2-player split-screen 3D shooter out now on the App Store!

I thought forum users might be interested in seeing a teaser video for my upcoming game, Beware the Banjax, coded entirely in Codea.

https://vimeo.com/157928940

Originally I planned to make it a local device-to-device 2-player game using sockets, but, as documented elsewhere on this forum, getting fast-action 2 player synced across devices is hard.

So, I decided to turn that limitation in my coding skills to the good, and take advantage of the large iPad screen, by creating a split-screen mode, allowing 2 players to play on a single device. When you watch it on a video like the one above, the top player’s view appears to be upside down, but of course, when two people are looking end-to-end at an iPad, each person sees their view the right way up.

I’m not responsible if you drop the iPad :stuck_out_tongue:

It was an enormous amount of fun to create, and is also pretty good fun to play. Thanks to everyone on Codea Talk for your support down the years, with special thanks to @Ignatz for showing us all the way with importing OBJ models in to Codea, 3D lighting etc.

There’s just a few administrative things to take care of, and of course it has to be approved. But, Cupertino willing, this should be on the App Store in a week or two.

I’ve also created a website to promote it, and I moved some of my old blog posts on 3D animation there. I’m going to try to blog a little more now that I’ve got my site to a more presentable stage.

http://saltpigmedia.com/apps/banjax

I’m happy to discuss processes, workflows etc.

B)

Wow! look forward to playing it.

Looks really good and is a good advertisement as to what can be created with Codea

Very polished!

Holy crap. I can only dream to be able to program something like this! Great work!!!

Thanks everyone for the kind comments! Just pressed the “submit” button, so fingers crossed that the review goes smoothly…

This is amazing. I am very impressed. Keep the updates flowing once released. I love to see something on my favored apps every so often. Updates will keep your demographic pulled in more.

@WilkeNine_Co thanks! Yeah, just testing the waters with this first release, but there’s certainly tonnes of content I could add. Different worlds/ skins/ weapons etc would definitely be on my list. And maybe even peer-to-peer 2 player (if I can ever get that working…)

I think using sockets would be a really good idea like you previously stated. But like you said, the problem is syncing the times between the two, and preventing the lag between the clients.

If this were a computer game, I would recommend using Bluetooth connection to share the information between the two players that way. But since you are doing this all on an iPad, then Bluetooth sync is out of the plan.

OK, it should be out now.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/banjax/id1084565170?ls=1&mt=8

Downloaded and started to play, not sure what i did but generated a crash, screenshot below…
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jnsaa1u50hp6zon/2016-03-20%2020.35.54.png?dl=0

@yojimbo2000 Looks like a fun game. Graphics look really good. Unfortunately I don’t play games, so I only got as far as your demo on the App Store.

@piinthesky thanks for the download! And sorry about the crash :frowning: . I thought the release candidate was fairly stable. That screenshot shows the print statements from the console (I probably should take those out of the release version), you’d need to scroll down through the console until you get to the red error message to see what caused the crash. It would be great if you could give me more details, what you were doing when it crashed, whether you’re able to make it crash again.

A pleasure to purchase-recompense for all the code of yours that i use!
Actually for me it crashes quite often, but now unlike the first time it goes straight to ios and does not bring up the console. If i catch another one with the console i’ll post it.

I notice, that the actual view does not always match the selected view, especially when restarting a new game.

That sucks! Can I ask what device/ iOS version you’re on?

Also, do you know whether you have the iOS 9 “Gamecenter bug”? I just found out about it from another bug report. If you have the issue, then any game which invokes gamecenter will crash (none of my beta testers have this issue, so it didn’t get flagged). I’m looking at my code to see whether I can make gamecenter optional.

Ios 9.2.1. When i first started the game there was a game center screen at the beginning, but i cancelled it. It also appeared the second time and i cancelled it. It did not appear since.

Have you tried launching other games that have Game Center support? Apparently, if you have the bug, any game that invokes Game Center on launch is inoperable! Neither me nor any of my beta testers had the bug, so it didn’t get flagged. This might not be the cause of your crashing, but it’s something I’m looking into. I’m worried that the Codea Game Center plugin invokes Game Center regardless of whether you actually include any gamecenter methods…

Aww, wish it was free, but you deserve the money from all your hard work!