It’s been kind of a long development cycle but we decided to launch this release with some features which include the following:
Update to ARCore 1.20
Added support for OpenGL ES 3.0
Added Push Notifications
New monster: Added the Cacodemon!
Added ability to toggle God Mode in the Cheats section under the Settings menu
Made some changes to spawn pickup items closer to player to lower the difficulty
Capped the rendering framerate to resolve some FPS inconsistencies
HUD change: Added screen flash effect when picking up items
Fixed some crashes causing app instability
Here’s a preview of an early Alpha version of v2.3 that shows the Cacodemon in action:
Alpha of v2.3 showing the Cacodemon and God Mode. Note that in this alpha Depth API Depth Occlusion has been disabled and the screen flash effect when picking up items is still under development.
We haven’t made a blog post on other releases after v2.0 (5 months ago!) so here’s what we’ve incorporated since then:
v2.2 – v2.2.3
Fixed some issues with OpenGL alpha blending
Added Firebase Crashlytics to debug an OpenGL Shader compilation issue in some affected devices
v2.1
Updated to ARCore 1.19
Enabled Depth API Depth Occlusion for supported devices
Made some rendering frame rate tweaks
Made a change to spawn monsters at least 2 meters away from the player
We added support for floating monsters (Lost Souls, Cacodemons, etc.) however v2.0 only spawns Lost Souls. We also added the Chainsaw due to popular demand, so you can saw “Pinkies” to the tune of I Sawed Demons.
Adding the Chainsaw required some changes to the sound effects implementation, so we refactored this code quite a bit. The Vanilla Doom code handles the playing and stopping of sounds, and the unique sound effects of the Chainsaw make use of this, particularly the switching between the idle, attack and hit frames of the Chainsaw. So we had to do some work in the sound code to replicate this same behavior in ARThings. We also updated ARCore to v1.17 in this version.
Anyways below are 2 videos that showcase these features:
We recently released v1.9 of ARThings, which included a couple of new features (addition of a new monster and weapon) and some under-the-hood improvements.
We also introduced 3 new achievements and some game difficulty balancing. We discovered some major bugs (pre v1.9) with monster spawning that made the game incredibly difficult – monsters spawn too frequently, and these bugs are fixed in v1.9.
Below is a clip of a pre-alpha version of v1.9 showcasing a rough implementation of the Plasma Gun:
Plasma Gun and Zombieman Gibbing!
Below are the full release notes, we hope you enjoy!
Added spawning of Baron of Hells
Added spawning of Plasma Gun when killing Baron of Hells
Reduced the frequency of Chaingunners spawning
Added gib animation for Zombies, Imps and Shotgun Guys
Added some logic to make missiles explode when too far
Fixed thrust and friction implementation that was not working before
Added 3 new achievements – Picking up Plasma Gun, Killing Baron of Hell (Boss) and Gibbing a monster
Added spawning of Blue Armor
Added spawning of clips, 4 shotgun shells and cells
Fixed bug of monsters spawning when they’re not supposed to
This is a light release and the last one before the start of 2020. We introduced 2 Leaderboards:
Most kills in a single round.
Total kills for all rounds.
We also display Top kills in a single round in the HUD (displayed in green color).
I took a video of v1.8 today, which includes footage of unlocking some achievements – including unlocking and picking up the Super Shotgun before I was mowed down by demons:
While developing an Android app with Google Play Game Services integration a developer needs the following for testing Game Services features:
1. Ability to test in a Android debug app (signed with debug certificate) with unpublished achievements using a tester account.
2. Ability to test in a Android release app (signed with release certification), fully signed by Google Play with a published Game Services configuration.
Google provides some documentation on how to setup Game Services for Android. This documentation clearly outlines the configuration process:
However, despite these guides some developers might face some stumbling blocks along the way. After dealing with this myself, I’ve outlined below some general guidelines on how accomplish the configuration for both Android debug and release apps published to Google Play.
Testing in Debug Mode
To test in debug mode, you need to create a Linked App inside the Game Services configuration that corresponds to your Android debug app. The Client ID used by this Linked App needs to use the SHA1 fingerprint of the Android debug keystore (debug.keystore). Typically, for Windows users this keystore is located in the following path:
C:\Users\{your Windows username}\.android\debug.keystore
To find the fingerprint of this keystore all you need to do is run the following in the command prompt:
You can then copy paste the SHA1 fingerprint into the SHA1 fingerprint of the Client ID needed by Game Services and you should be good to go.
If for some reason you can’t find the keystore there’s another way to find out the SHA1 fingerprint based on the Android app’s generated apk. The Android SDK Build Tools come with a nice little tool called “apksigner” that can be accessed through the command line via the following path
C:\Users\{your Windows username}\AppData\Local\Android\sdk\build-tools\{version}
The “apksigner” tool takes the path of an apk and returns information about the certificate that the apk was signed with. Below is an example of the command line:
The above instructions also apply for Release Mode, but with one small change: You need to use the SHA1 fingerprint of the certificate that Google Play uses to sign the release apk with in Google Play (called the “App signing certificate”, NOT the certificate you use to bundle your apk in release mode (called the “Upload Certificate”) from the “Build -> Generate Signed Bundle / APK” option in Android Studio.
Getting the SHA1 fingerprint of the App signing certificate is very simple. Go to Google Play Console, click on your app and navigate to the “Release Management -> App signing” section. In the “App signing certificate” section (screenshot below), use the SHA1 certificate fingerprint (masked in the screenshot below) for your release app Client ID.
The important thing here is to use SHA-1 fingerprint of the App signing certificate, NOT the Upload certificate.
In a nutshell, here’s the overall approach:
Testing Game Services for debug Android: Create a Linked App using using a Client ID using the SHA1 fingerprint of Android’s default debug keystore (debug.keystore).
Testing Game Services for release Android app in the Play Store: Create a Linked App using a Client ID using the SHA1 fingerprint of the “App signing certificate”.
After a small period of development hell, we finally released ARThings v1.6 last Saturday. This release is a big step into making ARThings more of a game experience versus just a mere technical demo. We’ve still got a long way to go, but we’re ok with taking baby steps and experimenting with new features.
The main addition in v1.6 is the integration of Google Play Game Services, supporting the following 3 achievements:
Killing 30 monsters in a row without dying
Picking up the Chaingun
Picking up the Super Shotgun
Below are the full v1.6 release notes:
1. ARCore 1.13 update
2. Google Play Game Services integration with 3 achievements
3. AR Session filter -> limited camera capture rate to 30fps and prevented the use of depth sensor
4. Added the Super Shotgun (awarded as a gift but won't give you spoilers on how to get it!)
2. HUD changes
Version 1.6 ended up having a bug with Google Sign In, so we made an emergency v1.7 release with the following changes:
1. ARCore 1.14 update
2. Google Play Game Services update to 19.0.0
3. Disabled AR Session filtering -> camera capture rate and use of depth sensor is not limited anymore
4. Settings menu -> Added Player Id to Signed In message
5. Settings menu -> Added icon to achievement button
6. Settings menu -> Positioned Sign Out button at the bottom
7. Updated Sign In error dialogs to display more informational messages
8. Sign out -> Updated sign out handling code
9. Game Services -> Released achievements buffer to fix memory leak
10. Fixed memory leaks in Game Services static member variables
Below is a short video of v1.7 – it doesn’t showcase all the features of this release (like the Super Shotgun) since I was killed repeatedly before I was able to unlock it but I’ll post a video of the Super Shotgun soon!
Check out the Google Play Game Services Sign In pop-up. Also, you can hear me huffing & puffing (I’m out of shape) and cursing in Spanish multiple times as I fail to unlock the “30 kills in a row” achievement.
Helldorado Team’s Doom WAD portfolio hasn’t been particularly illustrious. In fact until this year its been nonexistent. Can we recall the overly hyped Confessions from the Flesh – announced back in May of 2006 but cancelled after only 2 days of development?
Let’s recount Helldorado Team’s various attempt at WAD building for a moment:
Exhumed – began in 2012 as a single map for ZDoom. Much more progress was made compared to Confessions but after 3 weeks the team lost interest. Development resumed in December 2018 but yet again scope creep derailed the project when the team tried to incorporate countless features to showcase GZDoom advanced capabilities. The project was shelved by end of December.
Septic Shock – After Exhumed, the development team decided to keep it simple. The goal was to build a single Boom-compatible map for Doom 2 and avoid the development pitfall every Doom mapping newcomer faces – getting carried away with ZDoom features. Development began in January 1st 2019 but the project was put on hold in mid February due to other priorities.
Despite the aforementioned facepalms, we’re proud to celebrate the breaking of this vicious cycle. Today we release Helldorado Team’s first Doom WAD – The Breach. It’s a Boom-compatible 2-map WAD for Doom 2. You can download the WAD by downloading the breach.rar file from the original Doomworld thread:
How to play? If you are newcomer to Doom and its source ports, you can download a Doom source port such as PrBoom+ or GZDoom and drag and drop breach.wad over to the source port executable. The WAD requires Doom 2 so make sure Doom2.wad is in the same folder as the source port executable.
It’s been a little bit over a month but finally v1.4 is out. We already covered what’s new on our previous sneak peek post, but below is a laundry list of some of the major changes:
Added the Imp monster
Added player damage and player death, plus player’s ability to retry after dying
Random spawning of health and armor items
Some changes to the HUD
Check out some of the action below, any feedback is welcome for v1.5!
ARThings v1.3 introduced the Shotgun Guy monster from Doom. Since then we’ve been brainstorming ideas for new features. Given the sandboxy feeling of ARThings so far the natural course was incorporating features that would make the experience feel more like a game.
Users have been clamoring for the introduction of health and player damage, so that’s what we primarily focused on for v1.4, in addition to the introduction of another monster – the Imp. We also introduced some minor HUD changes to display Health and Armor.
Check out some of the action from v1.4 (to be released soon) below!
Yes, it’s been a while but v1.3 is finally out. Helldorado Team has been busy with other projects since November 2018 (wasting time creating vaporware WADs amongst other things thanks to Elioncho’s encouragement) but we plan to add more features over the next couple of months and focus on this app for the remainder of the year.
This is a minor release with one major addition – the Shotgun Guy monster. The plan was also to add another weapon – the Super Shotgun. However this plan was too ambitious and the feature discarded for the time being. Another addition is the update to ARCore 1.10 – we hope this enhances the overall AR experience.
Thinking ahead we might add one more monster in 2019 and focus more on enhancing the gameplay experience.
