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LibGDX has decent localization support
via a bundle of .properties files, for example:
== strings.properties ==
app_name=Confirmation App
confirmation=Are you sure?
== strings_en_UK.properties ==
confirmation=I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but would you please be so kind to confirm your certainty on this matter?
== strings_nl.properties ==
confirmation=Weet u het zeker?
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As an indie game developer, I’m wearing a lot of hats. At one moment, I play the role of developer, happily banging out code. The next moment, I can be posting about my game on forums, or doing artwork, or communicating with my client/partner/designer. How do I stay on top of all this? Fortunately, I’ve built up a bag of useful tricks and tools that work really well for me. Time to share!
Unfortunately, I can’t reveal too much about the game I’m currently working on, but I can say that it’s like a board game. For the sake of this post, let’s assume that the game is chess: there is a game board, there are some players, and each player has a bunch of pieces that either have a position on the game board, or have been captured. In this post, I’ll talk a bit about how to architecture such a game in software.
I realized a long time ago that my website was looking a little dated. A dark theme, drab colours and not exactly mobile-friendly. So when I started fulltime in December, one of the first things I did was a major styling overhaul.
Happy new year, dear readers! This post has nothing to do with new year’s resolutions; it just happens to coincide. Studies have shown that setting and announcing explicit goals helps drive success. And who would I be to argue with science? So here’s what I’m planning to do in the first half of 2016 (until the end of June).
So I’ve been a fulltime indie for about a week now. I launched Rocket Mail for Android. More about that in a later post. So what’s next?
Put your spatial insight and worldly knowledge to the test! Rocket Mail is a company that delivers packages to anywhere in the world – by rocket! Use your phone’s compass and accelerometer to launch your delivery rocket to cities throughout the world. The closer you get, the higher your score!
I recently did an interview with Robert of Tornadic Dev Studio from Melbourne, Australia. He noticed my recent announcement about starting as a fulltime indie developer, and got inspired:
At the core, Rocket Mail is a very simple game. I made the early prototype (Doomsray) in less than a day. There are no complicated physics, no advanced graphics, and very little in the way of performance requirements. Of course there’s a long way to go from a prototype to a finished game, but even after the game looked, felt and sounded polished, I still found that I needed several weeks to get it ready for beta testing.
After thinking this through over and over and over again, I’ve finally decided to take the plunge, quit my day job and become a fulltime indie game developer!
Just a short post to share something I’ve been working on that mightily pleases the Kerbal Space Program player in me. In testing Orbital Express, it became clear that having three controls (compass direction, inclination, and launch speed) is too much for beginning players. So I decided to simplify the first two levels:
Virtual reality seems to be all the rage in gaming these days. Everyone seems to be buying into it. Big corporations like Facebook (Oculus Rift), Sony (PlayStation VR) and Microsoft (HoloLens) are pouring money into VR as if it’ll be the biggest thing since sliced bread. But right now, few people who aren’t game developers actually own the necessary hardware. Will it all be worth it in the end? I think not.
As I’d hoped, my 48-hour game Glauron did pretty well in the latest Ludum Dare game development competition: it ranked #58 overall, and made the top-100 in the graphics and fun categories as well.
For my game Orbital Express, I need a list of cities that can serve as targets for the player to aim at. We’re trying to select cities that…
After Ludum Dare, it’s back to working on the game I blogged about last week. Name clashes notwithstanding, I’ve decided to call it Orbital Express after all. As I mentioned, there is work to be done on progression, balancing and scoring.
(Cross-posted to the Ludum Dare blog.)
This is Glauron, my Compo entry for Ludum Dare 33, themed You Are The Monster:
I’ve been working on and off on this project for almost two months now, so it’s time I blogged something about it. Here’s the elevator pitch:
Each field of programming presents its own challenges, and game programming is no exception. In fact, I would say that a game is among the hardest things you can program in general. Why? I can think of three main reasons, which are closely related, as we will see.
After a weekend of toil with GRPC, ProGuard, dex, Netty, Maven, Gradle and IntelliJ, I finally managed to build a release APK of the first public version of the Bigcanvas app. Add some screenshots (inspired by – well, hopefully you can tell), and we have a publication!
Pickomino (known as Regenwormen in Dutch, Heckmeck in German) is a dice game in which players try to get as many worms as possible. It is largely a game of chance, but there are some tactics involved, which always leaves me wondering: did I make the optimal choice? Only one way to find out: write an AI player that knows how to play optimally.