This blog has moved

This blog is now obsolete.  My new blog can be found at: http://blog.noctua-software.com

Please update your bookmarks ;)

Voxel Invaders: voxels + space invaders

This week we (noctua software) released our new video game for android phone: voxel invaders.
This is the sequel of our previous game Retrocosmos, and it follows the same principle (making a fun space invader game for touch screen devices).  Only this time we used 3d voxels (the equivalent of pixels in 3d) for all the graphics.

Voxels based games are starting to appear more and more and are particularly interesting for independent developers because it is much easier to generate a voxel model than a traditional 3d model.

Anyway back to the game:  this has been written almost entirely in C using android ndk, with just a few java code for some of the stuffs the ndk does not allow to do easily (like controlling the device vibrator). I wrote the engine from scratch, using opengl es 2 for the rendering, and some interesting C hack using macro for the enemies behaviour state machins (maybe I'll do an other post on that an other time).  The good thing about that is that if the game is a success it will be very easy to port it to other platforms like ios or symbian.

From a marketing point of view, we did two versions of the game: a free demo and a full paid version.  We have little experience of this kind of approach so I might do a follow up an other time about how much money we made from that.

Here is a video of the gameplay:

Super Medusa for android

I am pleased to announce the launch of my video game super medusa for android.

The game got some new levels, as well as a very cool music thanks to labbed.

The game can be directly downloaded from android market.

You can also check the youtube video of the game I made.

Introducing super medusa

Super Medusa is a small video game for nokia symbian phones.

It is somehow similar to the old Macintosh video game diamond.

In the game you control a jelly fish that always bounce up and down. By tilting the phone you can make it go left and right.

The goal of the game is to free all your friend trapped into bricks. You can break the bricks that are of the same color as you only, and some special bricks make you change your own color.

I write this game using Qt, it is already available on ovi store and it is totally free.

How to get ride of the perverts?

Now that my new website chatocracy has opened for one week, we start to see our first visitors.

The problem we have is that many of them seem to simply enjoy taking naked picture of themselves for all of us to see.

Since we use a rating system, if we had enough visitors the perverts should be automatically put at the very end of the list and be invisible to the normal visitors. But for the moment they keep showing up and may scare the other people away.

We think of several strategies we are going to use to hide them without relying on the rating system. The simplest one would be to simply allow the visitors to specify that they are indeed going to take off there clothes on the webcam. We could also try to automatically detect the offending pictures.

Whatever we do, we hope that soon we'll get screenshot of our page looking different that the one I put here!

Chatocracy is opening

Chatocracy is a website that allows people to have one to one conversations on the webcam. After each conversation you can rate the person you have been talking to ; the better ranking you get, the more people you can talk to.

My brother and me have been working on this website for the last few weeks. It is still beta so if you encounter problems please report it.

url : http://www.chatocracy.com

English translation of a short story

Here is an english translation of my short story : "The computer scientist priest". The translation is probably pretty loose. Hope you'll like it.