius [3] emits 89 g/km of CO2, so 15,000 kg of CO2 amount to 168,000 km. According to EPA [4], the average american drives 1600 km/month (1000 miles/month), so that’s about what 100 Prius emit in that month.
Hence, just the Flash content in nytimes.com, which is mostly useless scrolling things and blinking ads, emits the same CO2 as 100 Toyota Prius.
Footnotes and references:
Since we’ve submitted the game, we’ve been hard at work porting it to the iPhone/iPad platform.
One of the most interesting challenges we’re working right now is making it a network game. If you’ve played the game you’ll know that it’s very fast and network latency can be critical.
We’ve just been told that RingRun was not selected for Gamma 4.
Well.. back to work!
RingRun is our submission to Gamma 4 . It’s is a fast-paced multi-player arcade game that you can play with just one button.
Press the button to switch rings and collect stars. The runner with more stars when the time is over wins the game.
Simple right? Well… not quite!
Crash another player from behind to make him lose stars. Crash head-to-head and suffer. But wait, you can also defend yourself, or even attack. That’s up to you to discover!
And all this with just one button?
From 1 to 4 players allowed. The remaining players are controlled by “The A.I.”. Beware!
Challenge your friends and become the master of RingRun! ;)
Download the game (compatible with Mac Leopard and Snow Leopard) and tell us what you think either by twitter @kalio or email: info at kalio.net).
Click here to see snapshots and videos.
Idea, Design, Programming, Graphics and Sounds: Kalio
Music: Jacob H
Many thanks to:
Each of the 4 runners has two stable states: flat and sideways. Holding the button down maintains the runner sideways. When going flat it remains within a ring. When sideways it jumps to the tangent ring.
When runners crash, some of the stars they’ve collected are returned to the level. If they crash head to head, both lose some stars. If one crashes another from behind, only the chased one loses stars.
When all the stars have been collected, the countdown accelerates. In any case, the game finishes after 2 minutes. The runner with more stars wins.
Another layer of control is properly timing the button press when two runners cross or overlap. It’s possible to attack by “slapping” the opponent (that is, switching to the other’s state while the other remains put). This behaves differently if they come head to head or one is chasing the other.
’)
