Princesses, snakes, and bears, oh my! In the form of Princess Maria, or some other form, make your way through 10 levels to save your fiancé, Plumber Pete, from the claws of an evil monster! Taking inspiration from The Talos Principle, Portal, Sokoban and a certain classic platformer, Morphing Maria is a top-down puzzle game in which you change shape to accomplish your goals. Each shape brings unique abilities that help you reach the exit.
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.
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.