GameFontMaker

July 9th Update: GamefontMaker is now at 1.0.0 beta 2 and it’s also been released under the GPLv2. You can find the latest version and source over here!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything to the blog, so I figured I’d do something a bit special to try and get into the swing of things. So, I present to you what I think may be the first native Cocoa bitmap font creation tool for games, GameFontMaker!

At least, I think it is… Maybe… I didn’t do a lot of research, but I have seen a lot of fellow iOS devs wishing something like this existed for OS X, as the only other alternative runs under Windows.

Even if it isn’t, I was getting sick and tired of my really awful bitmap font creation tool that used FTGL, SDL and duct tape and generally produced hideous bitmaps without a lot of fudging of numbers. This is much, much better than that.

Anyway, GameFontMaker is currently in “beta” so don’t come crying to me if your computer explodes or anything. Though in my defense it hasn’t caused my MacBook to explode, and it was way less stable when I started it about 12 hours ago!

This is also my first Cocoa app, so forgive me if it’s a bit rough around the edges.

That being said, if you do find a bug or have a suggestion you could always drop me an email at: colin[at]celsiusgs[dot]com.

So, you’re itching to create some decent bitmap fonts for your game? Well, GameFontMaker is pretty easy to use. From the main window:

GameFontMaker Main Window

You can select the font by clicking on the “Fonts” toolbar button, doing so updates the preview. Once you’re satisfied with your selection, click “Export Font” which opens a file dialog. Choose the file name here, it will automatically choose a .png extension. Once you make sure you’re not overwriting an important system file or your taxes or what have you, click “Save”. This will invoke an ancient spell designed to end the world (and generate fonts) and will cause GFM to spit out a PNG file with all the printable ASCII characters in a line, also it will produce <filename>.png.xml which is an XML file that describes all the character dimensions. It has the following format:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<fontdata>
	<glyph>
		<character> </character>
		<width>7</width>
		<height>25</height>
		<offset>0</offset>
	</glyph>
...
</fontdata>

Right now the output isn’t ideal for using directly as a texture atlas, but hopefully the PNG plus the XML file can be put to some good use. Once I get some more time I will add support for defining the PNG size and altering the XML output.

Anyway, GameFontMaker is free to use for all sorts of purposes, however if you do find it useful you could always have a look at my games or maybe follow me on The Twitters. Enjoy!

They call it the “Race to the Bottom” on the App store, where everyone tends to price their app towards 99 cents because they feel that will compel people to buy their app because it’s so cheap. Well, I’m not so sure that is working anymore. Also with the new finish line apparently being set at $0, I think I’m going to pull out of this race.

Put a big “Did Not Finish” next to Celsius Game Studios in the Great Race to the Bottom as even if we reached the finish line, nobody is winning.

Partially inspired by this Gamasutra article “The 0.99 Problem” by Canabalt Co-creator Adam Saltsman, the huge amount of noise at the 99 cent level, and by the fact that if people want to play my games they’ll also more than likely pay a reasonable price for it, CGS games going forward will not be priced permanently at $0.99. To prevent future cries of hypocrisy I’ll state now that you may see a sale at $0.99, but at the very least that’s the new Free for a Day as far as I’m concerned.

On my part I promise I’ll continue to deliver games that are worth more than 99 cents to you, my wonderful audience.

To that end, the $0.99 “introductory sale” on Chromodyne for the iPhone and iPod Touch will be ending this weekend and as of Monday, April 12th, it will be priced at the still inexpensive $1.99.

Mark it in your calendar. Or not.

Thank you for your continued support

Well, the iPad is out and Chromodyne was successfully ported after a marathon session of epic proportions. Amusingly, Chromodyne HD was submitted after Chromodyne v1.1 and was approved before. Some may say I amuse easily, but I was amused.

The Port

Thanks to some experience writing game engines for other platforms before, about 90-95% of Chromodyne’s graphics code was already resolution independent. After updating my XCode to the 3.2 Gold Master, I clicked the handy little “Convert this project to iPad” menu option and was playing Chromodyne in the simulator in mere minutes! Though everything else was really horrible looking because none of the 2D assets were scaled properly and some of the menus looked like crap on the huge screen.

So really, most of my time was spent creating high-res 2D graphics (even though the cutscenes are pixel art, for the most part, those are seriously high-def pixels!) and fiddling with the perspective/view on the gamefield because it was way too freaking big keeping the same perspective as the iPhone version.

I don’t know about the final build yet, but the simulator in the GM release of the SDK didn’t have 3D acceleration! I can understand why some devs were reluctant to release their apps sight-unseen to the App Store.

The iPad Only Version

If anyone actually wonders why I went with a stand-alone iPad version of Chromodyne, the biggest motivator is that the app bundle for the HD version with its 1024×768 graphics assets is larger than the 20 MB OTA limit. Basically I still want people to be able to get the iPhone version over 3G.

The Price

I’m also selling Chromodyne HD for $1.99 instead of 99 cents. I figure the larger, higher resolution game experience warrants a slightly higher price point. We’ll see how that plays out in the days to come anyway… at least I can have a sale at some point without going directly to free. Definitely something I regret when I priced Chromodyne originally.

The Numbers

I’m half-tempted to post sales numbers for Chromodyne HD as time wears on. If anything to see how things are going. I’ve seen that the game lists for the iPad don’t have any top lists for subcategories yet, which is pretty bad news for small devs such as myself. Sales for Chromodyne have not been anything to write home about, but they’ve been steady at least.

Anyway it’s been a fairly exciting few days, and at least I can say I was here from the start. Whatever that actually means, only time will tell.

Just wanted to drop you all a note saying that I am forging ahead with my plans to turn Celsius Game Studios into something more than a hobby in my spare time. I really do love creating video games and I’ve been thinking about making my own company to do this for over 12 years now, it’s unfortunate it took me this long to stop being afraid about “what if it doesn’t work” and just realize it’s more important to get out there and kick some ass and do awesome things. I’ll be spending the next few months easing out of my current job before I can fully spin up the turbines at Celsius. However I have started pre-planning my next title, which you will find out about soon enough

I still have a lot of hard work ahead of me, business plans, and funding and all that crazy scary stuff, but rest assured this is the real deal. I just wanted to let everyone know that awesome things are in the pipes, but that I have a lot on my plate right now so I hope you’re understanding while I work on them all at the same time.

To that effect I wanted to say that I’m still working on the 1.1.0 update for Chromodyne, and it will be out Real Soon Now.

Things that will definitely be in the update:

• Improved game timing, reducing the time between a match being made and the play field being active again
• 3D lighting has been improved
• Cutscenes are now skippable
• Improved load times slightly and added spinner when loading

Things that I’m currently working on for the update, which will hopefully make it in:

• Alternate control style, currently testing a few final candidates
• Online leaderboards, working on securely transmitting scores

Until next time!

So apparently Chromodyne took less than 2 weeks to make it through the approval process O_o

I just spent the last few hours sending out press releases and all that good stuff. I still need to finish up Chromodyne Lite, but don’t let that stop you from buying Chromodyne if it tickles your fancy

Anyway, I’ll post more when it’s not 3 in the morning.

I haven’t installed this yet, but this is certainly a nice alternative to rewriting GLU calls in my 3D engine!

Thank you, iPhone-GLU developer(s)!