It is better to know your comrade’s mettle before the real battle begins, is it not?

I have finally managed to get The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge ready to return to the stores. Yes I know it’s taken a while and in reality it’s been a labour of love, but we are almost there. I have had both games running on iOS, iPadOS, OS X, Windows, and Android.

I am hoping to release the games during January, I have put a lot of work into this rebuild of The Lords of Midnight and for that the game will now cost a total of NOTHING! I initially intend to keep a price on Doomdark’s Revenge, although if you’ve already paid, you won’t need to pay again. But I also intend to include some In App Purchases in the future.

Right now, I would just like to get as many people testing them to make sure that they are behaving as expected. I am sure there are a few little niggles, and I know there are a couple of small UI features that I removed; awaiting a rebuild. I just decided not to hold up the release because of them.

To start testing The Lords of Midnight…

To report any issues either use the links supplied as part of iOS/Android testing system, visit my issues page on GitHub or fill in the form at the bottom of these page. Please provided as much information as possible, screenshots if it helps, and details of your device.

Some of the things removed.

  1. Detailed map needs the ability to scale.
  2. Desktop – Cursor images need adding
  3. The compass gadget is missing from the look screen
  4. Desktop – Some keyboard shortcuts are missing
  5. Mobile – Some gesture shortcuts are missing
  6. Desktop – Only runs in a window. Should open a window in 16:9 at about 75% the hight go your desktop resolution.

Known issues

  1. Splash and Credits screen crop badly top and bottom
  2. Desktop – Direction number keys are mapped incorrectly
  3. Scrolling indicators/icons missing from think page and popup info pages
  4. Names on the map collide with each other
  5. Options screen has incorrect options on it for platform

Some of the changes.

There have been some UI changes that I have added either for flourish while I was rebuilding or out of necessity.

The landscape view now adapts to your screen resolution much more dynamically. It keeps the same aspect ratio (1.3333) of the original for the height of the view but allows the width to grow. The affectively gives you a wider field of vision or wider devices. I did feel originally that this was an unfair advantage to those on with resolutions closer to the original, but in the end I decided that the advantage was minimal as most people look around them anyway,

The Think page changed a little. The first is that the text now scrolls vertically if it gets to long. Again this was to help with certain resolution issues. But also each think page now scrolls horizontally in a fashion more akin to scrolling pages on mobile devices. Note the page indicator at the bottom of the screen.

He thinks again…

The following screens show some new additions to the think screen that allow to take certain actions direct from there.

Showing the new display when it’s night… more like the original.

Two changes that have happened on the main menu. A bigger scrolling area for the stories and a new stile menu screen.

Report Issue

We must reach the Tower of the Moon by tomorrow

It’s been 15 score and 7 days since I last posted about The Lords of Midnight. Things have changed a little since I decided to make the games available for free on GoG and to remove them from the Apple and Play stores. Firstly my working situation didn’t change. This was mainly because the government shelved its implementation of the new IR35 rules that were coming in to effect in April 2020. The reason for this was the same reason that has turned 2020 topsy-turvy; Covid19.

During this time I still haven’t done much work on LoM deciding to keep to my self imposed exile. I did visit the land of Midnight time-to-time and managed to break the back of a number of issues, and I enjoyed my time there for the first time in a long while.

I have have finally pretty much completed the Cocos2dx port. I only say “pretty much” because until I produce a release with it, then I’m not sure of any issues that remain. There are some known Desktop problems and I haven’t looked at Android at all (other than it’s under Cocos so should work mostly).

I have also satisfactorily resolved the resolution independence problem that has increasingly gotten worse with Apple in particular going hell bent for leather to release as many different resolution phones as they can managed over the eight years since I original brought the new LoM to mobile. Some of you may have already see the wide screen screenshots that I have posted on Twitter.

With those two issues at hand, I believe I am very close to being able to bring The Lords of Midnight back to the Apple Stores soon. My intention (but don’t hold me to it) is to get the game in to TestFlight testing in January and get it in to the stores proper as soon as possible after that. There are a lot more Apple devices to test on this time around!

After that, I will look at resolving any desktop issues so that I can get the game into TestFlight for OSX in February.

If these two milestones can be achieved, then Android and Windows release will follow very shortly after.

This is the last few remaining issues that I would like to tackle before I push to TestFlight. Not all of them are required to push to TestFlight so I suspect I will attempt an early smaller test release just to go through the process.