For those of you who don't already know, LavcoPriceTech are two guys with a youtube channel. They talk about IT stuff and do some of the most honest hardware reviews out there. Unfortunatly buying motherboards, cpu's, video cameras and pc cases gets expensive. So to help these guys buy some next level gear, from now until the end of march sales of Super Ninja Skydiving Plus Zombies will go towards helping these guys out.

Computer hardware isn't cheap! So pony up people and buy Super Ninja Skydiving Plus Zombies to support these guys and don't forget to subscribe to their youtube channel.

For anyone who's not looking at my rather uneventful twitter feed, Super Ninja Skydiving Plus Zombies is coming to the Playbook. I had actually planned to release it on the iPhone first. But turns out the port to Playbook was WAY easier. Not to mention RIM is offering free Playbooks for anyone to submit an app to the Playbook before February 13th.

Porting the game itself was easy. Since the game is build it Adobe Air, all I had to do was download the Playbook SDK, download the Playbook VM, then create a few fancy batch files to do all the work for me.

The big complaint I do have however is the ridiculous code signing process. (You can find a good step by step guide to the code signing process here http://www.hsharma.com/tutorials/10-easy-steps-to-package-and-sign-air-apps-for-playbook/) I would really like someone to comment on this blog post and explain to me why this kind of stuff is necessary. Code signing is required to submit apps to iOS and Android as well. Yet definitely not as annoying.

That being said having access to the VM is great. I definitely prefer that to the Android emulator. I think apple is shooting themselves in the foot by not offering similar services.

Anyways, I will try to maybe throw a video or 2 on the old YouTube account this weekend. Also stay tuned I think I'm going to reveal some statistics and actual numbers on how profitable Super Ninja Skydiving Plus Zombies has actually been on Android.

So taking a break from working on a content update for Super Ninja Skydiving Plus Zombies I desided it would be cool to play around with some multiplayer stuff.

So I started by doing some research on p2p connections within flash. I came across a blog post on Tom Krcha's website. The post can be found here (http://www.flashrealtime.com/p2p-game-lib/). He was nice enough to make available the source to his p2p game library for use with the Adobe's Cirrus service.

Cirrus is a beta Adobe service that allows you to connect 2 or more clients together with a p2p connection using Adobes rtmfp protocol. So all the server does is allows the handshake to happen, the rest is all p2p connections handled within flash.

I really hope Adobe keeps Cirrus free or low cost to allow developers to create some awesome multi-user content without the cost of having a dedicated server.

So once I knew how the p2p connection could be made I wanted something to test it with. So I grabbed the Box2D World Construction Kit (http://www.sideroller.com/wck/) and plugged away. At first I thought about syncing all kinds of physics data to make everyone connected see the exact same world. I ended up just sending the the players data. For the most part this does the trick and allows you to do some neat stuff. In the future I will be sending data for objects that have made contact with players but that's not in there currently.

The result is 2 nights of programming. I was able to get a small level that can accept multiple users and sync their locations pretty accurately for the most part.

Check out the project by clicking on the screenshot below.

Not sure if I'm going to release the source for this example. The code was put together fairly quickly and is a bit messy and uncommented. If you take a look at the 2 links I posted you could have all the info to recreate a similar project without too much trouble.

Known issues:

• Sometimes it takes a second for a new connected players position to update
• Objects in the level will not be synced if a player connects after some have already been interacted with
• There are a few minor syncing issues but for the most part it plays pretty smoothly
• When a player disconnects his ninja does not disapear

So I made the free version of Super Ninja Skydiving Plus Zombies available in the android market last Friday.

You can grab it now from the Android Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=air.snspzFree

And feel free to throw me a few stars and comments through the market :)  That stuff really helps a lot.>

I guess I'm a little silly for not posting something on my site about it soon but I've been really busy trying to get other sites to post something about it. Its really funny how the big and small game review websites operate. Most of them really couldn't give a poop about the smaller developers like myself. Getting some publicity this time around seems near impossible.

When I first launched my game there where only a few review sites that would even look at my game. bestandroidappsreview.com was one of the ones that did. Most of the other indie and android gaming sites simply just ignored me as they post reviews of every heavily marketed game out there. Funny thing is, as soon as my game was featured on gizmodo, reviews of Super Ninja Skydiving Plus Zombies started showing up on other sites.

I understand that most review sites only want things on their website that will give them traffic. So they spend their time reviewing games that have just had 10k in advertisements floating all over the place. I personally could care less about 99% of the big budget mobile games. Most of them have 0 originality and the entire budget for the game has been put into marketing. I would really like to see more sites post original games and ignore news about the 5 new versions of angry birds coming out. Really I don't understand why so many people are still playing that game. Angry Birds is a well made game don't get me wrong. Nice art work, clean menus etc. but lets get serious games like “Crush the Castle” did what Angry Birds did years before anyone knew about Rovio's Angry Birds.

Companies like Rovio take existing ideas, make their own version of it, and market the hell out of it. What's crazy is that these companies think they are innovative and are amazing at making games. NO THEY ARE NOT! They are good at making money. There is a huge difference.

Anyways rant over! Spread the word on the release of the free version. Anyone who posts anything on their websites can have a spot in the games credits if they want :)  Oh and if anyone out there knows what I could be doing to market my game better PLEASE shoot me an email  matthias@rybram.com

Now go play some games internet!

My daughter turned one today! Oh where has the time gone?

I have been working non stop lately :(

I would like to apologize to everyone who has purchased Super Ninja Skydiving Plus Zombies. I have not been able to update it as often as I have wanted. But please be patient the update that has been delayed for some time now is still coming. The launch of Air 3.0 has slowed the release down a bit because I am taking full advantage now of the new features.

Some of the new features that will be in the next release:

1.  over 400% performance increase on some devices
2.  you no longer have to have adobe air installed (but the file size went up to 11megs)
3.  online scoreboard
4.  many new graphic options like motion blur
5.  Android Licensing Extension
6.  Trophy system
7.  Quite a few bug fixes
8.  Removal of the update screen (this was causing issues with some providers)

Thanks to everyone who purchased the game. I might run a competition some time after the next update. I was thinking something along the lines like the first person to unlock all trophies would get some sort of prize. I haven't decided yet on what to give away though. If I can get the proper promotion going maybe give away a tablet or a phone or something? Let me know what you guys think.