astroCommander - Version 1.0, updated 2010-08-07

There we go, version 1.0rc2 is now out on the market. No saved data is changed so you can safely upgrade and resume your game in the new version.

As I wrote in the last blogpost there is not a lot for you as a player to notice about the upgrade.

But I stumble into some interesting stuff when I was browsing the developer pages. There is now an API for the backup manager (See code.google.com/android/backup/ for more info about that) and since it sounds like a nice feater it's now implanted in the game.

If you ever factory reset your phone, root and install a new rom, buying a new phone or just delete the game, all your hard work is gone... But now when the backup manager is in play, all you need is to download the game again from the market and all your saved data is magically back as if you never deleted it!

Please note that this feature is only available on phone running Android 2.2 using Google servers and having a backup transport on the device.

Soon there will be a new version of astroCommander, 1.0rc2, the last in a long chain of beta releases. All releases after that will be deemed as full versions.

And the news in it? Absolutely nothing :)

Well, the truth is that it will of course contain some new stuff, but nothing that you as a player will notice. The gameplay will be exactly the same and all of your saved data will be intact when doing an upgrade.

It will have some internal changes as I try to clean it up a bit after all changes made to the source during the test period. The most important change for me is that it will send your upgrades when submitting/updating hiscores. With this data I will have a better view of where the coins are spent and if I notice anything wrong (From my calculated "normal game experience") the upgrades will have a tweak in version 1.0.

Due to the nature of how the hiscore data is stored on your phone and how the update works the upgrades will only be sent after you have got a new hiscore. This I hope will not be a big problem since most of you out there have an ongoing hiscore in your current game or start from a saved restart point and dont have that long to your hiscore from there.

And version 1.0 will be out not long after that. It depends on the amount of new data that I receive and if I need to act on it or not. So please break your hiscore and send it in asap when you install rc2, the faster I get your data the faster 1.0 will be there...

Right now release candidate 1 of version 1.0 is under my final test. What I do is playing the game from level 1 until the end to check that everything works as intended.

One of the changes is a little popup box that you will see the first time you start an upgraded version, there you will get information on the most important changes.

Here is a copy of the current one that will be included in 1.0rc1:

We are getting closer to actually saving the earth. The big bad leader behind all alien attacks have been spotted, he looks strong and I think it will take more then one fight to kill it...

Not only is one more boss added, there is also one new kind of alien ship, you can see one of them flying around in the screenshot with a red bar ontop.

That red bar indicate there health, it goes down while they is "inside" an explosion. With some luck you can down them with one shoot, but its a bit better to double tap just to be sure.

The shield I gave to the aliens was a bit strong and next delivery will have reduced uptime and longer times between activations.

And still struggling with the balance of the game. The first upgrades will make a bigger impact and the later once a bit less. Instead of having it all linear this will make it feel better at start but in the same time not give you an too much easy ride.

Still a lot of work, but aiming for a new release, v1.0rc1, this weekend.

Flash update: By mistake I checked the the box for copy protection when I uploaded the new version, this was not intended! I found out since it doubled the size of the apk file so now its back to off again. So sorry for this.

Ingame interactive help is here. Thats something I have been postponing since the first public release. But now I got my act together and wrote it, was not as hard as I thought now when the GUI engine doing its tricks.

It goes through all the basic elements in the game, lets you try to shoot down one asteroid and have a quick peek on one of the bosses.

For all of you already playing the game its nothing new in it, but I think it can be good for new players.

Buttons in the mainmenu is now a bit bigger and easier to hit. The resume button is always there, only its red when you dont have any game to resume.

In the hiscore view, your hiscore change color to show you the update status. Its green when your current hiscore is the same as the one uploaded, red if you got a new hiscore and need to submit it. And it can also be yellow, this is if your submitted hiscore is higher then your ingame one, this happens if you uninstall and reinstall the game or after a data wipe.

Removed the nagging for setting your hiscore name when you first install the game, you can set it from option menu or the hiscore view.

Well, that the round up on whats happening right now. There is still more work to do before 0.99 is out, but in a few days or so you can expect to get it.

Yippee!

astroCommander just reached 10.000 downloads with an average rating of 4.03 stars. It makes me happy that you all enjoy this game, its a big encouragement for me to carry on the work.

And still going on with the updates, longing for getting to version 1.0.

So, whats happening with the game now when we getting closer to 1.0? Well, I just rewrote the rendering engine and made a nearly 40% speed boost. Thats not so important for newer devices that runs on 1GHz since the FPS was good as it was but for the more lowend phones I hope it will bring more joy.

Also making small fixes, like someone pointed out that the coin counter looked bugged. Its not bugged, just that it increases upon spawn and not when the coin gets there. Think on the upgrade menu, there can still be a flying coin when you get there and you want to be able to shop with that coin also. But now I added a fake counter so it looks "right". A lot of other small fixes here and there have also been done, but nothing big that you will ever notice.

There is also time to start the work on the ingame help, thats one job I have pushed to "tomorrow" for a long time now.

And after dieing so many times on levels around 50-59 there will be more changes on the raising difficulty factor. Thats one of the best thing about being the author, if its too hard you can just change it :)

Will not add more gameplay for the game now until I decides the game being version 1.0. But after that... well, don't despair, I got plans for the future of this game even if I will move on to other projects and updates will be more rare.

After hours and hours of playing version 0.98 is here.

So, whats new in this version then? Well, we got the coin ships that you can read about in some earlier blog and changes of the balancing.

One more new thing in the game is that you no longer can restart the game from your highest played level. This was a leftover from the older game when no upgrades existed. Its hard to start on the higher levels without any coins and upgrades, thats why I removed it.

But no panic, you don't have to play the game from level one every time. Whenever you kill a boss you get the option to save your progress as a restart point including; scores, coins, upgrades and lives.

You can then choose to start from any of your restart points just as you did a resume from there. So if you made it to level 21 without dyeing you probable want to start there next time. If you made it with one or two deaths, start there or go back and try to get a better restart point.

Every 10th level got it's own save, so if you resave at level 21, the data for restarting on level 11 is kept untouched.

And last change is that the scores you get from killing things got increased, with about the double amount and triple for the bosses. This way I don't have to reset the hiscores :)

Ops, just found out that I (once again!) forgot to change the ingame about text...

Working hard on balancing the game, both on upgrades and difficulties of the levels.

I am starting to get happy with the upgrades, there is more coins to get and prices have changed. But you will not get the new coins for free, there is always work behind more money...

You still get two coins for completing a level and one for every surviving defense satellite, but the rest is from coinships.

There is some randomness for them to spawn after killing an alien ship, but if you are unlucky on the rolls there is a build in cover for that. Whenever you miss to spawn a ship the chance is increased a bit and lowered back when you finely get one so it will even out in the long run. There is also a raising maximum number of coinships you can get per level, in the early stage you can only get two of them, so no super rich trolls after level 1 :) And you must shoot them down to get the money, but on the nice side is that they cant shoot back at you.

The hard part of this balancing act is making the levels easier without doing them too boring. Up to the first boss, level 10 that is, the game is more or less at learning stage now. Shorter levels with not so mush on the screen at any given moment.

Whats waiting you on level 11 and onwards is what I am working on right now, my hope is that a new version will be out this weekend.

And I will end with a big thank you for all the nice feedback I got, its nice to see that most of you out there seams to like this game, it give me inspirations for the upcoming projects that I will uncover for you when this is done.

"it's a bit more expensive to get better weapons now"... That was what I wrote yesterday, too bad I didn't count more on it before I made the changes. Now I have change the prices once more, at the beginning the upgrade prices get lower but for the later upgrades they stay at the more expencive rate.

And not only is the lower items getting cheaper, you can now get more coins! When you kill an alien spaceship they sometimes try to use there escape pod and run home. If you shoot it down everything inside is yours, except the body that some secret government organization will take care of :)

Will also see if I can make the 2 first bosses a bit easier now when we got plenty of levels to play there is no need to make it so hard in the beginning of the game.

Next version will be 0.98 and will hopefully be the last version with bigger changes on the game play before 1.00 is released. The 0.99 update will most likely only be for last minutes fixes and the final help guide.

After 1.00 I will start looking more closely on the rendering engine, as it is right now I make a lot of small changes on it for every version so not a good point to start messing around with tweaks and optimizations before I know what it have to do.

Was adding nine new levels and one boss, but got the flow up and made 180 new levels :)

Well, it's not fully true. What I did was to make the game calculate new levels on the fly and add bosses on every 10 of them. It reuses three types of bosses, but make them harder for every time. Not 100% happy with the result, it lack a bit of randomness that I need to add later.

Made some changes to the GUI and speeded up the rendering a little, there I still got some work to do also before it will hit 1.00.

Change the upgrade costs, it's a bit more expensive to get better weapons now, but on the other hand you can upgrade a bit feather if you got the coins for it.

So, dont stand here, rush to the market and grab the new version 0.97 of the game!

Just uploaded version 0.95, so go and grab it from the market!

The most noticeable change is weapon upgrades. Whats not so easy to spot is the tweaks I made on the levels, played some hours and change a bit here and there to get a better flow in them. Also removed some spawn points that would sometimes flood your screen with enemys if played in a sertent way.

And found out that I had forgotten to change the about text, it was the same as in version 0.90...

I need to make a better way to display the help texts and tell you how the upgrades works and how the prices is calculated. What I plan to do is a computer played level that pause and tell you whats happening on the screen, a picture is worth a thousand words so it will save a a lot of typing I guess.

I think you can figure out what to upgrades do, but the "buy ammo" is a bit tricky since you already got unlimited ammo. So it works like this, when there is no cooldown on a satellite you can fire five rapid shoots before it maxes out, when you buy more ammo you raise that by one.

So upgrading cooldown is for the overall fight, upgrading ammo is for that stressful time when you need more firepower.

And speaking of upgrades, right now you can only get five coins per level, two that you always get and one more for every defense satellite alive after a level. But there is a "coin ship" in the pipeline that will spawn randomly when doing multikills. When you shoot it down there is a shiny coin inside for you to spend.

As many have pointed out, its a nice idea if the weapons would be upgradeable.

The only two problems I have to solve is what kind of upgrades and how to get them...

What I hope will work is that instead of giving extra lives from scores and killing bosses, is to give the player coins instead. I will have to lower the score needed to get them, and maybe give them as random reward for killing some alien ships.

With the coins you can buy stuff like:

Nice Nice game but not accilent i like it

Just in time for asteroid 2005 YU55 ... This game "ROCKS"!! Is fantastic on my LG Op. V. Simple and addictive with gr8 graphics & sound effects. Lite on internàl mem. too. A+

Awesomely addictive!! Don't start playing this game before you plan to go to sleep because sleep won't happen. It is so addictive and fun, its tough to stop playing!

Excellent Smooth and sharp. No flaws. This dude needs to make more apps

Unreal gameplay and flawless graphics. Im lv 59 and its getting testy! Mike, u need to hone ur skills!