Dink Smallwood on the iPhone/iTouch preview video

Despite working on a ‘secret project’ for the last three weeks (more on that later..), Dink for iPhone is still coming along nicely and I wanted to show it in action.

It truly is a great port, including features not found in the original versions such as ‘full state saving from anywhere’, faster script processing, rewritten graphic/resource handling, native GL support, the full original CD sound-track, and a built-in .dmod downloader/installer.

Instead of the usual screenshots here is a crappy youtube movie to give you an idea of how it runs ‘on-device’. Controls/GUI are not final! Hope to put in my new control idea soon and see how it works.

21 thoughts on “Dink Smallwood on the iPhone/iTouch preview video

  1. David

    Wow, this brings back some memories. It’s looking great, I can’t wait to play it. Love the add-on implementation.

  2. Erik

    Video won’t load for me. Ah well, I’ve got a Droid anyway. If you nail the control scheme I’d love to get to play with it

  3. scratcher

    Somehow I didn’t realize the magnifying glass is talk/examine until watching this video… I thought that was used to zoom in on the action… or something.

  4. Seth Post author

    Yeah, actually there is a place in the video where I don’t realize it either and am tapping the wrong button. Definitely going to replace all of those icons… hopefully Justin has some good ideas.

    We need to think of a clear symbol that means “interact” as it could be examining, or speaking with, or pulling a switch.

  5. Linus

    Yeah that’s tricky. I did figure out what it meant from the screenshots though. Nice to see you thought about adding a keyboard, as my dmod uses some keys…

    Anyway, it’s looking good, keep up the good work ;)

  6. Skull

    Man, that title screen is awesome. In fact, there are many updates in this iTouch, that I would like to see in the PC version of Dink. Have you thought about making a new PC version that has some of these same updates?

  7. James Troughton

    I’m not convinced the fightingis going to work terribly well – More combat intensive d-mods may be a challenge to play on this.

    However, this seems like a fantastic opportunity to get story-based d-mods some respect. A d-mod with a host of environment puzzles and nice environments to explore could really be a hit.

    Consider me watching this very carefully – I’m certainly looking at gearing a forthcoming d-mod I’ve got in production towards the iphone (whilst obviously still being very enjoyable on PC!).

  8. Chrizum

    Amazing. The music may not be midi, but not worse than what midi sounds like on most soundcards.

    Wouldn’t it be possible to have a button in the main menu for going straight to the Dink Network D-Mods page?

  9. Seth Post author

    Skull>> Yeah, will definitely think about a Win and even Mac build, it’s very portable. Would need a bit of work to re-add gamepad support though, I stripped that when I killed all things DirectX in it.

    James Troughton>> Yep, a huge concern. I won’t release this until the interface is good enough that I can win the original game myself on the device. Have some stuff I want to try. If I flat out can’t make the controls good enough, there is always the option of lowering all enemy HP’s or damage done internally, but that could cause problems with DMOD designs so I hope I don’t have to go that route.

    Chrizum>> Most of the music in the video was in fact midi, it’s just that it doesn’t quite sound correct as compared to say, playing the MIDI on the PC. Close though. It does also handle playing mp3 audio, which I’ve converted the CD tracks to.

  10. Linus

    How will this handle true colour mode? Some dmods look bad with it and some look bad without, will it work the same way as in DFarc? So that you can choose an option?

  11. Seth Post author

    Linux:

    Everything runs in true color mode. Under the hood, it’s native GL ES running 24 and 32 bit textures.

    Can you recommend a DMOD I could use for testing to make sure everything looks ok? I do plan on adding screen fading (right now there isn’t any..) but not sure what else I would need to do.

  12. Linus

    Well my dmod, ‘three amulets’ looks really bad without true color due to all 24-bit graphics (It’s also scripted to look if true color is activated and will quit if it isn’t, (how will that work?)), and some old dmods ‘Lyna’s Story’ for example doesn’t work in true color.

    Try to run those.

  13. Seth Post author

    Thanks Linus,

    Your DMOD seems to run fine, (Dink iPhone is truecolor and passes a 1 back if asked) and Lyna’s quits out complaining about it. So I hacked it to pass 0 back (lie) and Lyna’s Story seemed to run just fine.

    Do you know why it required non truecolor mode?? Maybe I didn’t play it far enough to see the problem.

    I would hate putting in an option “Report truecolor as false” in iDink… (confusing for people) I can think of a few ways around that but I need to know if it actually does break something to lie to it.

  14. Linus

    Lyna’s story doesn’t use true-color mode because one of the biggest features in the game is the ability to travel between two different worlds. In the other world the palette changes, so the colors become negative, which gives a feeling that it’s a different place, a dark world. This doesn’t work in truecolor however, but I don’t know if it works on iphone, that’s up to you to figure out :P

  15. Ragura

    Awesome progress on this Seth :) Keep it up and you’ll blow a whole lot of new life into Dink.

    I do have a question, will it be possible to create UI elements on the screen that people can tap? Like the keybinding scripts in the original.

  16. Linus

    How much work is left to be done on this? Will it be finished by summer? :)
    I just bought an iPhone and is really excited ;)

  17. Seth Post author

    Hoping to get it into official beta test within a month, it’s VERY close to finished but I’ve had two wrinkles:

    1. Busy on secret high profile contract work, not much energy left for extra work, not sure how much longer until this project is complete.

    2. I want Dink to be a universal binary with both iPhone and native iPad support on release. Not a huge deal as Justin and I planned ahead and did the art at iPad sizes to start with, but needs some work figuring out the best screen arrangement options to use.

  18. Anonymous521

    hey. do you have some sort of a walkthrough or maybe a map for the three amulets DMOD?? pls i have the first two amulets and i don’t know where to go to get the third one…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *