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It’s been over two months since my last post, in which I announced that I was abandoning JavaScript for the development of Turtle Paint, and switched to Ruby instead. So far, it has been a great learning experience, and I’m loving this language more every day. There are a number of interesting technical posts that I want to write about the new internals of the game, but those are for another day.
Once upon a time, over a decade ago, I wrote a simple program in C++Builder to help my father solve crossword puzzles and cryptograms. It would let you type a word with blanks such as f....al and it would tell you which words would fit.
The JavaScript server code for Turtle Paint is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. People had warned me beforehand, but there’s no teacher like first-hand experience. The problems in a nutshell:
A good selection of words is essential for a fun drawing-and-guessing game; they must neither be too easy nor too difficult. However, I’m thoroughly lazy, so I was not going to compile a word list by hand.
No, the Frozen Fractal blog is not dead. It’s just been, well, frozen. A lot happened since the last post: I got a job at Google, moved to London, and made a little game for Ludum Dare that I’ll post about later. But a lot also didn’t happen: I didn’t finish Cart Frenzy. It turned out to be too much work to get it done before my contract at Google started, and after that, I didn’t have the time and energy to work on it any longer.
Back to work after a much-needed break, I have gained a better perspective on the current state of the game. I concluded that, if I am to finish this game on time, I’ll have to reduce it in scope significantly.
Game development can be a pain sometimes. Remember my writings on threading last week? This week has been more of the same kind of stuff: engine improvements, code cleanups, bugfixes, and only some small new features that are actually visible.
More work on performance this week. Things were getting a bit too slow for my tastes, meaning that they would likely be unplayable on medium-end phones. This work involved quite a bit of refactoring (which is jargon for “creating new problems to replace your old ones”), so I now have a bunch of screenshots of things… not working the way they should. Because this is a long and technical post, I will intersperse them for comic relief.
As announced, I made a large sprint this week to bring the artwork closer to completion. I think it’s about halfway done now, but I’m getting more and more experience with this, so the second half should go a lot faster.
Like I announced, lots of work on graphics. In-game graphics are beginning to come together, but are only halfway done, so the overall result still doesn’t look too good.