Skyfall

WIP games, tools & toy projects Archived Projects
#1

Hey all,

I’ve been working on a mobile RPG called Skyfall as one of their main engineers for like 7 months or something now. The game is in open beta on limited Android devices, but will be on more and iOS soon.

http://skyfallrpg.com/
Android Market

The game is free, so give it a try if you have a supported device. If you’re curious, I did most of the visual effects in the game, like the combat, the character animation, things like that. I also did all kinds of random other stuff.

#2

Interesting…it says that this app is not compatible with my Samsung Infuse, even though it requires 2.0+ and I have 2.2 :confused:

Otherwise, it looks amazing! :o
Lots of dedicated artists there :stuck_out_tongue:

Did you make this using pure Android SDK or using a 3rd party library?

#3

This looks like my kind of game! …does anyone have an extra Android device lying around?

#4

It’ll be available for more devices soon probably.

#5

My (T-Mobile) HTC Desire HD is not compatible too :frowning:

#6

What devices are compatible?

#7

Very nice production quality. I really liked the parallax effect ;D brilliant. The battle mechanics was new to me, but I don’t really play many games like this. I quite liked that, much more fun than just random hit. A bit unresponsive sometimes and some time really long loading times, made it a bit annoying. I got completely stuck in a “Traveling” screen… Even though there were some tutorial/help I got a little bit lost for what to do. Nothing that a bit of guesswork couldn’t solve, so that is not a big problem. Not my kind of game, but I imagine that it should be really popular with people into this genre.

Hope you have good success with it, one can tell that you have put a lot of effort into it.

#8

I was able to play now due to an ad that redirected me to the marketplace download…

Its pretty nice to play, when there is a WiFi or HSDPA/Edge connection available - throttled speed due to excessive traffic use may occur after a while…

Well, the game mechanics so far i played - Slay the dragon - were pretty easy and intuitive. Leveling Up could show the attribute effects or did I missed that info? And maybe add some kind of loading/connection animation. I used to tap and tap and tap when nothing happend when there seemed to be some background loading.

Overall pretty nice so far. I really like the graphic style :slight_smile:

#9

Uh, double post, remove this pls!

#10

Thanks for trying it out, guys. :slight_smile: I agree with all your gripes. The team is working on it. I am not on the team anymore, I quit the company last week! :stuck_out_tongue: I’m going to a new non-game company so that I can release indie games without contractual issues. Eventually you get tired of making other peoples’ games.

Yes, the parallax effect is sweet - and it’s one of the things I coded. :slight_smile: I also did most of the combat, the animation system, and some other stuff.

#11

You quit the company! :o

And what’s this parallax thingy?

#12

Great looking graphics, looks really polished.

Must be pretty cool seeing the end-product out there and having it on your resume. The ratings on google play are very high.

The card-style format sounds a little like the Scrolls game Markus Persson’s company is working on: http://www.scrolls.com/

Congrats on the career decision, big move! But how will you bear the drudgery of a non-game making job?

#13 
This application has access to the following:

    Services that cost you money:
    send SMS messages
    Your location:
    fine (GPS) location,
    coarse (network-based) location
    Your messages:
    receive SMS
    Network communication:
    full Internet access
    Your personal information:
    read contact data
    Phone calls:
    read phone state and identity
    Storage:
    modify/delete USB storage contents modify/delete SD card contents
    System tools:
    prevent device from sleeping,
    retrieve running applications,
    change network connectivity,
    change Wi-Fi state

    Your accounts:
    discover known accounts
    Hardware controls:
    control vibrator
    Your location:
    access extra location provider commands
    Network communication:
    receive data from Internet,
    view Wi-Fi state,
    view network state

Is these all really necessary?

Also I am eager to hear technical details about graphics and such if there is anything that can be shared. Game look superb.
And there is no reason why my huwei would’t run that game. Adreno205 is ridicoulous fast gpu(some tests even rank it higher than ipad2 gpu)

#14

The tech here is http://www.mobage.com/mobage running on top of ngCore[/url], a service that ngmoco has made for building their games cross platform. I worked for about a month on mobage but mostly haven’t personally touched those systems. It’s basically a social network and leaderboards etc. and some backend C++ code for running on iOS, Android, and Flash. You write your code once in Javascript and that gets interpreted to native code for you at runtime.

I’d recommend looking at it if you’re interested in that sort of thing. It basically has a sprite engine and scenegraph, like Cocos sort of. Honestly though if you’re pretty capable I’d just recommend writing once and then porting, as Javascript can never be as fast as native code and the debugging capabilities are just pitifully bad (mostly println debugging). It was one of the reasons I left the company - I was sick of doing all my code in a text editor without breakpoints and sometimes getting exceptions that said “undefined object trying to call undefined method at line undefined” no joke on that one. But you’ll save a lot of time in terms of porting, and getting a complex social network on top of that. So it depends on what you’re comfortable with and what you’re looking for.

But I digress. The parallax effect is the character and monster portrait - you tilt the phone at different angles and it’s like you’re looking through a window into a 3D world. As for the level of polish. A lot of it has to do with having extremely talented artists working on the project. Also having a team of 15 (at its peak), 6 of which being engineers, allows a lot of tech to get in to make things purty. And 7 or 8 months development on top of that.

@pitbuller - I believe that because the app runs on mobage, it requests access for all those things just in case your game uses it. Because it’s backend tech every game could use one of those things.

@CommanderKieth - It’s not like Scrolls at all, actually. No cards involved. More of a traditional RPG with nontraditional mapmechanics. The combat is also more like Mario Golf than anything. I think I’ll be well satisfied at my new job as long as I keep doing game jams and things on the side. I have a friend who also left the game biz for this company and he loves it, so we’ll see!

#15

Fucking awesome!@@@