Hello,
GalaxiTaxi is on the Ansca mobile showcase! Hopefully this will rise awareness of my little game. 🙂
Ansca Mobile is the great company behind the Corona SDK with which I programmed GalaxiTaxi. If you are an Indie Developer or just plain interested in coding with a great language (LUA) you can download it and test it for free at their website. It is easy to get into and a very rewarding experience. I learned the language, did all the assets and programmed the game in just 4 months!
Hi everybody,
yesterday my first iPad Game GalaxiTaxi has been released to the Apple AppStore! You can now buy it for $0.99 (0.79€)! I put a lot of hard work in it and would really like to hear your thoughts about the game. I will release a few more levels in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
Hello all! So this is the last day of waiting! For some lucky few the waiting will be over even sooner!
I will give away some free download codes for the people who share GalaxiTaxi to the most people until this evening!
(By which platform you share is not important – be it Twitter, Facebook, Google+, word of mouth, etc.)
Just send me an email (support@manaconcept.com) and tell me the number of people you shared this blog with!
(I absolutely trust you to be honest!)
The bonus on top of it is that you can play the game a day before everybody else in the world!
I hope you will like the game as much as I do and rate it accordingly in all the AppStores around the globe! Thanks for sharing and caring!
Your Alexander “Barghest” Ommer
Hi all! Thanks for your support so far – please keep sharing and liking this blog and the Facebook Site to increase awareness of my little game. Tomorrow there will be a chance for some of you to get some free codes for the game and also a teaser video with some gameplay in action. Have a great sunday!
Hi out there. Only 3 days left until GalaxiTaxi finally hits the AppStore. Today I am totally consumed by the preparations for the release party on May 1st and I only want to thank you all for the support I am getting! On Monday you will get a chance to win some codes for GalaxiTaxi. So stay tuned and keep spreading the word!
The final four days start with really, really good news as the little Calliphora (on the left) indicates by celebrating! Apple has approved GalaxiTaxi to the store and it is ready for sale at the 1st of May! Wow – and this before I even had some decent breakfast… 😉 Cheers everybody!
Hi again,
the last 5 days until GalaxiTaxi will finally appear in the AppStore. Today I will tell you a bit about the galactic inhabitants or aliens as you may call them. There are currently 48 races 
populating the galaxy, which can all be seen in the game. From the snail-like Snoggs (like the guy on the left) to the strange Symbrains (the violet guy on top to the right) who induce knowlege to their mind controlled “victims” (the green guy). Some of them live on planets which are very strange compared to Earth – like Dasal, homeplanet of the Algeas, a pure saltwaterworld where the famous green “Space Bananas” are grown on top of the algae islands. Others like the beforementioned Symbrains have no homeplanet of their own, but live in every system as teachers in their well-known “Mind Academies” (Though nobody can really remember what happens inside).
The galaxy itself is divided by the six major fractions: Plantilles, Insectoids, Dark Worshippers, Democratic Order Of Many, Aquatuus and Furrians. These fractions are mostly peaceful, but major dislikes between some of them can even be witnessed when they compete over a place in your taxi…
Ok, that’s it for today – hope you are as excited as I am to see the whole game in action. See you tomorrow – and please don’t stop talking about this game and the FB site and keep sharing!
Hello again,
GalaxiTaxi is only 6 days left from its release on the AppStore. I will talk a bit about its gameplay today.
In GalaxiTaxi you control a small taxi which can hold a driver and only one passenger at a time. Since the future day aliens are very busy, they cannot be bothered to wait on trains or buses anymore. They need fast flying cabs to get to the next skyscraper, mall or work facility in due time. They pay well of course, but only if you manage not to bump into anything while transporting them at top speed. The more often you achieve this, the better your rating among your small alien customers will be. They will pay you up to 5 times the normal fare, if you prove to be the best. But the customers are not all that counts. The G.alactic T.axi A.uthorisation has put some stars into the landscape to challenge your cab flying abilities. If you collect all of them you will be rewarded one gold star. But for a three gold star rating you have to collect them all, transport every passenger in a level and set them down so softly that they didn’t even notice they have been transported – did I mention not to bump into anything while a passenger is on board? Getting three stars in every level will be a challenge.
That’s it for today – thanks for reading – and if you haven’t done already, tell people about this game, share this blog and like the GalaxiTaxi Facebook Page! Many thanks!
As some of you have noticed it has been awfully quiet on this blog. This normally means one of two things: Lack of interesting stuff to tell or lack of time to tell you interesting stuff! For me it’s definitely the latter one. I have been working hard to get my first iOS Game GalaxiTaxi out of the door. It is currently being in the review process by the guys from Apple and I hope it will release on the 1st of May as planned. It has been quite a ride doing a game completely on my own – but what a great experience it has been! I feel a bit exhausted but also anxious to know if this game will be successful – after all, it is some kind of child to me, which is released into the wild.
If you want to help me push it out of the door…
Welcome back! I hope you enjoyed my little blog so far. Please feel free to comment or ask questions whenever you like. Today I will talk about my current weapon of choice:
The Corona SDK from Ansca Mobile. I stumbled upon this great development kit as I searched for means to build an iPhone/iPad game. The Corona SDK allows for instant fun with coding as it is really that easy to understand. I downloaded the trial version and was amazed by the possibilities it offered. The only thing I could not do with the trial version, was to actually build for the Apple Store! I could even built directly on a device (Apple Developer ID is still needed of course!) which is very rarely included in trial versions. I was skeptical at first as I had tried quite a few SDKs from different studios but when I finally tested it, I had an iPhone simulator screen running with a “Hello world!” in just a few seconds. This screamed “wow!” all over it. The programming language used is LUA (V 5.1) which is very easy to understand and is ideal if you have none or just basic understanding of programming. Sure C# or Objective C might be more powerful, but they are quite a hurdle to overcome if you start fresh out. I tried some of their code examples and learned the language really quick by just trying out some things. It uses Box2D physics and is mainly targeted at an audience trying to do 2D games with physics although even “boring” apps like calenders and the like can be done.
I decided I wanted to do a small game project before I try something bigger and came up with the idea of doing a gravity based game like Spacetaxi. I had some artworks from an unfinished project with some cute little aliens and I always liked space taxis. I wanted to go “bottom up” with this, so I really built the game as I went not planning greatly ahead. I improve GalaxiTaxi on a daily basis and if I am not satisfied, a feature may get overhauled or dropped entirely. I love working on my own – nobodies work is wasted but mine.
Looking through the list of third party tools for Corona I found two that proofed to be perfect: The first was Particle Candy and the second was called Lime (and whats better than a corona with lime? ;)).
Particle Candy is a very well done particle library which offers physics particles and many other effects. I always liked particle effects as they cost so much less processing power and are more flexible than animations (for explosions that is). It is easy enough to understand, but it could use some kind of editor for quickly perfectioning effects. But since Corona is interpreted it can be told to automatically restart everytime any assets are changed in the project folder. So that is no big issue.
Lime is really amazing. It is a tile-based editor library for Corona which uses tilEd made levels and reads them in for Corona. Its creator Graham Ranson is a really nice person and quick to respond on any questions I had. Lime works as advertised and is a big helper when it comes to loading in levels which can be hold a lot of information for the game. This makes it possible to give tasks to a level designer who has great possibilities on changing values and keeps the programmer from doing this. Especially for one person developers this proves to be an enormous plus as I can write the code once and load in any level I design.
The TilEd (V 0.8) editor is a tile based level editor that still has some issues with reloading assets and sometimes needs to be restarted, but overall it is a good enough tool for something that does not cost a penny. It surely is better then writing XML tables by hand. It can be used with a lot of different platforms and operating systems.
That’s it for today. I hope you found something new and worthwile to read and next I will show you how I built a level from scratch.
Development Blog 