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Mindless retro action :)

About a week ago a friend of mine released his very first indie game – for the iPhone of all platforms. Sounds like a bit of a pain and probably it actually was. The game is basically a bigger and better version of one of his old games. The old one was written in C++ for Win32 (the source is also available over there). Later on he also ported it over to the GBA.

The new version looks and sounds pretty cool. If you're interested check out the video over at the official site. By the way, all models were done with everyone's favorite box modeler Wings3D. And the final audio cutting was done in Audacity. Both tools are mind-boggling awesome for these tasks. Check them out if you haven't yet.

Well, about a week has passed and he only sold a dozen copies so far. In the meantime it was pirated a few thousand times. Ouch. So, if you got $2.99 to burn (and an iPhone to boot) you can make one poor student very happy.

A low poly spaceship

Without net access there wasn't much to do. However, modeling was one of the few things I actually could do. Fortunately I had some recent version of Wings3D installed. A few futile attempts later I got something that looked alright. Semi-satisfied with my low poly (52 polygons, 104 edges, 54 vertices) spaceship I went ahead texturing it with Inkscape.

Since the intended rendering size is rather small there isn't a need for fine details. I also wanted to try some bold semi-futuristic look with a touch of military blandness. Using vectors seemed like the most natural choice. Hard vector edges also fit the flat shaded rendering a lot better.

Before I could start with the texturing I had to do the UV mapping first. UV mapping is a bit annoying in Wings3D, but it's alright for simple models. If you aren't familiar with the term: it's about which part of the texture goes where on the model.