This post has been a long time coming, with me being focused on other work commitments and the family, so you’ll have to imagine this being about five months ago when I wrote it. :) Things are settling down a bit now so their will be a lot more posts coming in the near future. Now lets wind the clocks back about six months...
The last month has been quite busy. In addition to all the updates I’ve done recently, most of this time has been getting the new levels into Molecular 2 and deciding on which parts of the game I liked before and which I didn’t. Eventually I ended up with about 60 new levels. Some of the same molecules as the first game are present but the level layout are quite different. There are also a lot more atoms this time around too so we’ve had to come up with a new rendering scheme for the atoms. It gives us a lot more flexibility but is quite a hit on performance, especially on the first-gen iPhone. In the next post I’ll go through what the issues were, how I found them and how I fixed them.
Another change I’ve decided on is to remove the time-limit. While a great feature for a hard-core puzzle game, I'm trying to make the next game much more accessible so it was something that just had to go. With that goes the multiple difficulty settings. That said, I’m still tossing up whether to track the players time still and rate their performance based on it. We'll see.
I think that's about it for this post. In the next few posts I get a bit more technical, describing some of the rendering and level layout rendering techniques we used. I promise they won't take five months to come out. :)
