My son has ported his Awesome Name Generator Android app to iPhone and iPad and released it onto the iTunes Store.

Been back to The Game’s core engine for the last few months on and off.

The tutorial engine, which can be used to multimedia enable Twine stories, is now feature complete.

Slowly working towards a Kickstarter project with one story author to publish their game using just the tutorial engine.

I’m also considering Kickstarting the tutorial engine itself as a separate spin off. The aim being to fund it to get developed to the level of a stand-alone tool as well as a port to Unity.

As for The Game, at this point I’m working on the world physics.

In the last few months I have managed to make progress with….

• Visualisation of the World Hexagons.
• Navigation/Focus throughout the World Hexagons. (Mouse, keyboard and game controller).
• Basic Gas physics (with thermodynamics).

In the demo video below, I scroll around a bit while I simulate a 100kg ball of a 100K ideal gas being released in the vacuum of space. The gas expands until it reaches pressure equilibrium with a cohesive force holding the gas together.

I’m using a time scalable cellular automata send force messages between hexagons. That way I can build up force tensors slowly. I’m aiming at being able to round-robin timeslice the physics updates.

The colors I use don’t represent the relative temperature, more how temperature is changing over time.

Red = heating, Blue = cooling, and Green = stable.

So the core is blue, because it is very hot and losing heat 🙂

You will see it eventually turn green as it stabilises. What happens before that is rather hypnotic, particularly just before equilibrium where solitons seem to form.

Working on performance and basic data flow at the moment (because getting the data flow correct is really important).

Happy so far. The physics is running hundreds of times faster than I need.

Next steps are to tidy up some of the navigation and simulate gravity in some form. I’m thinking of extending the cellular automata approach to get the cells to explore and agree upon a stable curvature of space based on distribution of mass within it. This should create something very gravity like. Not totally realistic, but gamey enough for things to fall to planets.

Gas velocity will be tricky, but I wants it.

I’m experimenting with moving the physics between different levels of cellular detail based on how how uniform the force vectors are. This is similar to how I distributed detail in my hexagon image and video encoding.

I will be need to do a decent visualisation of this at some point.  It may be a dead end but it should allow the realism to naturally scale based on what is visible and where it is needed.