Thumb Swyper 0.9 pre-release universal screen version!

Versions prior to the 0.9 pre-release did not use the entire screen. This was done to create a fair, consistent playing field across all screens using a 640x960 virtual resolution. Problem was, on most devices this meant letterboxing. As the nice reviewers at RIM pointed out : )  So I am doing a rewrite of the layout engine that uses proportions and unit coordinates so that all screen estate will be used, on every device, landscape or portrait! This is, like most things, more work than expected.

For instance, here is what happens if you are running on some oddball 815 x 935 device:

Not perfect, but it works. The big stars in the foreground need to be adapted to this universal scaling thing. The mountains are starting to look a bit too regular and repetitive when there are this many (all items in the layout are dynamically generated -- including the green rocks and bumps, and of course tree positions.) Are we afraid to show our flaws at Percunia Games? No we aren't!

I could have re-submitted with a quick hack for Playbook but no-- that's not how things are done at Percunia Games! We won't rest until every user is smiling while playing our games! Unless they are smiling out of derision and pity of course. Hard to tell sometimes, so those might slip through.

While I am at it, I am fixing the difficulty issue, so that things ramp up more gradually and fairly. Frankly, if the game author cannot progress beyond level 12, what hope is there for the player?

Here's a summary of the changes for the 1.0 release that I expect to be approved this week or soon after. Some suggestions from play testers are being incorporated as well:

• Universal screen adaptation! Sort of like an 'anamorphic' version, but the content will actually change depending on the screen. [nearly done]
• This doesn't make scores comparable across all screen layouts, but will lead to a more enjoyable experience. There is no online high-score saving yet; if there is, the difficulty across layouts will be normalized when that time comes (if enough people play).
• Challenging but not impossible gameplay, as far as difficulty increasing with the wave number, as mentioned above
• I will likely make the stars rotate around a different center of mass, so they speed up and slow down rather than move at constant speed, in the later waves
• Make some stars red, say, and lose points if you swype them [optional; tester suggestion]
• Add a bird flying above and get extra points for swyping it [optional; tester suggestion]
• If I do this, I would actually prefer not to 'kill' birds. We are protecting trees here, so the theme is respect for our natural environment. We all know that in Brazil especially, towers shooting stars at trees is becoming a big problem : ). Perhaps it should be a bulldozer that could take out a few trees if you miss it. For the minuscule number of people actually reading this far, a tidbit: our next game will likely involve a bulldozer! So our efforts here will be re-usable.
• Earlier versions used shurikens (ninja throwing stars) instead of these yellow stars. The icon for the game uses stars, so it was changed to match. Will likely change back to ninja stars. For one thing, the moving stars are the same as the three stars that mark your progress, and that is confusing. [nearly done; ninja star artwork already exists]
• Changing some of the sounds and art to ones with a license that is compatible with a non-free app so I have the option of making a paid version of the app. Luckily that is only a few things that aren't on screen often, so it won't impact game much. And no, 'Swyper' in this context is not violating any Dora the Explorer copyrights : ).

So, RIM asking me to add a little blue on top and a little green on the bottom, has been an opportunity to fix some nagging issues I was planning to ignore so we can put more effort into our developing projects. But why not make this game really fun, rather than just casually entertaining? At the risk of delaying the release by a week or two, Percunia Games is making the game even better!