ANN: Little Soldiers released for Mac and PC

[Dan MacDonald]

I'm happy to announce that I have partnered with Phelios.com (http://www.phelios.com) to release Little Soldiers. Since the announcement here is more for developers then customers I'll elaborate a little more on the details.

Little Soldiers (http://www.phelios.com/pc/littlesoldiers.html) is the product of the creative minds (and stylus's) at SquareCircleCo (http://www.squarecircleco.com/). It was originally an unfinished flash game which they approached me to port to pocket PC. I really like the game and saw it's potential and offered to port it to mac and PC and refine it in the process. The agreed and here we are. The game is coded from scratch using C++ and PTK (http://www.phelios.com/ptk/). It took less then one day to port it from PC to MAC and is now available for download/purchase at Phelios.com (http://www.phelios.com)

Screenshots:
1 (http://www.phelios.com/images/games/littlesoldiers/littlesoldiers2.jpg) 2 (http://www.phelios.com/images/games/littlesoldiers/littlesoldiers3.jpg)

Demo Downloads:
MAC (http://www.phelios.net/files/mac/littlesoldiers.sit) PC (www.phelios.net/files/pc/littlesoldiers.exe)

[Jack Norton]

I just played the demo, fun game!
Said from me that I don't like casual games at all, is really a compliment ;)

[Dan MacDonald]

Thanks jack, so far this game is interesting some people find it pretty easy, and some people find it hard. Still need more feedback from customers before I'll know if I should make it easier or not.

[Chris Evans]

I just wanted to say congrats Dan! :)

I already downloaded it and I'm going to check out the game later today.

[Jack Norton]

Thanks jack, so far this game is interesting some people find it pretty easy, and some people find it hard. Still need more feedback from customers before I'll know if I should make it easier or not.
Hmm well I finished the demo in not much time, for me the game was easy, but I play lot of strategy/simulation games... :)

[BantamCityGames]

Hey Dan, The game looks great, but the main problem I was having was that it ran REALLY slow on my computer. Don't get too offended, my computer has trouble playing alot of games. I like concept of the game and the art looks good. I don't really know why it was running slow... does it use openGL? My card doesn't run openGL too well. Here are my system specs if you want them:

Athlon 850 (first gen)
Windows XP Pro
ATI Rage 128 32mb
256 ram

If you need me to run another test let me know. I may have to update my gl drivers too.

[Jack Norton]

Since it uses PTK, yes, I can tell you that you need to update your drivers, on your graphic card should work well :)

[Sunshine]

"SquareCircleCo. "

for some reason I cannot view this web-page :confused:

[ztownsend]

"SquareCircleCo. "

for some reason I cannot view this web-page :confused:

Flash - shows ok on my PC.

[Dan MacDonald]

Hey Bruno, update those GL drivers and let me know. You should be fine on that card. I do some stuff that makes it run really slow on machines without HW accelerators (Software mode) but anything with a resonable HW card like a Rage 128 should be fine.

[Sillysoft]

It is a nice fun game. Runs fine on my computer, except I cannot find a way to get it into fullscreen. I am using Mac OS X 10.3.5.

[Dan MacDonald]

Fullscreen is a planned upgrade ;)

For now it's a little office time killer that you can quickly minimize when the boss comes.

I think it's good to have a list of planned upgrades when you launch your game, it's probably one of the single best ways to get traffic for your game. Just ask Jack or Gabriel.

For Little Soldiers, I plan to have a fullscreen option, a level editor, a new tileset, and a new gameplay option "head-to-head" (hot seat) where two players can controll different teams in the same level and compete to accomplish a certian goal.

[Sillysoft]

Another thing I just noticed is that it left an empty file named 'lslevel.raw' in my home folder after playing. That is kinda annoying. It should either be deleted or created somewhere out of the way, like ~/Library/Application Support/littlesoldiers/

[Jack Norton]

I think it's good to have a list of planned upgrades when you launch your game, it's probably one of the single best ways to get traffic for your game. Just ask Jack or Gabriel.
What?? I only made 2 updates this month, to Quizland and The Goalkeeper! :D

[Dan MacDonald]

Another thing I just noticed is that it left an empty file named 'lslevel.raw' in my home folder after playing. That is kinda annoying. It should either be deleted or created somewhere out of the way, like ~/Library/Application Support/littlesoldiers/

Ahh that little file is used as part of the key unlocking mechanism, patraux (from Phelios.com) actually did the mac port for me as I do not have a mac (yet). I'll pass the feedback on to him... thanks!

EDIT:
Ahh, I that's incorrect, that file is actually used to store the sound/music settings and the last level that the user finished. The reason that it's in the home directory is more and more mac owners are setting up multiple users on their machines, this allows the game to remember what level in the game each user has achieved and only allow them to go to the level directly after it (or any of the previously completed levels)

[Scorpio]

Hi Dan,

Congrats on releasing your game. I installed the game on both my wife's laptop and my work machine.

On my wife's laptop, the game ran but was incredibly slow (way too slow to play).

On my work machine, the game crashed as soon as the empty game window appeared.

I'm sure it's the OpenGL drivers since QuizLand does the exact same thing (I prefer to keep my work machine "stock" to make sure HipSoft games run properly...so I don't update the drivers).

I'd be happy to try a special build with logging if you have one.
-Scorpio

[Greg Squire]

Dan,

I tried playing this during my lunch break here at my day job. The game is fun to play once you get past the small learning curve (the tutorial levels really helped with that). However, I’m seeing a bug where the bottom of the window gets garbled. I’ve attached a screenshot so you can see what I mean. Like Scorpio's issue, this may have something to do with the the (OpenGL) video driver.

My machine at work is a Dell PWS530 Workstation (Xeon 2.6 GHz CPU 768 Mb RAM Radeon 7000 Series video card). If you need anything else from me let me know.

[Dan MacDonald]

Hi Greg, it doesn't seem that the file attachment worked. Thanks for checking it out.

One of the thing I did with the code was to do a "blitArbitraryRect" when drawing sprites and tiles, this would enable me to support fullscreen rather easily by scaling the sprites and tiles. However, this has proved to be a boon for machines with little or no HW acceleration. I will release a new version soon that uses a regular blitRect, the Software drivers tend to have big problems with blitArbitraryRect because they can't just assume that it's a regular blit, they have to account for scaling and trapezoidal shaped rects.

Thanks for the testing.

EDIT:
looks like the attachment is there now, thanks!

[Codemattic]

Ahh, I that's incorrect, that file is actually used to store the sound/music settings and the last level that the user finished. The reason that it's in the home directory is more and more mac owners are setting up multiple users on their machines, this allows the game to remember what level in the game each user has achieved and only allow them to go to the level directly after it (or any of the previously completed levels)
Thats unacceptable. Imagine if every app did that? Your Home folder filled with strangely named files polluting your Home folder without any idea of how they got there? Sillysoft is correct - ~/Library/Application Support/littlesoldiers/ (or possibly a proper preference file in ~/Library/Preferences/). BTW - the "~" is shorthand for the users Home directory so it will be different for each user, so it will work the way you want.

Very very clever game. I just wish the graphics were bigger. (Im guessing its small since it was originally intended for PocketPC) On my 1600x1200 screen settings its a strain to differentiate between the different item types. Also I would like to be able to access the html help while in the middle of the game without having to quit first - an easy way could be to provide a file link (or copy) in the game folder to index.html.

Anyway, best of luck with your quite original game,

Codemattic

[Dan MacDonald]

Ahh, good feedback codemattic, thanks. One of the most requested features is a fullscreen mode and it is indeed in the works. Expect a v1.1 update comming soon :)