Skyriders Progress - Aug 11th

This shows the current look of Zone 2: Emerald Nebula, as well as how the first zone is looking after some texture/lighting/camera tweaks.

A few new obstacle types in there now - the mushrooms, jump ramps, and hoops. Boost stars can now be placed in the air, and also on top of objects, which makes for more interesting gameplay - this level is certainly a bit more tricky to keep the streak going, needing some well-timed jumps+flips to get the stars placed on top of the mushrooms.

The jump ramp worked out surprisingly nicely. It 'just worked' with the physics engine, after creating a nicely curved jump ramp model + collision mesh.

I'm still not convinced that the colours-switching mechanic is quite clear enough. The inactive/bad stars are shown more clearly now though, in black/grey. This should help avoid the confusion that led to people thinking 'red stars = bad!'

The red/yellow tinting of the lighting is gone, and instead there's a small glow around the player, which looks pretty decent in Zone 1, but it's not so visible over the Zone 2 green colours. It also has to be disabled on iPhone 4 to keep the framerate up... Performance on the iPhone 4 is still very borderline - it's 60fps nearly all of the time, with a few occasional stutters (and nastier drops when the phone does something in the background, such as logging into Game Center, but that's unavoidable)

The jump/flip mechanic has been tweaked a bit now, too. You can flip-jump whenever airborne, not just as a double-jump. So you can flip colour when falling, and also jump further than it would allow before.

Anyway, I think it's about on target for a mid-September release, or at least submission...

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  Gaming

[Paul Rahme]

Looking great - jaw dropping amount of polish and smoothness!

My only concern - are the stars' colours discernable enough when they appear in the distance on a phone screen?

Looking forward to the release, hope it comes out soon :)

[bluescrndotnet]

It's better on a real phone than on Youtube - the video compression and reduced framerate makes it hard to see into the distance. But the new wider FoV does mean the stars are smaller, a bit harder to see than before (They've got larger glows now to compensate)

But there is definitely a bit of a memorization element to it - especially if you're going for big scores - and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, as it's always been a part of fast-paced platformers, shmups, and racing games.