And the new world Space Prisoner champion is... Qaeyious!!
His score of 1,814,395 on Level 20 is tops! Congratulations!

He also sent me some very useful bug reports, which I'm investigating.
Keep those bug reports and suggestions coming!

Zeke is on the board at #13 with a score of 164,780. Way to go!
He also sent me a cool spaceship .obj model that I'm going to test in the game. Thanks Zeke!

Hamul improved his ranking to #11 with a score of 227,235. Nice work!

Fantastic new score from Qaeyious - 1,246,095 and good for 2nd place overall!!

I finally updated the User Reviews page - check it out!

Thanks everyone for your input, it is much appreciated.

OK, so I've taken a bit of a hiatus while my busy summer proceeds. When I have more time, I will be finishing up and releasing version 2.0. Thanks for your patience folks!

In the meantime, Hamul's score has been posted today, good for 11th place overall. Nice job!

Some exciting new updates are on the way for Space Prisoner! I might have to call the next version 2.0, because there are some major changes to the gameplay coming up...

1) Timed levels - you have only a certain amount of time to rescue the prisoners. This avoids the problem of "hanging around" on the first few (easy) levels, racking up points. It also gives more of a sense of urgency to the game.

2) The ability to fly OUTSIDE the cube! You'll start outside, and have to find the entranceway to get in. At any time, you can wander back outside again too, if you want. Watch out though, the wall guns have the ability to swivel their barrel to the outside and defend, so you won't be completely safe out there!

Let me know what you think of these changes, and email me with any other ideas you have. I'm open to all suggestions, major or minor! The object is to make the game more fun, even if it means changing it in a big way.

Cheers,

Tom

Timothy Gentle rocketed to 5th on the high score list after only his 3rd time playing the game! Wow, is it really that easy?? It seems that players either find this game impossibly hard or really easy.

I may have to make some adjustments for the next version. By the way: I am planning a tentative release date for version 1.5 of May 15, 2009.

Another score improvement for Manoj... he's now #3... great work, keep it up!

Congratulations to Jeremy Russell - the new Space Prisoner Champion!

1.3 million+ ... great score!

2 more hiscore updates, one from Releaser Man and another one from Manoj, who climbs another step up the ladder. Rockin' scores!

The next version of Space Prisoner will require at least 50,000 points to generate a SpreenCode.

The WolfGang from Germany has leaped into 3rd place with a great score of over half a million!

Another new score by Manoj Chawla... he's climbing up the list!

The million point threshold has been broken!

Cyril Q from Switzerland has the new worldwide high score with 1,124,010 points. Congratulations Cyril, you are the new Space Prisoner champion!

New worldwide high score of 732,135 by deaddodo.

All I can say is... WOW! I think that one might hold up for a while.

Space Prisoner 1.4 released!  There's lots of great improvements this time around:

- Major performance improvements! Explosions and other graphics-intensive operations now render smoothly, even on slower Macs without dedicated graphics cards.

- NEW roll controls! Now you can roll the ship around its longitudinal (nose-to-tail) axis. Maneuvering in zero-g just got even more fun!

- NEW camera views! Now you have 7 different camera view options instead of just 4. Useful backward-looking, right side and left-side views let you scout around your ship and see what's around you.

- NEW "True Newtonian" physics model option! Pressing "N" during game play will let you experience true, frictionless outer space maneuvering - it's realistic but also pretty wild! You might just get a bit dizzy. :) Press "N" again to restore the normal, "artificial mild-friction" environment.

- NEW higher-contrast application icon

- Updates to the splash screens

New high score of 470,005 from Romain in France. He got to Level 12. Très bon!

New high score of 246,525 from Brian. Nice!

Also due to a suggestion from Brian: For Space Prisoner version 1.4 (to be released soon), I've added the ability to roll your spaceship about the longitudinal (nose-to-tail) axis.

For now, I have set the new roll controls to be "Q" and "W"... (at least, until I get user-configurable controls going, which is kind of a lot of work)... these new key assignments are negotiable... any suggestions?

By the way: it's simple to prove that every possible three-dimensional orientation can be achieved using just 2 out of the 3 degrees of freedom (roll, pitch, and yaw). Up until now the game had only two to work with (pitch and yaw), but adding the third certainly provides more interesting maneuvering options.

Thanks to a bug report from Doug Walters, I've managed to track down a bug which caused slowdowns during explosion sequences on machines without dedicated graphics cards.

As a result, the next version of Space Prisoner (1.4) will have significant performance gains for all machines. This gain will only be noticeable if you have the slower, shared graphics memory scheme that is present on most MacBooks. It's only the very latest MacBooks (introduced a couple of months ago) which finally have dedicated graphics cards built-in. (The MacBook Pro always had them).

I'll be releasing Space Prisoner 1.4 soon, after I've finished a few more refinements and some more playtesting.

Released Version 1.3. Here are the changes from version 1.2 to 1.3:

- Lowered the minimum score for generating a high score code. Now, if you score 10,000 points or more, Space Prisoner will generate a "SpreenCode". Email this code, along with your name and score, to tspreen@gmail.com and I will post your score on the project blog!

- Added ability to erase the high score. To erase the current high score, hit "H" several times rapidly while on the splash screen.

- Updated Info screen, added credits

- Lowered the max rate of fire for wall guns (shots would sometimes hit each other)

- Improved wall gun appearance

- Increased strength of sentinel ships (sentinel ships are the smarter, faster ships that show up in the later levels... they were also supposed to be stronger, but they weren't! This has been corrected.)

Added a "Reviews" link (just under the download link).

No high scores have come in yet... so I'm thinking that 50,000 points as the minimum might have been a little optimistic! In version 1.3, I'm going to lower the min threshold for generating a high score code to 10,000 points.

My personal high score on Space Prisoner 1.2 is 262,780.

Posted a "Instructions & Hints" PDF which provides some good information on what the game objectives are and how to do well in Space Prisoner.

I've realized that nowhere in the game did I include any real instructions (besides a list of the controls). Oops! The next version will have instructions built-in.

NOTE: If you reach 50,000 points or more, Space Prisoner will give you a special code at the end of your game! Email this code, your score, and your desired name to tspreen@gmail.com and I will post your high score on the project blog.

Version 1.2 released. Major memory leak plugged. It should be OK now.

OK, so clearly I should have done some more thorough playtesting!

Apologies to all who suffered through the indignity of having bizzare and/or hanging displays when they downloaded version 1.0 or 1.1 and tried to start a game. I forgot an important rule: OpenGL requires that the width and height of all textures be a power of 2 (128, 256 etc)... I had one large one which didn't meet this requirement. This caused an OpenGL memory leak. My fresh, RAM-heavy machine handled it no problem... but other machines didn't.

Great start to the public version, don't you think? :-/

Version 1.1 released. Here are the changes from 1.0:

1) Several old, unused resources have been removed, so the overall file size is much smaller now.

2) Fixed some small bugs with the splash screen.

Unfortunately the "swath of color" bug still exists on low-performance machines. Let me know how it works on yours.

CAUTION: Version 1.0 has a rather obvious display bug on my 2002-model 1GHz Powerbook.

The right hand side of the screen, rather than showing the nice information console, is instead flooded with various shades of green, blue and red.

However, everything works fine on my 2.6 GHz Intel Macbook Pro. Let me know if you have this display problem on your machine.

Posted version 1.0.

Updated the blog in preparation for public release of the game.

Several small changes and improvements have also been made to the game. Stationary wall turrets now attempt to prevent you from completing your rescue mission, and new enemy Sentinel ships show up at the later levels.

As well, there are now special levels: Wall Gun levels and Money levels.