Forums » Games » Steamclash - clash of the steam powered warships

Steamclash is a two player realtime strategy game, played via Bluetooth.
You are ordered to destroy the opponents harbour and protect your own.
The battlefield reaches over both your own and your opponent's iPhone or iPod Touch.


www.steamclash.com

Features

* one-on-one multiplayer matches via Bluetooth
* dynamic battles allowing for smart tactics
* time and glory based income system
* four awesome ship classes
* lovely graphics
* atmospheric music and nice sound effects


Technique

* node.js to simulate bluetooth for browser testing.
* own multiplayer logic
* own button management (https://gist.github.com/1395616)
* dominics iOS shim
* and, yes, impact.js

Feedback

Please comment our game. It's our first (published) game.
Started as an student project in Bremen, Germany.

Haven't seen it yet. Will so in minutes. But I had to ask: what's a shrim?

dominics iOS shrim

I think he meant shim :D

Woah. Very nice. Concept is simple, without appearing too simple. Multiplayer support (local game play) adds good replayibility. I wouldn't buy it, though, as battleship is not my cup of tea. But I can see some people getting into that.

Let us know how it goes.

And, dominic, some kind of sample multiplayer project would be great and IMO would have a noticeable impact on sales of Impact. Impact on impact, that's like sales squared. :)

Quote from TylerAppmobi
I think he meant shim :D

Yeah, he meant that :)

We are planning to release the network code. And that wouldn't be good without a simple demo game :)

The demo looks amazing. It's sort of a new take on "tower defense" games. Good idea, and great implementation.

@Philip

Oh now you've given me something too look forward to for the holidays.

I better not tell my wife. She'd think me such a geek, hehe.

@philip

We are planning to release the network code

any update on this? is it specific to bluetooth?
are you sending the data as json or a more compressed format?

the networking code is a big thing missing from iOS impact, so as a placeholder I did hack in a simple blocking call... if you have a nice async way to do that extended on iOS impact it would be great to see your code ^.^

// quick hack for blocking networking calls
JS_FUNC(JS_iOSImpact, ajax, ctx, argc, argv ) {
    NSString *baseUrl = @"http://localhost:3000";
    NSString *url = JSValueToNSString( ctx, argv[0] );
    NSString *success = @"success";
    NSString *type = @"type";
    NSString *fullUrl = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@%@", baseUrl, url];
    
    NSLog(@"ajax: %@ %@ %@", fullUrl, success, type);
    NSError* error = nil;
    
    NSString *response = @"test";

    NSLog(@"ajax response: %@", response);
 
    // what a hassle to return one string
    const char *chars = [response UTF8String];
    JSStringRef respString = JSStringCreateWithUTF8CString(chars);
    JSValueRef ret = JSValueMakeString(ctx, respString);
    //TODO - dealloc chars
	return ret;
}

I don't want to release crappy code so the rewrite takes some time.

Right now it works in the Browser and on iOS. The browser uses socket.io with a tiny node.js server. The iOS Version uses Bluetooth via the nice GameKit. GameKit does a lot already, so I don't know how easy it is to do this via internet.

One of the devices is the server. I don't know how well this scales with more than two devices. But i will look into that.

This won't be a standard networking class, it's pretty specific.

I hope i will get this done this year.

In case you didn't noticed, the game is cheaper right now, only 0.99$.

And I released the network code some time ago here: http://impactjs.com/forums/code/network-plugin

Would be great to get some feedback on that, cause it was the first time i've done some network stuff and i don't know if this is done right.

And feedback on the game would be awesome, too. It's fun, and right now cheap, so try it :)

Game is excellent but I had to play against myself to test it. If you added a computer player that would be perfect.

Excellent graphics and sound.

It took me a while to figure out you had to tap the water after building to deploy the ships.

UUUUuuuuuu Me like this one especially the network stuff for iOS..... Beautiful stuff mate....

We are not finished with this :) An iPad Version is coming soon. And maybe we go even further, let's see…

And thanks.

Today we released an Update for Steamclash!

Steamclash is now an universal app, which means an iPad version is now included. For this version we added a hotseat modus, so you can play against another person on one device.

You can get it here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/steamclash/id479579753?ls=1&mt=8

In the next week or so I will clean up the multitouch code and release alongside a multitouch version of my button class. Just have to clean the code up a little bit.

I love the new Hot Seat mode.

Looking forward to the new button class.

You shared your plugin. I bought your app. My way of saying thanks for sharing. :)

Plus I get a good game out of it. Good deal.

I hope so :) Thanks.

Just released the multitouch code.

Philip, 4 questions about Steamclash that I'd love to know the answer to:

1. how long did it take for Apple to approve your submission?
2. were there any "impactjs game submission lessons learned" that would be of use to other impactjs developers?
3. was this your first iTunes store product? (I could have checked this while in iTunes but I'm feeling lazy now)
4. to date, how satisfied are you with the sales? I'm always assuming that, with the amount of iOS stuff coming in daily, one's product wouldn't last, i.e., generate sales for, very long (hours at best, maybe).

Thanks in advance
Alex

Okey

1: One, two weeks? Can't remember exactly.
2: Went all smoothly, had no problems.
3: yes

4: Bad. But the whole thing itself was more of a test. We just threw it out there and it drowned pretty bad. We wrote to a lot of blogs, but there was mostly no response.
But it's okey, we learned a lot and thats what you're supposed to do as a student :)

Thanks for the answers. Not surprised about #4, sad to say.

Just got a notification from apple that our dev account is running out. We will not renew that, cause thats to much money for us right now. We sure will e back with another great game and this time for real.

So, if you didn't download Steamclash already, now is a good time. It's free anyway, so go and have some fun!

hey Philip, make a single player web/mobile web game out of SteamClash and sell in on marketJS. That'll make you a few grand easily.

Hum. A Singleplayer is in the works, but very slowly.
Don't know if I want to sell it, though. It's like our little baby, the first video game we both made and released. But we'll see…

@Philip lol totally understood.