He rode on towards the Tower of the Moon a little more gladly

Posted on May 27, 2017 by Rorthron

Thanks to the generosity of Scott Gibbens, who took time out from his 170 mile journey home at the end of a busy day at work, to swing by my place and lend me his iPad2 for testing… the new build is now working on all the devices it can. The only restrictions I have had to make is iOS7. This removes iPhone 1-3, and iPad1, and iPod Touch 1-4. Unfortunately, there is just nothing I can do for these old devices anymore. For the record, the current version in the app store will continue to be available and work on those devices that have already downloaded it, it’s just no future versions (should there be any) will be available.

This new build has gone out to the external testers, and as long as I get the ok, it will head to the store next week. All being well, I will do the same for Doomdark’s Revenge. I intend to release both LoM and DDR for Android, Windows, and OSX as well to unify the releases. However, Blackberry, and Windows Phone will not be getting this release.

For the record, this is what is available in this release…

1. Added discovery map

2. Added ‘tooltip’ info on map

3. Added cleanup button for lords on select screen

4. Change to undo system ready for difficulty modes

5. Added ability to UNDO from the gameover screen!

6. Handle new screen resolutions

7. Built for latest IOS SDK

8. Support 64 bit devices

9. Cosmetic changes on scrolling views – dithered

10. Update of engine to align with Doomdark’s Revenge

11. Misc minor engine fixes ported from Doomdark’s Revenge

This time you’ve got me to help you…

Posted on December 13, 2016 by Rorthron

A few months back I received an email from Marmalade Studios. Marmalade is the system I used to give me cross platform support. I pay for a licence yearly which is still covered by the ongoing sales on the long tale of the game. Anyway, the email informed me that Marmalade were pulling out of the Tools business to focus on their own development. They laid out a timetable and final release plan for the current tools but ultimately from March 2017 they will no longer be supporting their toolset. There was an offer to purchase rights to the source code, but as a small indie, that’s not really an option.

This doesn’t affect the current releases, but what it does mean is that any chances of me producing updates in the future have almost certainly been removed. And with every new OS release, the chance of the game not working are increased.

I know I have not been prolific with updates since the release of Doomdark’s Revenge settled. There was so many things I wanted to do, but just haven’t gotten around to. The reality is two fold, as amazing as the sales of the games have been, they are obviously not enough to support me full time, and secondly, the games were written quite frantically in the end and I never regained that sense of purpose after their release; this is not just for these games but for everything that I have been doing creatively.

I’ve been trying recently to tie up another release. The main reason for this is to produce a build with the latest version of Marmalade and get it out there to properly support the latest devices. In theory a new release should keep its visibility in the App Stores for a few more years. As part of this I’ve been slowing adding a couple of features: Discovery Mode, Difficulty Modes, Rationalise the code base between DDR and LOM. etc..

So with all this in mind I have been toying with the following: Uploading the source code to GitHub and making it open-source with the objective of transferring it to another cross platform solution, Cocos2d-x for example. Or, allowing people to port the engine to any other coding languages they like, so it could be used however they like.

The current codebase is written in c++, and thus moving to Cocos2d-x makes sense, but I quite like the idea of porting to c# or swift.

Moving to open source could also allow for the tool chain to be fully developed which would allow for more work to be put into ongoing development of the games.

Anyway, I shall think on this more, but if anyone is interested in getting involved, then drop me a note…

Midnight @ Blackberry

Posted on July 18, 2014 by Rorthron

I have removed The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge from Blackberry App World. It’s been a tough decision to finally make, but the games are just not viable on that platform. There are a couple of major issues that I have:
Firstly, the games are not really selling, so the low numbers mean that I am not triggering Blackberry’s minimum payment thresholds. I estimate that I have sold somewhere between 100 and 200 units of The Lords of Midnight, but Blackberry use three different payment vendors depending on how the game is purchased. These are Bango, Digital River, and Blackberry themselves.
Bango, and Blackberry have minimum payment thresholds, and I have received no payment for games sold through them.
Digital River have paid me, but they pay in USD into the business paypal account. This is really poor and a nightmare to administer from an accounting point of view. In particular it makes calculating my VAT very difficult.
The fact that my sales are estimates is because you are unable to get accurate reports from the Blackberry Vendor Portal. You have to rely on statements to calculate your sales. But some of the Vendor statements ( Digital River ) appear to lack any reference to the game sold. So I can’t separate the sales for the two games.

Should there be enough interest, I will consider placing the Blackberry .bar files for future updates on this website, so that the keen players can side load the updates themselves.