mattin found ELFrun featured on “Englishtwist’s” Christmas Countdown for December 3rd. If you want to see the whole ELFrun intro video (because you don’t have an iPod/iPhone, of course, otherwise you would indeed buy the game to watch it), have a look at his footage starting at about minute 4 🙂
There’s another video from “ipodtouchlab” who is featuring ELFrun over here with two (simple) levels of gameplay. I’m really wondering whether someone will ever make a movie of the harder ones.
Latest Posts
ELFrun gameplay video #1
mattin created a new video which shows ELFrun from starting it up on the iPhone to finishing a level (and most of a bonus level). It’s one of the easier levels at the beginning (level 5), so there are not many obstacles and the speed is still pretty low. I guess playing a higher level through a camera is pretty much impossible.
ELFrun is also currently featured on TouchArcade.com, hooray!
I was a bit scared how fast ELFrun was pirated, though.
ELFrun available
ELFrun is available in the AppStore. Just follow this link.
And now, dear colleagues, please spread the word! Feel free to use one of the shots mattin posted and do some advertising. Greatly appreciated!
ELFrun submitted to the AppStore
I nearly shed a tear when mattin finally made it after 12 hours of struggling with code signing and stuff. Imagine that: a 3D artist builds, signs and deploys a whole C++ application using XCode and command line tools by himself. I couldn’t do something like that the other way round. I’m really proud to work with so amazingly talented people.
Now keep your fingers crossed that the AppStore people like it as much as we do.
Oh, and here’s just a little update to mattins posting:
ELFrun Highscores
The ELFRUN developers are fighting for the highscore during their last tests with the game. mattin, here’s my reply.
MATTHIAS has taken the lead.
Now I’m stuck in level 20.
ELFrun is coming to your iPod/iPhone
Since mattin has let the cat out of the bag, here’s what we’ve worked on in the past weeks.
Head over to dermattin for more.
Crunch-time
I didn’t talk to my girlfriend very much lately. I didn’t read many blogs. I didn’t watch any movies. I didn’t breathe much fresh air. I didn’t use my PC for anything more than listening to music or fetching mails. I didn’t sleep much more than four hours the last two weeks or so. I neither wrote a single line of code for DVW nor attended the last sechsta sinn team meeting. I have a new game on my desk right next to me but I didn’t even bother to install it yet. I get asked whether I’m sick because I look like a zombie when I creep around the office in the morning at noon. I currently drink so many energy drinks that my heart beats heavily when I finally try to get some sleep (so eventually I don’t get any). I’m sitting here with the MacBook Pro on my lap, big headphones with music on my head and two separate headphones in my ears, one connected to the MacBook and one to an iPod. I wrote about 15000 lines of code in the last eight weeks in my spare time, and there’s a deadline coming so close so quickly that I fear I will hit me like a bullet train.
It’s crunch-time, baby.
Unity3D for iPhone ships on October 22, 2008
As an update on my article on 3D engines for the iPhone / iPod, Unity Technologies has announced the shipping of their 3D game development tool for iPhone starting on October 22nd, 2008. According to a heise news, prices will range from 400 to 1500 USD.
iPhone NDA dropped
Apple has dropped the iPhone NDA for released software. I guess now I need to release something really quick in order to be able to discuss iPhone development in detail and publically, right? So, you get what that actually means? It seems now that they cannot protect their stuff as much as they wanted, they at least want to make sure that people discussing the stuff have paid for the developer program first. As it seems, “released iPhone software” refers to the SDK itself, not released products in the AppStore. At least, this is what everyone else seems to think.
iPhone 3D engine test: SIO2
Yesterday, I digged deeper into the SIO2 3D engine which I mentioned in my last post. This is what I’ve thrown together in some hours of work. (Featuring a free model by Sven Daennart, one of my favorite 3D artists.)
The SIO2 API is very OpenGL-ish and features a bunch of C methods like “sio2ResourceGet”. It requires you to have one global attribute sio2 around which is the entry point into the engines internals, like the SIO2 window. (This is the point where it gets a bit annoying since every SIO2-related pointer in there starts with _SIO2… Hold on, I’m already using this sio2 global which you’re expecting me to have, so why do I need to type something like sio2->_SIO2window->_SIO2windowrender…?) I prefer an object-oriented approach anyway, so I started to wrap the engine into my own C++ classes which went pretty smooth so far. Fortunately, SIO2 comes with eight examples, each accompanied by YouTube video tutorials, and a skeleton project you can use for a jump-start. Moreover, a good part of the examples is documented inline, but still some API functions are lacking any documentation.
Featuring Theora video, OpenAL sound, Lua scripting and Bullet physics, SIO2 has an excellent basis to build upon. Still, there are drawbacks, e.g. it’s currently lacking support for skeleton based animation (but it’s in the works according to the page) and it doesn’t come with a scenegraph and thus doesn’t regard parent-child relationships modelled in Blender. Also, in order to attract some more people, there should be some written tutorials available since not everyone using it is a Blender expert also who can guess what the author is doing from watching the blurry and uncommented videos. But, don’t get me wrong here, I highly appreciate the excellent work and I’d just like to encourage the author to put more effort into documentation.