To give everyone a little treat for Halloween, Prisoner 84 is now on sale for the reduced price of $0.99/£0.69/0,79€.

It should now be available on your local App Store

The free version of Cabby – Cabby Lite – has finally been updated to incorporate the changes we made to the full game. Why not try before you buy?

Prisoner 84 update v2.1 has been sent to Apple for review. In this update we have added a whopping 25 GameCenter achievements. How far will you travel into Tryton prison to get them all?

As always we’ll keep you all informed of the review progress.

To celebrate the update of Cabby, from Fri 22st June until Sun 22nd June Prisoner 84 will be having its first ever sale – down to $0.99/£0.69/0,79€

In the coming weeks you should see news about the next Prisoner 84 update (v2.1) which will include some GameCenter achievements to add a little bit of extra fun to your journey through Tryton prison.

We’ve completed work on the Prisoner 84 HD update, and it has been submitted to Apple for review! Hopefully there is a quick turn around and you will see it in the Apple Store within the next few weeks.

Don’t forget to check back on our blog and twitter account for the chance to catch a promo code upon release.

Currently a lot of the technology is complete for Project Iota – we’ve got the main physics system working, which manages bomb placement and how the buildings collapse with the rest of the scenery reacting accordingly.

In the coming weeks we will be throwing a few tweaks around to make sure the physics are both challenging and fun. I will talk more about how the physics have been put together in the future once more media of the game has been released.

Recently I took a break from game code and decided to try and get Multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA) working on iOS. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Due to the default renderer on iOS rendering to a Framebuffer Object (FBO) all that was required was to create another FBO and a multi-sample render buffer and just get the draw loop to render to the new FBO and resolve and display into the normal FBO.

Here are the results…

Whether this effect makes it into the final game is unknown. We will need to do a profiling step to make sure we still have time to render the MSAA and process the rest of the models. At the moment it seems a little expensive especially with the amount of objects we have to render and process.

Mak Software Studio – a friend of Hidden – have just released their first game for iPod/iPhone called Slam!

Slam! is an addictive match making game with 50+ levels. Test your memory and your reflexes as things get frantic very quickly.

You can find out more at MakSW

One of the recent additions to our tool chain is the ability to create texture atlases.

Texture Atlasing is a concept whereby you place multiple textures into a single bigger texture or textures so that you drastically reduce your texture binding and swaps during the rendering of a complex scene.

Atlasing has existed for a while and has been used on many older games as a primary technique — the Quake games for example started using atlasing for a level’s lightmap information. We have recently been looking into this technique because we have increased our texture usage, plus atlasing has a lot of benefits on devices such as the iPhone where texture bandwidth is limited.

Read more…

Over the coming weeks as we continue development on our next game – and in an attempt to get into the habit of updating our web site more regularly! – we will be posting a series of development diaries. These diaries will not only allow us to document our progress for our own benefit, but we hope will provide other indie developers with an insight into how we work – which may prove beneficial when applying our development concepts to their own projects.

In our first dev diary we will cover some of our core tech that we have been developing on and off since our first release in 2008. To illustrate our tech we will be showing off a prototype that we were working on called “H3”.

Read more…