The android version of Stoned in Space has finally achieved escape velocity. This time it only took two more weeks than I would have liked which makes it much faster than Cosmic Bootlegger which I believe took over three months to bang into a releasable state for mobile devices. Anyway Stoned in Space is now available on Google Play
The premium version gives you access to the other 1/2 of the ship configuration options, and three free continues of each type every day.
Also, we made enough tweaks that I felt compelled to update the desktop version you can find the updated download on the games page.
Stay tuned for information on whatever our next project turns out to be.
So what’s the whole story line for this game anyway? I’m glad you asked…
Meaningless Flavor Text
While couch sitting in a basement with your friend, said friend bogarted all the Funyuns!
And you thought Luke was upset about getting a robot hand from his father.
Since couch sitting is hungry work you have decided that you need to go get some more. Fortunately there’s a convenience store just a few 100,000 km away on the other side of that asteroid field. You think briefly of plotting a course around the asteroids when your stomach says, “Grrrrrrrr need Funyuns NOW!” Quickly, to the ship and straight through the asteroids we go!!
Unfortunately all of that basement sitting has left you with a bad case of “can’t fly straight”. So the odds are that you’ll just keep flying faster and faster in loops through the asteroids. But, hey, funyuns are worth dying for and you’re in a rush.
Overview
You’ll be flying endlessly through an asteroid field trying not to hit anything hard or run out of fuel.
Ships still don’t react well to asteroids. But now you can continue after face planting.
Before each suicide run you’ll get to pick the configuration of your ship because you’re rich!
Hulls
Each hull has a different size body, a different sized fuel tank and consumes fuel at a different rate.
Weapons Nuke A – shoots a cluster of asteroid destroying missiles.
Nuke B – shoots a different cluster of asteroid destroying missiles.
LASER – shoots a powerful asteroid vaporizing LASER straight ahead.
Wave – a gravimetric distortion pulses outward from the ship for two seconds causing nearby objects to disintegrate.
Shields Barrier – puts a force field in front of your ship.
Bubble – puts a force field around your ship.
Shrink – makes your ship smaller but provides no other benefits.
Extra Tank – attaches an extra fuel tank to the shield mounts.
Special Dooms Day – destroys all asteroids within view.
Invincibility – makes you immune to asteroids for some time.
Cluster Bomb – launches a cluster of anti-asteroid bombs forward.
Converter – passively increases the number of fuel asteroids encountered.
Things You May Encounter in Space
Asteroid – it’s a rock.
Fuel Asteroid – blow it up to release a fuel ball.
Fuel ball – fly over it to replenish fuel.
Hull Patch – can be used to continue after a collision. Expires after 1 day. Made from two part epoxy nanites.
Aux Fuel Pod – can be used to continue after running out of fuel. Made from an isotope with a short half-life… it’s useless after 1 day.
And since a monthly update wouldn’t be complete without a schedule update.
The lines have crossed and Stoned in Space is finished. If only we were sad to see you go.
We’re currently going through testing on the mobile version so that should be released soon. And the people rejoice yaaay.
Rho_bot has been hard at work on the graphics and I think it’s safe to say that the artwork is done. While some final layout adjustments need to be made. Which means, of course, new and updated screenshots.
Is it a menu or a ship?Filler graphics have been left where they belong, in November.
In other exciting news the sounds are pretty well wrapped up. All of this points to Stoned in Space going to beta testing sometime next week. We just have to do a few minor tweaks and an in game tutorial.
And that brings us to this month’s schedule update.
Squinting at the right side you’ll notice the dramatic 2-3 month pull-in of the completion date in the last couple of days. Well, after the third straight month of push outs this time for no easily explainable reason I did a quick estimate of the expected completion date by hand on an envelope and found it to be near the beginning of March. Much closer than the scheduler was predicting. After a quick perusal of the scheduler’s code a bug was found and crushed, and henceforth schedules will be ‘totally accurate’. Well they’ll at least be somewhat more predictive at least.
It’s a good news bad news month. Bad news is; We’re still not actually getting any closer to the completion date. This time due to really poor estimation on the schedule. Basically numerous tasks in the spec for the game were inappropriately rolled into one task and that task was allocated about 10% of the time it should have been. It’s possible that the Holidays didn’t help, but I don’t think that contributed to the bulk of the continued delay. We now looking a release some time in April.
And we’ve turned into a real game development company; the delivery date just keeps getting pushed out.
For good news; rho_bot is back and has completed many of the graphics. With mostly screen backgrounds left I’m hoping those will be done by the end of January. We also have enough of the game together to start tweaking the difficulty, and we’re slowly moving away from the initial state of absurdly easy.
Also in an effort to prevent a further push out of the release at least initially some features will be dropped these will mostly be special asteroids or critters which hadn’t been well thought out in the first place, and the global leader board.
Bad news we suffered a massive slow down due to holidays, and Rho_bot’s continued inaction on graphics, and me being required to put in extra time at let’s say my evening job. This meant that instead of coding I’ve been relearning how to use blender. Good news is I’ve gotten some graphics done: the game over background and a group of asteroids. This has led to a predictable push out in Stoned’s completion date.
Surprise, surprise, dicking around for a month on non-scheduled tasks has led to a month delay in our projected completion date.
So I’m going to take this update to thank striking fast food workers for hastening the rise of humanity’s robot masters. I don’t know what roll a burger making robot will have in the glorious, metallic future though. Once humanity is gone there won’t be much call for burgers since everyone knows that robots use alcohol to fuel their mighty power cells. But I’m sure they will none-the-less make a valuable contribution to robo society.
Of course the date that machines will supplant meat-bag meat flippers is still underdetermined since Zerohedge’s commentary is actually just regurgitating a year old Business Insider article. Or (maybe) they used the wayback machine to view an old version of Momentum Machine’s website.
The current version of Momentum Machines website is a little thin on the news and details regarding their harbinger of the revolution (the last salient site update was in 2013). After more than three years of operation I’d expect some video or photographs of a prototype but, then again, if I was building Skynet in a San Francisco garage I would have an overly cheery website that was scant on details too.
Since we got the all important promotional-cover image out of the way in September, we spent the better part of October actually working on Stoned in Space, and we made enough progress to have screen shots! Unfortunately Rho_bot has been less productive at graphics than I was at code (something about real life and an actual job was mentioned. Sounded pretty fishy to me), so we still have plenty of filler graphics and preliminary layouts. While many of the details of the game continue to be shrouded from us some details have become clear. Players will be able to choose a weapon, shield, and special ability for their ship.
Rho_bot, Roid_0 is calling out to you for real artwork.
While it still contains some filler graphics we’re comfortable with the layout of the game screen although we are discussing adding another control.
Schedule Update
Project has a 25% chance of completion on or before the date represented by the blue line and a 75% chance of completion by the red line. So we’re currently looking at something Februaryish
After some initial volatility the schedule seems to have settled on some time in February for a completion date. Since most of the buffer has been allocated we’ll see if that holds up for another month.
Since we released Cosmic Bootlegger last week it’s time to announce our new project! that we started work on … three months ago. It’s called
and as you can see from our handy project complete date estimator we’ve been hard at work on this project for … almost none of that time.
Project has a 25% chance of completion on or before the date represented by the blue line and a 75% chance of completion by the red line. So we’re currently looking at something Marchish
What will Stoned in Space be about? While working on Cosmic Bootleggers I realized that my favorite part was was dodging asteroids while sneaking into systems. So we’re going to rebuild and expand that minigame stronger, faster, and with guns! (hopefully for less than $6 million.)
Now I’m sure some skintubes are asking why did we pick Stoned in Space as the name for our new project. The simple answer is we wanted to call it Asteroids Strike Back, but that, like all good game names, has been taken by a shitty Flash game, that I want to give me the 5 minutes of my life back that I spent playing it.
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