GeoTecha - new Android app

edited October 2013 in Share Your Work

I have recently published my second Android app developed with Processing, titled GeoTecha. It is available for free from Google Play.

The game is controlled entirely by tilting the screen. The objective of each game mode is to survive for as long as possible against the various enemies that are encountered. Scoring is determined primarily by time and several other factors. There are three game modes: Survival, Asteroids, and Minefield. More information is located on the Google Play page mentioned above.

I originally started writing the game shortly after reading the PVector tutorial (a long time ago!), and the use of concepts from the tutorial is apparent to anyone else that has also read it. I was also inspired by some of my favorite games for iOS and Android including Dark Nebula and PewPew. I have tried to combine some ideas from these games as well as other ideas from my imagination.

I have more ideas for contributing to the game in the future and I am open to suggestions, bug reports, or anything else worth mentioning either here or on the Google Play page.

Below are some screenshots of the game (I don't have a gameplay video at present...):

geotecha-scr-03

geotecha-scr-01

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Comments

  • Hi calsign, you have caught my attention. I'll give it a try

  • The game is really good, congrats :P

    Now, what you really want to hear: - Options are not preserved, every time you play you must set the options, specially I don't want to set the difficulty each time. I can help you saving/loading a settings file if you ever need it. - As a suggestion I would do the accelerometer calibration every time play button is pushed. - It would be nice if in the stats there was a difficult level column. - I find the game quite difficult, so it would be nice if in the minefield mode you could make a smaller collision box/circle for the red squares, because I strike against them all the time ;(. - When I switch off my screen and switch on again I get a blackout - Perhaps you can find a nice music theme. I suggest you this site: http://ccmixter.org/

    It seems a lot, but is not :P, they are only little details and of course matters A nice to have feature, but that require a lot of work, would be having power-ups, but I'm sure that is something you have already thought.

    Greetings and congrats again

  • @kabomi - First of all, thanks for the feedback!

    I included the ability to preserve options for the vibration and debug buttons, but, in an oversight, left out this functionality for the difficulty button (which is, of course, the most important of the three...).

    I considered re-calibrating the accelerometer at the start of the game, but largely didn't include this because I wasn't entirely confident in the calibration feature's ability to work properly; I will now work towards trying to correct it (if it needs to be corrected) and then implementing an auto-calibrate (probably configurable in the options menu).

    I will also include the difficulty level in the high-score table. I considered this at first, but, quite frankly, forgot about it before the release.

    I can work towards re-balancing the Minefield game mode, although I must say that I enjoy the challenge of it at present...

    I will attempt to include music and / or sound effects at some point in time. I wasn't sure how hard it would be to achieve this, but I will certainly look into the website that you provided.

    In an older version of GeoTecha, I included a set of power-ups, but they didn't work all that well. I will probably try to add them to the game at some point in time, but not necessarily in the near future. I'm more concerned with other parts of the game-play experience, such as music, right now.

    All in all, thanks for the feedback - this is exactly the kind of information that I want and need. I believe that I'll be pushing a second version of the app within the next week with at least some of the improvements mentioned above.

  • I'm glad to have been of help, I wish you the best with your game and I'll be waiting for your next version, of course take your time.

    I encourage anyone to test this amusing game.

    If you want that more people test your game you could publish it to Slide Me marketplace. In my experience, in play market indie games have less visibility, in 3 days I have had 18 downloads only, but in Slide Me market my game is more visible and in one day I've had more than 160 downloads.

    Good luck

  • I have really liked it, both playability and aesthetic. I agree that music and sound effects would greatly improve the experience.

    I haven't calibrated before playing but it has worked perfectly every time. And the difficulty was spot on for me as the controls felt very responsive. Great work!

  • edited November 2013

    I've just released version 1.0.1 (the second release build) to Google Play... it'll probably take a couple of hours to become available it is now available. In the update notes, I outlined the inclusion of the following:

    • Difficulty and Accelerometer Calibration now saved between sessions
    • Difficulty displayed in high-score table
    • Minefield game mode is easier
    • Removed debug functionality

    I opted not to re-calibrate at the beginning of each game, but your calibration is at least saved now. I might consider changing this again at some time in the future if it's still necessary.

    I tried to improve the preservation of the Activity's state between sessions of running, but my attempts have proved entirely unsuccessful. I still have the code, and will continue to strive for a solution... I am also surprised that some of my newer sketches do not encounter nearly as many issues, and am wondering if the version of Processing has something to do with the problems.

    I didn't include music loops / sound effects in this update, but this is because I want to spend more time working on them so that they can be correct the first time. I have several different ideas, one of which includes a dynamic sound-scape that changes with the gameplay. The ideas are still rough, but you can be certain that sound will soon contribute significantly to the game.

    @kabomi and @kosowski... this is to let you guys know... and thank you for the feedback.

    I'll probably take a break from this for a little bit and work on other projects. Of course, I have school, as well... so it might be some time before I work on adding sound to GeoTecha.

  • Hey, I find Minefield mode much easier thanks. I showed your game to some friends of mine and they find it pretty cool. Take your time to improve the game, and I'd like to say that more people have downloaded my game from Slide Me market than from Play Market, because of the visibility they've given to it. Good luck

  • downloading.

  • I would expect the hard difficulty to be actually harder, like enemies being faster, and not just having a shorter life bar.

    On a 1200x800 tablet the game looks beautiful, but on a ~ 400x800 phone it looks aliased.

    Keep on the great work!

  • edited November 2013

    i enjoyed it very much! it's very hard to fit on every screen. mine is 320x240. i found it stays black when returning from blocked screen. but it seems to be something about Processing compatibility, which i'm dealing with too.

  • Thanks for the feedback @kosowski and @redraw.

    I'm not actively developing GeoTecha at the moment, but I will consider your comments when I do.

  • Great processing app

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