Going through an old coat I found a Mondovi Supervalu receipt from 2005, the contents of which are:
Shockingly similar to the types of things I get these days
Here is a current shot of my math game, currently titled CalcuDrop but I’m going to be looking at the name soon.
I finished Speeder, put it out on the Android Market and of course get no sales. The free version is doing okay and it’s generating more ad revenue then any of my other apps but that’s still nothing. It’s unfortunate but if nothing changes I’ll probably be looking for another job in July. I haven’t given up though as the idea of getting a regular job sounds dreadful. I had an idea for another new game that I’ve started work on already.
The new game is going to be a math game, and force you to try and do simple math problems quickly in order to do well. I like this because it’s something you can get better at over time, the more you play the easier it will be to work quickly. I’ll post more about it as I get more finished on it but it’s coming along really nicely I think.
I’m using libgdx to make it, previously I’ve worked just in the Android Canvas to write things, but I wanted to try out something using OpenGL and nice game framework. Libgdx seems to have the best documentation and demos and tutorials and such of the game frameworks I looked at. I’ve been able to figure out how to do anything I need to do in it by looking over their website and forums so I’ve been happy.
I’ve also been goofing around with Haskell in order to learn it. Haskell is a completely functional programming language as opposed to Java which is an imperative programming language. It’s a different way of thinking when you write programs in a functional language and a lot of people think it will be the way to go in the future. I’m starting to feel good about what I’ve learned in it so I’ll probably fiddle around with writing some stuff from Project Euler, algorithm stuff like that seems perfect for what Haskell does.
Not much else to talk about, it’s getting nice out so I’ll probably start going to the beach soon, I’ll post some pictures from there because that place is rad.
Well I’ve mostly been tweaking Speeder and levels for the last week and I’m pretty sure I’m ready for a testing release. I’ve posted on Facebook but I’ll post here as well: If you are interested in testing Speeder please let me know, I can always use more points of view. It is definitely not complete but I have most things in and two levels for each difficulty. There are no instructions in game yet and you need Android 2.0 or higher to run it.
I always feel like I need a better way to get feedback, I don’t always get as much as I’d like, but we’ll see how it goes.
No updates last week, I was out of town at the beginning of the week and working on a separate project the rest of the week, but I’m back at it today.
Today was mostly about rewriting how level selection and such works. Now you select a difficulty, then select the level in that difficulty you want to play. I have switched to only tracking a single high score for these individual levels which I think should be fine. I might add in the ability to add a name, but right now it’s just a score for each individual level. I’ll probably do something similar for continuous mode. Making all the lists interact with each other the way I wanted was a pain, but it worked out in the end after a bit of research and now it is a smooth experience.
With that put together I really need to make more levels for testing and get it out in front of some people. That will be my goal for the next few days, put together several interesting levels for testing.
No screenshot today, instead a Kids in the Hall sketch that is rad, like all of them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dzhx-YpV9g
The last two days have mostly been graphic work for me. I have the launcher icon finished and button graphics done, for now at least, I might go back and do something different with the buttons. I also added in the Level Complete state and the dialog to go along with it. It displays your score for the level, your bonus for remaining health, and then your total score. I updated the Game Over screen to display your total score as well. I set everything up to return the score and difficulty when you finish a game as well so that I can use it for high scores, but I need to do some work on that end before I actually save anything. I’m inching ever closer to a testing release. I still mostly need to finish high scores and a starter level for Medium and Hard difficulty.
Screenshot for today is the level complete screen on my test Hard level
I didn’t do a lot of work today, I woke up late and have things going on later today, but I did get the logo for the game finished and some ideas on icons and buttons. Here is the logo:
I like the way the finish line looked when I made it so I decided to do something similar with the main screen logo, I like the way this came out as well. That is all for today.
I put together a list of things I need to finish for Speeder before I can send it out to people to test, so I started work on those today. Some of them are game features, others are just general features for the look and feel and such.
Today I started with game features. First I changed how speed and crashes work a bit. When you crash into the back of a car you will take damage and your overall speed will slow down. The change is now that while still behind the car you will slow down even further until you get out from behind the car at which time you speed back up to your base starting speed. While fully slowed down behind a car you do not get points so you want to avoid this situation.
Second I added in taking damage for going off-road. If you have more then half your car off-road for several seconds you will start taking damage to the car. The idea here is that on 4 and 5 lane levels you could in theory just drive off the road the entire time and never have to worry about hitting cars. I’m thinking about suspending scoring during that time as well, to further encourage staying on the road.
Lastly, I put in a finish line mechanism so that I can write full levels with an ending and track scoring on those individual levels. I still need to put in a level complete dialog, right now I just show the game over dialog, but it is working as intended.
Still to be added this week, a proper main screen which just consists of a play button right now, high score saving, and putting together at least one proper level for each difficulty.
Today’s screenshot just shows the finish line.
