WIP - Canyon Defense - iOS/Android game

At long last Canyon Defense is live in the App store!!!!
iTunes Link

Finally the Launch Trailer!

Hello everybody! After working on this project for some time now, I have finally worked up the courage to show it off here in the forums. This is still a WIP (obviously) and so lots will change, but I would really like to get this communities' feedback and maybe some direction on where to take things. I am very open to constructive criticism and really want to know honest feedback (friends and family can be too nice sometimes ). I will be needing some beta testers to put the game through its paces, so if you are interested ( and will actually play the game and leave feedback) please pm me. Anyway below is a quick synopsis of the back story and where I am at with gameplay and of course screen shots. Thanks for taking the time to check out my game!

SYNOPSIS

Game takes place somewhere in the near-ish future ( ~50+ yrs). Machine AI has grown to the point where it is behaving at a level of basic animal instincts, but still primitive in nature. The machines are basically only interested staying alive and furthering their "species". Their "instincts" are to find a source of power and defend themselves. The machine AI has not grown to a level where it is capable of creating or designing new machines, thus they have moved into the shells of older machines designed by humans.

You are a pilot tasked with defending a power station located in a box canyon. You pilot an advanced hovercraft that has excellent maneuverability and smart targeting weapon systems to help you in the mist of an attack. You must protect the power station for as long as you possibly can!


STATE OF THE GAME

Currently I have implemented the basics of the game and have a very playable version that keeps track of scores. I am planning two different play modes for launch and then a third afterwards.

launch play modes:
-Wave mode
The main game play is somewhat of a "horde" or "wave" mode. You defend the powerstation as waves of enemies pour into the canyon from 3 different areas. You have 4 sub stations scattered throughout the map that generate the shield for the power station. The power station cannot be overtaken until all four substations are destroyed. The goal here is to keep the power station for as many waves as possible racking up as high of a score as possible
-Minute mode
This game mode is designed more for people who just want a short game that they can blast around in while waiting in line at the grocery store. This mode puts 60 sec on the clock and then unleashes a massive horde of enemies. There are no substations to help out here so you must do your best to keep the power station and yourself alive for the full 60 sec, while taking out as many enemies as possible. Score multipliers will be added for different feats accomplished during the game.

Planned Game mode.
-Story mode
I would like to plan out a massive open world that you can explore and then fight various enemies of all different shapes and difficulties. Due to the overwhelming size and complexity of this game mode, I have decided to release with only the two smaller game modes above to ensure that the game does indeed get released. However, I really want to nail down this mode as it was the original plan for the game. I think the back story needs to be fleshed out better and this could help. Any ideas here on how to accomplish this would be most helpful.


Please let me know what you think, and what I could do better. This community is awesome, so many of you have helped me get this far. I thank you all!

 

removing old screens. adding new updated screens

 

Nice looking game so far.

 

thanks!

 

Started working on Item drops last night. My first real use of enums! So far I have some really cool ideas for drops that hopefully will keep players engaged and coming back for more. I will post pics as well as game play footage soon.

 

Great concept, good progress so far.. looking forward to seeing yuo develop this further

 

Here are a couple of new models I have whipped up to replace the old one. Please let me know if you like one better than the other.

 

new video of game play on first post!

 

Hey,

I love the wipeout-like flying control style. Continue like that, its a good concept

Stephane

 

Hey guys in need of just a few beta testers with iOS devices. If you are interested and would give quality feedback then please pm me

 

So I have been trying to work on the sound for the game over the last couple of days. I have run into a problem where the player is typically moving to fast to hear the explosions from the missiles or defeated enemies. There has got to be a way to make the sound from these heard farther away.

 

you could make a global variable and play the sound (which is parented to the ship) always when it's true

btw. good looking project, I'll keep an eye on this one

 

good idea! the only downfall that I can think of off the top of my head would be that all sounds would be the same volume? guess I could grab the distance from the player and adjust accordingly. thanks for the idea. Also thank you for the kind words. I hope the project turns out as good as it is in my head

 

quick screen grab of a new part of the UI done with NGUI

 

Repainted some of my models and even added a couple of new ships!

 

Looks like it's shaping up nicely! Keep up the good work.

 

thanks for the kind words! Hopefully I can get this thing wrapped up by the end of summer.

 

I was going to say it looks generic thus far. Good to see you are updating graphics.

Keep it up, this could be cool.

I am wondering how controllable this is though. In your demo it looks like it would be hard to do maneuvers and kill things.

 

Yes the graphics were very basic at the outset, I am working this project all by myself, and I am a programmer more than an artist. I am learning new techniques though and plan to continue to make the game more polished as I go.

I feel the game is controllable (but then again I am a bit partial ). this isn't a flight sim, so there is no real control over altitude, but that was by design. I wanted the player to concentrate on just two axis (x z) and not really worry about y. I feel that this helps simplify things a bit when trying to play with touch controls. I have several people testing the game as I am developing and so I am getting continuous feedback to how the game plays. If anything I have had to reduce the steering sensitivity to make the game more accessible to players not used to touch controls (these settings are all configurable in game for more advanced players). Maneuvers aren't too difficult and different enemies require different approaches. I am in the process of adding an upgrade section that will let you increase a particular ships agility and speed (among other things).
One of the things that the demo doesn't really depict is the auto aiming system in place. since the player doesn't have explicit control over the y axis of the ship, I needed a way to make sure that you could still shoot a target that was not directly in front of you. I have created a system that will let the ship automatically aim the guns at an enemy that is within range and within a certain angle of the front of your ship. It does a pretty good job of helping you reduce the enemies to smoke.

As I mentioned above this is my first full game that I have developed and am doing this all by myself. As you probably know, a developer can easily get tunnel vision and forget what the end user thinks is fun. I am always looking for constructive feedback especially from other developers (friends and family can be too nice). If you would like to help test and have an iOS device feel free give it a run by going here

 

Finally wrapped up the first milestone and submitted Canyon Defense to Apple for review! This is an initial goal for me to get a complete game put together and submitted and then continue to add content and features in the future. This version has all new artwork, some of which has bee posted here. I am currently working on a game play trailer showing off all aspects of the game, and when that is finished, I will post it here. As I mentioned earlier this project is still very much in development. I have several updates that I am planning and already working on, so hopefully the game will just get better. Thank you all here for your kind words and constructive criticism, I need all I can get!

 

Any new videos? I think the toon shader is looking quite cool and the concept seems promising. I don't think you should release to the Apple Store if its still in development and not a polished state, you may actually hurt sales by doing so.

 

Are you working on the Android version now, or is that planned for the future? I'd be happy to give it a go when you're looking for testers.

I would agree with hellraizerhhh that if you're not sure that it is finished, it might be too early to release it on Apple/Android.

 

thank you for the kind words. I have a new video in the works. I am trying to make a trailer instead of just a game play vid, but we will see how well that turns out. I will post the latest game play vid that I have.

I think I might have mis-spoke about the game being unfinished. From the beginning of the project, it was designed to be released in phases. Being the only developer/artist/everything I am limited on what I can do in a given set of time. I have certain feature that I want to implement but couldn't in the time frame that I have. So I chose to limit certain parts until I could implement them the way they deserve to be. Some of the features that I wanted are just not possible without a pro license, so I will have to wait until I earn some money before I can afford to do that (working a very indie budget here). It is the extra pieces that are still under development. the game is complete as is except for a few bugs here and there that I just found today, but that is what I meant. If I didn't release at the time I set for myself, I would never release it. I really didn't want this project to turn into vaporware, so I forced my self to meet my deadline.

 

I really want to release to android. I am quite honestly terrified of it though. I have heard a lot of horror stories around the app store on android here being one of them. I do love the platform and even use it as a daily driver for my phone. The problem is that I just haven't been able to get the performance that I want to make the game play smoothly on Android. I don't know if this is a problem on Google's side, Unity's side, or my side, but the same bit of code runs at drastically lower frame rates on Android than it does on iOS. I am using a Nexus S as my phone and I can at best get ~20-25 fps. That is about as good as my old iPhone 3gs (which is why for now I have actually chosen to release just for iPad until I can get some more performance tweaks). I have tried a lot to get better performance, and I have actually succeed in some areas. I was getting ~15-18 fps before I really started digging. Even on my friend Galaxy Nexus it was barely getting 30fps and couldn't hold it for long. This all while my iPad 2 and my wife's iPhone 4s scream along at steady 60fps.

To be clear here that I really don't want to start a flame war on the different OS's but I can't in good conscience release something that I KNOW is going to preform badly. If anybody has some performance tests that I can run to get more data on what I could be doing wrong on Android I am all ears. Keep in mind I don't have a pro license so Unity profiling is out.

If you let me know what phone/tablet you have I can send you a beta build on Android, and maybe you can give me some feedback or tips for android. I do want to release on that platform, but really have to get some things worked out first

 

I haven't had much trouble with Android (but, that may be because I haven't had a game do well enough to run to trouble =). But, going from 60 to 30 or lower would be bad: you certainly don't want to release a game that isn't performing well on Android devices (as it will likely just frustrate users). I use a Nook Color (which is my slowest device), Kindle Fire and a Galaxy Player 4.0.

 

updated the first post with the new launch trailer and replaced some of the old screen shots with new updated ones featuring the new artwork. Let me know what you think!

 

Hey guys Canyon Defense is finally live on the App Store! To be honest it has been live for a month now, but I was a bit nervous to advertise it as there was a crashing bug. It took four tries with apple to get the fix published. Now that I feel more confident in the game, I thought I would announce it here.

 

Hi dude, i need your help.
I am doing a kind of similair flying game for iOS, and i need your advice on how to make huge terrain.

So basically your map is a set of terrain tiled together ?
How does Unity 4 terrain work ?

Basically i need to make really huge landscape but i am a little bit stuck.
I don't know what approach is best.

Please give me any hint if you can

 

Hey dude,

So yeah Canyon Defense is using a tiled grid of terrain objects with a controller that could turn individual tiles on and off depending on player location. This works pretty well in some cases, but on lower end devices you would sometimes see a hit on FPS when new tiles were loaded or unloaded. So in that case there was no real performance gain. You should also know that each terrain was converted using the "Terrain4Mobile" tool in the asset store. In Unity 3.5 the terrain was not mobile friendly so this was the best option. This would make each terrain into an actual mesh that could be used just like any other mesh in a scene. This helped tremendously in load and run time performance.

Now going forward, I am working on my second game which is a flying game and has a huge terrain ( you can see the WIP here. This time around, I am using the built in terrain system of Unity. At this version ( Unity 4.2.2) the terrain works really well on most iOS devices (my oldest device is an iPad2). What i did was set the terrain size to 24000 ( width and depth) and height to 1200. I also upped the terrain resolution to 2048. This gives me a map that is roughly 14sq miles and with an aircraft travelling moderatly quick, still takes 5 real world minutes to fly from corner to corner. I am pondering adding 3 more terrains of this size and loading them in dynamically to test a massive map size. The problem here is going to be memory consuption on lower end devices.

What I would do if I were you would be to setup the terrain and make it as big as you think you will need, then test it on the lowest device you plan to support. If you are running into memory issues with no other objects in the scene, then you will probably need to scale it down a bit. If the terrain is too small for what your game requires, then you will probably need to try to start tiling multiple terrains to get the size you are wanting. If you would like the terrain tile controller, let me know and i will see if I can dig it up.

Good luck on your game! send me a link when you get something to show, I would love to check it out!