Flightless

Bee Leader Gameplay Trailer

Greg — Fri, 18 May 2012 00:09:20 +0000

The bees need you! Become a Bee Leader and help the bees fill their hives with honey.

Fly around the world and hover over flowers to collect nectar. Look out for enemies and bad weather! Collect as much nectar as you can before the sun sets. The faster you get nectar back to your hive the more honey you’ll make! Pick up plenty of bonuses along the way – nectar, honey, time, and bee buddies. The more bee buddies you find, the more nectar you’ll collect. More nectar means more honey!

Get busy!

Coming soon to the App Store for iPhone, iPad & iPod Touch.

» Bee Leader Gameplay Trailer on YouTube
» Bee Leader Official Trailer on YouTube
» Bee Leader on Facebook
» Bee Leader project page
» Bee Leader blog posts

Bee Leader Art Posters

John — Thu, 17 May 2012 04:26:40 +0000

We’ve managed to generate some delicious artwork in the process of creating our new game Bee Leader (if we do say so ourselves). As a result we’re making some posters to celebrate the release of the game. We’ll be giving away some posters free in some kind of competition scenario very soon.

Bee Leader Art Poster. Hive C Island Time level

Bee Leader Art Poster. Island Time level detail

Bee Leader Official Trailer

John — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:28:11 +0000

The bees need you! Become a Bee Leader and help the bees fill their hives with honey.

Get busy!

Coming soon to the App Store for iPhone, iPad & iPod Touch.

» Bee Leader Official Trailer on YouTube
» Bee Leader Gameplay Trailer on YouTube
» Bee Leader on Facebook
» Bee Leader project page
» Bee Leader blog posts

Rope Simulation Code

Greg — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 03:55:14 +0000

We’re using VRope for simple rope simulations in our iOS game Bee Leader, so we’ve uploaded our fixes & modifications to GitHub. We’ve updated the classes to support changing gravity in a couple of ways, added support for creating a rope using a joint (instead of two bodies, which allows for better anchor points), optimised the integration step a little, and added a fix to support retina displays.

There’s a few little things we’d like to clean up and add, but it’s working nicely at the moment in-game.

» VRope 0.4 on GitHub
» Original VRope 0.3 article

Bee Leader - VRope work-in-progress

Melu Picture Book

John — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 10:22:27 +0000

At last mine and Ali’s latest kids picture book has been printed and the hardcover is now for sale. It was a labour of love of ours for a good few months as we tried to do justice to the very cool story by Kyle Mewburn.

A paperback version is coming soon. And just maybe an iPhone/iPad game too… watch this space. There’s also a Maori version of Melu available, Ko Meru.

» Available from Whitcoulls

Melu hardcover

Melu hardcover front and back

Melu paperback front and back

Melu title page lockup

Interior artwork - Melu turns around

Interior artwork - glittering green sea

December 2011. Proof checking.

In Production – Bee Leader Official Trailer

John — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:06:39 +0000

We’ve decided to generate the Bee Leader trailer in-game using the game engine – something that’s done a lot with modern 3d games, but not often for 2d games. So, we’re creating an entirely new game world with our trailer text elements and a selected set of game features. The trailer is instructional rather than hype-driven, and by using the game engine we can show how the player interacts with actual game elements. It’s starting to look pretty sweet.

Game trailer level layout

Game trailer screenshot

» Bee Leader project page
» Bee Leader blog posts

Bee Leader Screenshots

John — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 12:55:48 +0000

Now we’re getting closer to release and have sent out a few preview invites, we can start to reveal a little more about Bee Leader. Here’s some screenshots taken from the new iPad. More to come soon.

Title screen

World level menu - City Heights

World level menu - Country Life

World level menu - Just Desert

Screenshot - Bee Leader action, Just Desert

Screenshot - Bee Leader action, City Heights

Screenshot - Nectar drop, Just Desert

» Bee Leader project page
» Bee Leader blog posts

New iPad Bee Leader Goodness

John — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 12:40:50 +0000

With the release of Apple’s new iPad and the unreleased status of our game, it felt right to re-create our menus and layouts for the new iPad’s retina screen. The game engine itself already supported both SD and HD graphics so it was pretty easy to support in-game with our camera system. Now with the device in hand our efforts feel well worth it. The game looks incredible and the menu system and graphics are so sweet. We’re looking forward to getting it out as soon as we can.

World level menu screen

Bee facts transition screen

Our credits screen...with local flavours. Mt Maunganui is the setting.

» Bee Leader project page
» Bee Leader blog posts

Ongoing Rena Mess

John — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 04:59:22 +0000

There’s been stormy seas in the Bay of Plenty for the past few days. A quick walk along the beach yesterday was another reminder that all is not sweet on our beaches yet.
Large droplets and chunks of weathered oil and several dead birds were washed up. Additionally there were some large legs of meat that were bobbing around in the water and laying on the beach – not surprising there’s been a few sharks seen in the area lately. The oil sticks to everything, especially feet!

Top Dog v1.1 update

Greg — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:26:20 +0000

Continuing our quick break from wrangling bees, we also bumped Top Dog to v1.1. It now supports multi-tasking on iOS 4+ (finally!), uses DisplayLink on iOS 3+ for better performance and has a shiny Retina display icon.

Unfortunately, along the way we’ve dropped iOS 2.x support, so apologies to both of those users… the latest dev tools don’t seem to compile stuff that doesn’t crash when the app starts. Keep calm, though, as it still runs fine on our iOS 3.1.3 phone – the last five users still running that version are as sweet as us.

~~It’s currently in review and will be released as soon as it’s approved.~~

It’s available on the App Store now!

Go forth and herd