{"id":3844,"date":"2012-10-29T17:28:03","date_gmt":"2012-10-29T22:28:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hemispheregames.com\/?p=3844"},"modified":"2012-10-29T17:28:03","modified_gmt":"2012-10-29T22:28:03","slug":"what-were-up-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hemispheregames.com\/new_blog\/2012\/10\/29\/what-were-up-to\/","title":{"rendered":"What we\u2019re up to&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Things have been fairly quiet on the Hemisphere blog recently. The last year saw us busy on:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Osmos Multiplayer, which we released on iOS this Summer, and updated soon after with voice-chat. This is where we spent most (read, <em>a lot<\/em>!) of our time.<\/li>\n<li>The Android port, released at the beginning of the year.<\/li>\n<li>A few other minor projects\/updates, like iPad Retina, Game Center support for the Mac App Store, etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Then, in August, Dave and his wife Mel had a beautiful baby girl. (Congrats, Dave! :)) And, finding myself more or less on my own for a while with nothing \u201con fire\u201d, I decided to take things down a notch and enjoy the beautiful weather with family and friends.<\/p>\n<p>But It\u2019s now late October, fully into rainy shoulder season, and Dave and I are both back at it, planning what\u2019s next for Hemisphere.<\/p>\n<p>On one hand, we\u2019re excited to be working on games besides Osmos, picking up some prototypes we had worked on between the cracks over the last 1.5 years, as well as hitting some new ideas we\u2019ve been discussing. But at the same time we feel like there is some \u201cundone\u201d work on Osmos we plan on hitting over the next few months. Here\u2019s our list, broken down by platform:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>Android<\/b>: we\u2019re working with the fine folks at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apportable.com\">Apportable<\/a> to bring Osmos Multiplayer to Android tablets and handsets.<\/li>\n<li><b>iOS<\/b>: We\u2019re adding support for 4-inch (iPhone\/iPod 5) screens and the iPad Mini. (It should just work \u201cout of the box\u201d on the Mini, but we\u2019ll tweak the UI a bit, making the buttons and fonts a bit bigger.) We\u2019re also adding support for iOS 6, including Facebook integration. Finally, we\u2019re thinking of merging the iPad and iPhone versions into a single &#8220;group&#8221; so they can play multiplayer against each other through Game Center.<\/li>\n<li><b>Linux<\/b>: we\u2019re working with Valve to bring Osmos Linux to Steam.<\/li>\n<li><b>Mac<\/b>: we just added Retina support to the version on our website, and will be updating the Mac App Store version with this soon as well.<\/li>\n<li><b>Windows<\/b>: we\u2019re looking at Windows 8, Surface, etc., but the reviews have been pretty bad! We\u2019re wondering if it\u2019s worth supporting them explicitly. (There\u2019s already a Win 7 multitouch version available which hasn\u2019t generated much interest.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Last but not least there\u2019s some blogging we want to do, mainly on the subject of multiplayer.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>One subject we want to tackle is \u201cexpert play\u201d; namely, how it\u2019s difficult to connect with other strong players on iOS. As such, we\u2019d like to spearhead an effort to get people playing in some high-calibre Osmos matches. More on this soon!<\/li>\n<li>From a developer perspective, we learned a lot about creating a polished, real-time, multiplayer game on iOS. During development we found ourselves wishing there was more information on this subject on the web. So we plan to share some of our experiences in the hopes they can help other developers, both on technical aspects (Game Center, bluetooth, networking techniques for physics\/simulation-heavy games) as well as some thoughts on design.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And with that, it\u2019s time to get back to it. We have plenty to do!! ;-)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Things have been fairly quiet on the Hemisphere blog recently. The last year saw us busy on: Osmos Multiplayer, which we released on iOS this Summer, and updated soon after with voice-chat. This is where we spent most (read, a lot!) of our time. The Android port, released at the beginning of the year. A [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,6,7,9,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-android","category-dev","category-iphoneipad","category-linux","category-multiplayer","category-osmos"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5C9wi-100","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hemispheregames.com\/new_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hemispheregames.com\/new_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hemispheregames.com\/new_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hemispheregames.com\/new_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hemispheregames.com\/new_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hemispheregames.com\/new_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hemispheregames.com\/new_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hemispheregames.com\/new_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hemispheregames.com\/new_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}