Running Free

[davidn]

My latest game has actually been on the App Store since the start of the week, but I waited around a bit before announcing it - I wanted to be able to get the site together along with the Flash version, so it can be fed to the awful cretins on Newgrounds and then distributed further into the Internet in general. So now, at least, I can say - my first iPhone game Running Free is out!


You can try it out in Flash form here, with 15 specially-made levels - the full game on iOS has a further 71. (Why the weird number? Because the winning screen's counted as a level and eight of them fit on a page of the menu.) Your aim is to guide the perpetually running stickman - arbitrarily named Geoffrey by Whitney - around a set of increasingly dangerous sheets of graph paper by using the four arrow keys to change the direction of gravity.

It's evolved quite a bit since the first prototype I put up last year... thanks to everyone who posted there, and... actually, especially ravenworks for inspiring me to put this on the iPhone at all, now that I look!

So here it is on the US app store (the in-game link should open it in iTunes in the correct region automatically) - I'd recommend a 3GS/3rd generation Touch or later, as I think it'll perform slowly on earlier devices. If you give it a try, I'd really appreciate any reviews, as they boost my visibility in the store. (Unless you hate it, in which case you don't have to bother.)

The game has no music - here's some.

Comments

[gr33bo.livejournal.com]

So where's teh android version?

[davidn]

Teh Android version will be challenging to produce without a device to test it on, though I don't think there's anything actually stopping me from attempting it. I would hope that the licensing/permissions system for Android isn't anything like as absurdly overcomplicated as the one from Apple, because I don't know if any human being can hold two of those processes in their head at a time.

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

Android's is much nicer in that it's only like $20 and then you're set.

[tisnart little (from livejournal.com)]

Awesome! Love your games.

[davidn]

Thanks a lot for spreading the word about it! The Flash version has had 4,300 views already in the last six hours... here's hoping some of those translate to sales :)

[xaq.livejournal.com]

A bit quieter than I was expecting (perhaps CT2's soundtrack spoiled me?), but still a pretty sweet game all around.


What program did you use to make this?

[davidn]

Yes, the idea was that people could just have their own audio playing over the iOS version - this might actually be the first game I've ever released without music, now I come to think of it.

This was made in Multimedia Fusion, a visual environment which I use for pretty much all my hobby development - I would go mad spending my entire life in the same IDE I use at work. Though to save me the time of writing a level editor for it, I just used Excel to lay out the levels, with a Java tool to convert the .xls into the game's file format.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Ah...from the looks of it, I take it MMF's only good for side-scrolling platformers?

Main reason I ask is because I was looking at the possibilities of doing a demo version of Blade Clash as a computer game before making any further decisions on going full-scale with it.

[davidn]

It's very much a blank 2D canvas, so you can do pretty much what you like with it - though I could see a card-based game possibly becoming unwieldy, for someone new to it.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Yeah, even for professionally programmed games just trying to recreate the randomness of shuffling a deck has proven virtually impossible. I can only imagine how much luck I'd have. XP

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

.. okay, it is brilliant the way the "par flips" and "par time" options make two separate puzzles out of every level (in addition to the easy puzzle of just clearing the level if the player isn't into challenges)!

My only complaint is that you should probably disable the screen dimming / system sleep while a level is running, at least until the player hasn't flipped gravity for 10 seconds or something..

I also feel like there's got to be a better way to 180-flip than pausing and unpausing; maybe gravity won't change as long as your thumb is touching the screen? (This would also allow people to be more precise with the timing of their 90-degree flips too...)

Also, have you considered an alternate mode where you can change gravity by flicking that direction with your finger, so people with headphones on don't have to tie up their wrists with headphone cable ;) (I feel like we discussed that at some point, but maybe not?)

Anyway, congratulations, this is a game to be proud of :) I'm happy to have helped nudge it into existence if I did!

[davidn]

Thank you so much :) You really did help shape this, with your posts about the same time I started it about not 'rewarding' good players only by punishing poor players, or those who don't go for the challenges...

You did mention the screen dimming before, and I only just checked that by setting my auto-lock down to 1 minute - my (iPhone 4) screen dims after fifty seconds, which I really had to try to reach without touching the screen... is there another option somewhere for earlier screen dimming that I've missed? Uniquely for XCode, it looks like there's a fairly simple solution, so I could get that into an update.

The controls on this game were something that caused me a lot of difficulty, as when you're wrestling an iPhone around it's easy to hit the screen by accident (and difficult to hit it - or keep your thumb on it - on purpose, even though that's not a bad idea otherwise...) originally, you tapped the screen to flip gravity 180 degrees, but I hated that. Either you, rakarr or both suggested the alternative mode with swiping to change gravity (or even just tapping near the sides of the screen?) - I love the gravity gimmick, but I can see the... strangulation potential of it, especially after it took me so long to work out how to allow the iPod sounds to play along with the game.

The Flash version is without question my greatest hit on Mochi ever, with 14,000 views yesterday and 15,000 in the last six hours today... however, this is not translating into similar numbers of sales on the app store! I think I need to put out a free version as well.

[(Anonymous)]

I'd buy this on Android (assuming the price were reasonable)!—if only because my experience with Crystal Towers 2 suggests so strongly that you produce things I tend to enjoy in that general regard. Flash and iOS are both terrible platforms for me; the latter is unavailable and the former nearly so, so I haven't actually tried this one yet.

Some sort of free limited version tends to be a good idea in general, if only because products of this sort are distinct and non-fungible enough that one can't easily judge value before trying it out. Physical-packaging software had demo machines at stores; digital distribution sort of pushes more of the burden to the developers/publishers.

(Results are likely nonrepresentative of the general populace. Hacker News seems to think it's impossible to make any money on Android games; I would like to think this is false, but I don't have any first-eye data either way. Apparently an infinite stream of different and exciting graphics driver bugs is a real problem, sort of like it is for Windows.)

(Yes, I'm still waffling on LJ authentication. Yes, I take forever to do anything…)