Traffic stats for anyone interested

In case anyone would like to see the traffic stats to see the browser breakdown, locations, etc, here they are:

 

Happy 50th to me!

I just hit 50 subscribers on YouTube!  Actually it says 51, but one of those is my personal account so I can monitor how the subscription updates look.  I just want to thank everyone for their support!  I would have quit a long time ago if it wasn't for you guys taking an interest.

Yay! Major milestone - basic mechanics finished!

It feels good to have a big portion of the game done.  That selector was the biggest pain and probably why I did it near the end.  The basic mechanics are done.  Now we need to spend some time playing the game.  There are other things I want to add, but for now, you can launch the ball, bounce it off stuff and make it to the goal.  I feel pretty good about that!

Finally finished the selector!

I have to admit, this little problem kicked my butt for a while, mostly because ShiVa was not behaving the way I expected.  Here is how I got it all working and the end result.

Trig lesson

If you are like me, it has been a long time since you learned this in school.  Here is a refresher so that you are ready for the next video.  It's pretty much the basis for all the changes I made on this iteration.

Eureka!

I've finally figured it out!  You'll have to watch the videos to see what I figured out, but it took me all week to get this working the way I wanted--granted I only have time to work on this for an hour or two each night.  The videos will include a trig lesson as background to how I had to implement the code the way I did.  I'll also show you a bug I found in ShiVa, or if it isn't a bug, it's at least something that isn't implemented correctly.  So check back sometime tonight for the update!

Awesome article series about economies in MMOs

I don't know a whole lot about online economies and how to balance them, but I have experienced as a player most of what Simon mentions in his article and his solutions seem doable.  I don't know that I will ever tackle a project that would require a complex economy, but it was still a great read!

Yes, there should be another video soon =)

Getting the object selector/control piece working is taking a lot more effort than I originally anticipated.  Maybe I am just going about it in the wrong way--I don't know.  However, there is light at the end of the tunnel and so I am hopeful that I will be able to put something up soon even if I have to put that on hold and tackle something easier.

Making games tailored to mobile devices

Develop had another article that discusses how we are using mobile hardware in game development.  The gist of the article is that the best games take advantage of the unique capabilities of mobile devices.  I have seen way too many games that were originally designed for consoles or computers but are ported over to a mobile device so that the controls end up being horribly clunky.  I think I have been a victim of this mentality especially when using the preview feature in ShiVa3D.  My game is focused on mouse control at the moment and I have found myself loosing touch with the nuances of a touch interface.  I may have to find an Android device I can borrow so that I can start testing on the actual device.  I don't want to wait until the project is nearly done only to find out that my interface doesn't really make sense for a touch screen.

Making money on Android

Develop has an interesting article up titled What's the best way to make money from Android Games?  It definitely has some good points especially about freemium games, but the best info is that it can be pretty difficult to develop for Android because of all the different handsets and firmware combinations that are possible.  If you add to that the fact that the Android emulators are notoriously slow so that testing games is nearly impossible, then you definitely have one king-size headache brewing.  I guess I will just have to see for myself.

Adding the object selector tool to the HUD

In this video I finally import the HUD element that we created a week or so ago.  Originally I ran into some issues with the imported image looking pretty bad.  It turns out that when you import textures they resize to a multiple of 64, i.e. 64x64, 128x128, etc.  For a small image with a lot of subtle alpha settings to blend the edges, the resizing can really screw it up.  Once I resized it in Gimp to be 128x128, it looked much better.  So from now on, we will be making our texture sizes multiples of 64.

What's my motivation?

I got my first donation - thanks Rosario! Just to give you an idea of how online economics work, 2 months of people clicking on my ads barely evened out with what I got from Rosario's single donation! So if you are looking to get rich from a blog, don't hold your breath =)  This experience really got me thinking...as life crowds in, there are times when priorities shift and change and some things that used to be vitally important move to the back-burner.  As indie game developers, we often have the difficult task of trying to squeeze game development into our already busy lives.  So I started thinking about our source of motivation since I was finding it harder and harder to find the time to work on the project.  Getting a donation really snapped me out of my funk and made me really look at how I can better motivate myself to keep up with the project.  I think if we were to list all of the possible motivations that figure in to a game development project we would quickly run out of room, but I want to hit on a few.

I think that I have mentioned before that part of the reason that I am doing this a public/open project is because I feel that it will help me to stay on track, so the expectations of others can be good motivation.  If you fall in this category, I would encourage you to find some public forum, whether it be family, friends, the internet, etc., and let them know what you are working on.  It is hard to slack off on a project when people are always asking how things are coming.

Another reason is that I just love creating something that others will get enjoyment from.  It's also the reason I like to play music up on a stage--I love to see other people getting enjoyment from something I am creating.  If you fall in this category, you may want to get prototypes out in front of others to see their reactions.  It will help you to stay motivated (as long as they like it) and help you to know when you need to make changes (when they don't like it).

The last reason is plain old money.  I think when it comes to the creative process money may feel like a dirty word, but I think we would be kidding ourselves if we took it out of the equation--certainly when we hear of others that get rich off a game that went viral, we can't help but wish that we could be next.  Getting a donation made me realize the real pull that money can have on motivation--I thought, if what I am doing is important enough that people are willing to pay money to support it, then I have to keep going!

In reality, I think that our motivations are very complex and shift constantly.  If you want to see a project through to the end, it's important to maximize all of the motivating factors so that there will always be a reason to continue and give you the extra boost when times get rough.

Awesome pixel art tool!

A friend of mine just showed me a powerful app for doing pixel art.  I've only played with it briefly, but it seems to make creating pixel art easy and fun.  This will definitely be useful for making 2D games.

Check it out!

Real-time development

I read this great article on Develop-Online. You guys have probably figured out that I am a HUGE fan of iterative development.  What really drove the concept home for me is the fact that I have been working on a Blackberry app for work and I am doing it in Java.  The problem with Java development on the Blackberry is that you run your code in simulators that take forever to startup and load the app.  There are ways to reduce this time, but when compared with Blackberry Webworks development, it is a huge time waster.  In Webworks, there is a browser based simulator named Ripple that allows you to redeploy an app by simply hitting the refresh button in the browser.  ShiVa functions along the same lines because you can run the game in the IDE on-the-fly.  You don't have long compile times or a long wait while the simulator loads.  More than anything else, that has been the single most important feature in ShiVa and makes development so much easier.

Using Gimp to create a HUD element

I am definitely no expert in Gimp, so please keep the laughing to a minimum!  Since I am not an artist, I really appreciate the way programs like Gimp can make it easy to apply 3D effects like emboss.  In this video I create a basic image that I'm going to import as a texture and then put in the HUD of the game.  This will be the control to handle the rotation of movable objects.

Some great feedback!

So an important part of iterative development is to get good feedback during testing and then incorporate it into new iterations so that, over time, the game continues to improve.  This video discusses some of the feedback I have recently received and where you can go to leave feedback.  Although I have not implemented all the feedback yet, I will make sure that I call attention to changes that are the result of feedback when I do the videos.

Beam me up, Scotty! Adding a teleporter to the game.

I think it turned out pretty good!  I still need to change some of the mechanics like moving the camera with the ball so that there isn't such a jarring change in the view.  Kronos gave me some great feedback in the forums and mentioned the way the poly trail pauses, so I will be fixing that as well.  I encourage everyone to read his feedback because it brings up a lot of good points and demonstrates how critical it is to get the input of people outside the project. Thanks for the excellent feedback, Kronos!

Bug fix and AI re-design

Sorry its been about a week since my last post.  Here is a video documenting the fix for a bug that I accidentally introduced to the game.  Basically by adding a ceiling that is a collider, the game could no longer find objects that you click on to move them.  I fixed it by moving the ceiling in edit mode.  I also moved some code around to segregate AI functionality a bit more.