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With work full steam ahead on Mystery Game No. 1, it’s easy to forget that I’ve got another baby to care about. Rocket Mail was launched two months ago, but of course the story doesn’t end at launch. In a sense, it only begins.
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?
However, LibGDX doesn’t help you to create those files. It can be onerous to
create them and keep them in sync. Both Eclipse and IntelliJ have features for
this, but of course your translators won’t be using either of these. This is
why I came up with a simple way to generate these .properties files from a
spreadsheet (via CSV export). The expected input format is very simple (just a
column per language) and is fully described in
the README.
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.