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The new AI is making good progress; I’d say it’s about 90% finished. (The other 90% remains to be done.) After writing the code, it cleanly fell apart into three largely independent modules. I like to name my classes after corresponding real-world things, so these are called the Driver, the Navigator and the Manager.
It’s difficult to do a screen-cast of an Android game. You have to root the device to even take a screenshot, and with the game taking up most of the CPU, a live video is out of the question. The emulator that ships with the SDK is too slow to make the game run smoothly, and multitouch cannot be used on an emulated device. It would be possible to record a game session, then play it back at a slower speed while recording, but it would be hard to get sound, and it’s a lot of work anyway. It seems that the only viable option is to point a camera at the phone and live with the bad video quality. Oh well. Here it is.
After deciding in which direction to take the game, the last few days have been a matter of implementing this. Due to various circumstances I haven’t been able to get as much done as I would’ve liked to, which is why this post is relatively short and fragmented.
Due to other activities, I haven’t gotten round to much coding in the last few days. However, a lot of thinking happened that is equally, if not more important.
There was a permission problem that sometimes caused comments to be refused with a 500 Internal Server Error. This has now (hopefully) been resolved.
I also added clickable links to the Atom feed for the blog, because some browsers (Chrome, and Firefox 4 beta, but strangely not Firefox 3) do not show the feed icon in the address bar.
After seeing the last few posts, someone asked me why I’d gone from the original item-gathering concept to a more customary around-the-track racing game with more customary controls. This is a very good question, so in this post I’ll address some of the design decisions I made along the way.
Well then, since last Monday, the Frozen Fractal website is unofficially up. And since today, it’s official, because now there’s a blog post announcing it!
There are a handful of racing games that let you race purely against your own best time, but the majority of them let you race against others. It adds an element of competition that you don’t get when racing alone. The solitary racer is someone who spends hours trying to figure out the optimal way to tackle that sharp corner, just to shave a tenth of a second off his best time. Not the kind of audience I’m targeting with a somewhat (albeit not completely) casual mobile racing game. Long story short, I need opponents.
Last time, I wrote:
My brother probably expected the cart to make a turn if it was pushed on one side. Instead, it would spin around its axis, but keep moving in more or less the same direction! […] I will need to consider carefully whether this is going to be a real problem, though.
No updates last weekend, because I’ve been busy with the Rails Rumble: an annual contest to build a Ruby on Rails web application in 48 hours. Three friends and I built ChordWise, an online ear training and score reading practice application for musicians. Although there are some bugs to be ironed out (sound doesn’t work in Chrome, probably nothing works in IE), I’m very satisfied with the what we’ve accomplished in just two days. It’s a promising start, and we might continue to develop this into a full-fledged product and try to make some money out of it, if there turns out to be enough demand for something like this.