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With Mystery Game No. 1 in private beta, while I’m waiting for feedback, I’ve had all week to dedicate to Dragon Attack. A lot remains to be done, especially in the tweaking and balancing department, but there has been a lot of progress.
Yesterday I worked on the control scheme for Dragon Attack. In its original version, Glauron, the mechanics are very simple:
In the past few years, I’ve done most of my game development in Java. It didn’t use to be that way. Before Android and libGDX came along, when C++11 was still C++0x, I used C++ almost exclusively. And recently, because of some performance-critical bits in Mystery Game No. 1, I got to use C++ again. And I loved it!
At the start of this year, I set myself some goals for the first half of 2016. Today marks the half-way point of that period, so it’s a good time to check on how I’m doing on each of them. I’ll grade each goal on a scale of 0 to 1, which should ideally average out to 0.5 at this stage.
Update (14 September 2016): A month after I wrote this, RoboVM announced that they were winding down. I already had a (free) license, which is good until April 2017, but if you need a new one, you’re out of luck.
Update (14 September 2016): A month after I wrote this, RoboVM announced that they were winding down. I already had a (free) license, which is good until April 2017, but if you need a new one, you’re out of luck.
Rocket Mail was the first game in which I’m tracking metrics, using Google Analytics. Adding Analytics support to your app is fairly straightforward, but using it well isn’t. I’ve learned a thing or two from Rocket Mail, so with Mystery Game No. 1, I’m taking a different approach, as documented in this post.
Any programmer worth their salt will have heard of the DRY principle: Don’t Repeat Yourself. The idea is that repetition is bad: it makes for more code to read through, and it makes code harder and more error-prone to maintain because you have to make the same change in multiple places.
It’s Fun Time Friday again! And a good thing too, because I’ve been busy with Mystery Game No. 1 all week, which I can’t blog about yet. So apart from the welcome break, the Friday farming prototype also gives me something to write about.
While Mystery Game No. 1 is making nice progress, in the spirit of “throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks”, I’ve decided to introduce what I call “Fun Time Fridays”. On Friday, assuming the rest of the week has gone according to plan, I get to work on whatever I like, as long as it’s feasible that a game or useful product will come out of it.