Also, the free iRis AG Lite is now up on the App Store! http://bit.ly/1YZGnI

@aws357 Beside the contract stuff we’re signed into with Apple, the game heavily relies on OpenGL for the 3D rendering tasks, sooo…, we’re kinda stuck out of Android from a simple technical standpoint since it uses Java. Same goes for PalmPre with it’s webOS interface.

I should have mentioned, I would love to, at some time, probably in the bit more distant future, release our engine to the public so others can also use it to build Apps with, and particularly utilize the excellent Blender -> Game pipeline we’ve been working over. I’ve been really considering publishing it under a MIT license, but putting all the key documentation (not the Doxygen reference guide) into a 50$ book. Just thoughts at the moment.

I like that idea. :)

On the flip side though, we’re moving onto new ideas at this point, and hopefully this next attempt will be better than the first. It’s a slow iterative process, and… at least we have some branding and at least one published title to back us up on. =)

I should have mentioned, I would love to, at some time, probably in the bit more distant future, release our engine to the public so others can also use it to build Apps with, and particularly utilize the excellent Blender -> Game pipeline we’ve been working over. I’ve been really considering publishing it under a MIT license, but putting all the key documentation (not the Doxygen reference guide) into a 50$ book. Just thoughts at the moment.

Now when the game will be availlaible for the Blackberry? ( Always ready to test btw ).

Lite version is still “in review”. Apple decided to wait two weeks before telling us that we couldn’t use the name of the engine in our keyword listing, even though we’ve done the same thing for the full version (both v1.0 and v1.1) w/o issue. Resubmitted App and they are back at playing the waiting game with us for, probably two more weeks. :/ Can’t do anything more from my end, sadly.

A note about the Blender aspect of this…

Ben is a great artist. He does some pretty cool work. I’ve worked with several artists already and, for whatever reason, they all failed to really produce. Ben however has been an absolute gem and has gone above and beyond the call of duty (so to speak) and has a real passion for his craft. He is an exceptional artist and can knock things together in ways that blows my mind.

The 3D work came together very rapidly, and it was in large part thanks to the Blender team for writing a great product as well as Ben spending the countless hours learning and building up his knowledge base of the program. It really has shown, since day one, that Ben had a great grasp of what he was doing. That critical component, that professional talent and knowledge plays a huge role in the development cycle. Planning is definitely required (and we’re doing a lot more of that next go around), but that execution phase is still the most important, and Ben nailed it.

Since Blender is free to use, that aided immensely on the business end of things, giving us no overhead fees. I don’t think this point can be made any clearer: Blender is a great tool, and is an immense aide for the Indie developer like us. We wouldn’t have gotten this far without it.

On my end, I’ve went in and used the python side of Blender to write an exporter script to convert from Blender and into our native file format (GAMX -> Game Asset Manifest XML), and, heh, had a few bumps in the road, but a lot has been ironed out. We can import a lot of work out of Blender and into the game engine and that entire pipeline works really slick. Next thing on my list is of course a viewer/editor App that lets Ben see the finished import into the engine, as well as toy with values and adjust several things more relevant to game development.

At any rate – hope to have iRis AG Lite up on the App Store soon. Remember, we’re an Indie game studio, and supporting us is not like supporting big name company – quite the contrary. We’re not all about profits (a few people in the big business field I’ve talked to seem to not always be able to grasp that point), but rather center on making a great game first and foremost. We’re dedicated to the community of gamers around us, and thanks for the post Blender Nation!

The Lite Version of the game should be avaliable soon. Apple had some issue with one of the keywords used to describe the name, namely “geWiz ES”, which is the name of our engine. Unfortunately Apple didn’t realise we owned the rights to use this in our advertising and didn’t approve the app on schedule. Rest assured that we are working to resolve this and as soon as apple gets this sorted the lite version will be on sale.

Also, please go and comment on the game on the BlenderArtists forum thread here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=169334