Can't help but feel a bit sorry for riley, I mean who plays this crap on X-mas? :)
| Conversion to hiscore entry: | 1.48 % |
| Conversion to in-app purchase: | 3.10 % |
- What?, you're exclamating. More people buy the stuff than actually enter the high score list? Twice as many? Incorrect conclusion. To be precise, there are exactly two purchasable items in the game: levels and vehicles.
The main problem with Kill Cutie is the controls. Before the iOS/touch revolution, I haven't thought about game controls for fifteen years. Not because they were irrelevant, on the contrary, but because they were so amazingly well re-invented for 3D computer games by John Carmack in 1996. System Shock two years before that had a lot of stuff, including partial mouse look. Partial being the keyword here. Ever since Quake we haven't had to think about controls at all. But all the top games on the App Store had perfect controls; Kill Cutie is on the other end of the scale.
So it will be a long time until I close shop, smile all the way to the bank, jump into a plane towards a distant ocean from my App Store proceedings. And my next game won't have good controls on computers, but controls on iOS will be better than KC, a lot better. This is definitely a subordinate factor for now, but in the future it would be fun to make multiplayer game that is equally nice to play on the iOS device and on the computer. A colleague of mine, Bram Stolk, also in the field of creating indie 3D-physics-simulation-games-for-iOS-and-computers, nailed the controls perfectly for both his popular title The Little Crane That Could, and the upcoming Buggy Bang Bang:
I also note that his network code causes no noticeable solid body penetration, which I'm guessing is a result of him using simplified joints for the wheels. Adding suspension, which I have done before, increments one degree of freedom per wheel, which in turn adds energy to the system every time network replication happens. So I'll also use simple hinge-joints in the future.
Mr. Stolk's steering will however not work for my upcoming game, as swiping all over the screen would the defy whole point of sliding around in hovercrafts, which are supposed to be very maneuverable and quick. For a future tank game, which I am thinking about doing, I'll probably steal some his ideas for controls though. Controls is the shit, and have been ever since 1996. I must polish on those few lines of code until they shine this time around.
