Crystal Clash @ Picotachi #47

A short presentation I gave at Picotachi #47 introducing Cold Fusion's first original game, Crystal Clash, released at Tokyo Game Show 2017 for iOS/Android. Some background on the development of our in-house engine, the build pipeline, and our deployment system using Buildbot and fastlane is also covered.

Transcript

2. Technical Director / CEO, living in Sapporo, Hokkaido
 Born: November 26, 1976 (40 years old) in Orlando, Florida, USA
 Interests: Demoscene (coder for Brainstorm and Tokyo Demo Fest organizer), chiptunes, and beer
 Began programming at age of 5 on a TI-99/4a, then Apple IIe, then PC
 Entered the game development industry after writing Project UnReality, a Nintendo 64 emulator Michael Tedder Akira Fukumoto Romeo Knight Game Designer / Art Director, living in Tokyo
 Born: April 16, 1979 in Ehime, Japan
 Interests: Cooking, housekeeping, and playing games with his son
 Began designing after playing games on Famicom and Super Famicom
 Music/Sound Director, living in Düsseldorf, Germany
 Born: 1971 in Duisburg, Germany
 Interests: Guitarist for Samsara Circle, demoscene (musician for Brainstorm)
 Started composing in 1985 on C64 after listening to Rob Hubbard's tunes, and composed music for demos on Amiga in 1989
3. Crystal Clash is a realtime multiplayer, fast-paced action RPG puzzler which uniquely combines solving of nonogram puzzles with a simultaneous battle against your opponent, requiring quick thinking and fast reactions in order to win. Matches are casual and only a few minutes long, and let you build up your character to unlock new skills for use in battle.
4. CRYSTAL CLASH DEVELOPMENT Development time: about 3 months, for 3 people
 Engine development time: 1 year (1 person full time)
 
 Crystal Clash uses Cold Fusion’s internally developed engine: ➤ Multiplatform: Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android (all 7 supported CPU architectures) ➤ Fully multithreaded for performance and parallelization across multiple CPUs and the GPU ➤ Rendering pipeline was designed with Vulkan in mind, but currently uses OpenGL 4 and GLES 3 ➤ Performance keeps mobile CPU usage low, with minimal battery usage and avoiding heat ➤ Codebase is 99.9% C++14 (lambdas FTW!), 0.1% is Objective-C++ and Java where required
5. CRYSTAL CLASH BUILD PIPELINE For Continuous Integration, we use buildbot 0.9.4 on an AWS EC2 instance, with a single in-house iMac 2011 as a buildbot worker running macOS for macOS/iOS/Android builds, and VirtualBox with Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux for both Windows and Linux builds. ➤ Commit pushed via git ➤ buildbot automatically pulls from git ➤ The engine code is compiled for all platforms ➤ The test suite is executed and checked for problems ➤ If engine build passes, Crystal Clash is then built and tested
6. CRYSTAL CLASH TESTING & DEPLOYMENT For testing and deploying, we integrated fastlane ( http://github.com/fastlane ) with buildbot to directly push builds to iTunes Connect and Google Play. iOS gets new build notifications through TestFlight, and Android testers can get the update on Google Play within 10 to 15 minutes.
7. THANK YOU FOR LISTENING! PLEASE COME VISIT US AT TOKYO GAME SHOW! INDIE GAME AREA (HALL 9) AT BOOTH B43 ANY QUESTIONS?