Yesterday we finally submitted our Indiecade 2011 demo of Ring Run Circus, our upcoming game.
This particular build is a selection of cutscenes and eight levels from world 3 (titled “Strength”) .The first 5 levels allow the player to discover the basic mechanics; the last 3 levels attempt to show the potential of the mechanic.
For the final version of the game we plan to complete five worlds, each one with its own gameplay variations (goals, playable character, aesthetics, etc.) based on the main non-stop ring-switching mechanic.
We don’t have a release date yet, but now that we have settled in the core mechanic, story and structure, we’ll do our best to have it ready before the end of the year.
In collaboration with OpenFeint’s Free Game of the Day, TriDefense will be free this Friday 17th of September 2010.
Don’t miss this opportunity and tell your friends as well!
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!
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 a prototype of a fast paced multi-player game that you can play with just one button.
Decilo, bailalo, gritalo! Botón.tv te graba!
Empweb is an open and extensible framework for building library circulation systems. (2003-today)
An electronic health records software for ophtalmologists with a special focus in image capture. (1997-2010)
An open source office server that improves productivity. (1999-2008)
A secure transfer software for remote backup based on the WebDAV protocol. (2001-2002)
An open PCI development platform including:
’)