Saturday, December 22, 2012

Holiday Update

So here I am, working at home and writing code on an Acer Aspire 5532 I bought during college so that I could write papers. A cheap deal at Best Buy and something never really built to be coding on. Build times are a good bit longer and I can barely play Overflow, the good news is that I don’t really need too since I’m working on the map editor.

The overhaul is coming along pretty well after I finally broke the bug that had stumped me for three hours the other day. Players will be able to switch map sizes, play player tiles on the board, save & load to multiple save slots!

What I need to finish up is in the preview options have the tiles display player colors (at present they only know what grey tiles are) and in the actual game I need to make sure that the pre-placed player tiles show up and function correctly.

Matt talked to Dean, the Ai professor at Champlain, and he gave us some great advice. That is probably the next thing I dive into.

Had someone on Facebook ask about Android, and it’s a total possibility. Flash can apparently build straight out to Android, which is awesome. The biggest thing that is stopping me from doing so is that I don’t have a device to test on + I don’t know if there is even an android device with the same resolution as the iPad. If not then I need to scale everything to fit a range of particular resolutions which just becomes another thing on the long list of things to do. So we will see.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Friday!

Today we are going to try to hit our list of contacts Mike put together for us yesterday; we have around 30 people thus far. We did this last time for Loc, and from experience it’s super hit or miss. Sending an email to webmaster@somegamesite.com is a dead end. Stuff just gets buried under a landslide and quickly lost.

So this time around we are going to try communicating via twitter with some people, skipping the unknown webmaster and going straight for people who actually write the articles. We will see how it goes.

By end of day today I will also be rolling out the team/replay build of Overflow on Testflight, which will also update our game submission for the Pax East Indie Showcase.

Starting to pull together a list of stuff I might be working on over break:

Map Editor Overhaul: Currently it works, but functionality wise it needs a little help. A player cannot create and save multiple maps easily at the moment. They have to save the game in a particular slot, go back out to the main menu, go to the game setup screen and select another slot to save in.

What should happen is from the map editor the player should be able to switch easily between map sizes, be able to add player pieces to the board, test it (right from the editor) and save to any slot.

Map of the Day: thought of that yesterday. I would create a map every day, throw it up on a server and have the game pull it down. Would provide a new (official) gameplay experience to those who might have gotten bored from playing the official maps and don’t want to create new ones.

Ai: Might want to start working/thinking about how this is going to work. Never written Ai code before, so could be kinda hard. The largest hurdle will be making the Ai not brutally difficult.

Might be in on Monday, probably for a little while, my flight doesn’t leave until 5ish, but stay tuned. I will probably be updating the blog over the holiday.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Submitted!

We have successfully submitted Overflow to the Pax East Indie Showcase!!!

Originally we were delaying until apple approved our build (which also happened yesterday) to send them a promo code. However, Mike went back and started looking through the rules and discovered that you may send your build via testflight! Test flight allows for mass ad-hoc testing without having to pass the build through apple.

Wish us luck!

In other news, I got a replay feature working in Overflow. At the end of the game the player will have the option to view a replay of their game. The replay will auto play from the beginning and show every moment stored in the timeline. Players will also be able to tap anywhere on the timeline to move to a particular moment in time.

Today I want to try to get a fast forward button which would increase the speed of the replay so players can watch a time lapsed version of their game. From our own experience, matches can last upwards of an hour and as of this moment the replay is in real time, so in order to watch that hour long match it would take almost as long.

And because Apple got back to us and our build is now approved we will be sending out emails/twitter requests to the press. We have a decent list of contacts thus far, but it anyone is interested in getting the game on the iPad please let us know and we can make that a reality.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Preparation

Apple should be responding as early as tomorrow and by latest by Friday. So we have some preparation to do. Checking up on press contacts, writing those emails, getting facebook/twitter banners, backgrounds, still working on our gameplay video, get another batch of screenshots up, etc.

Yesterday I successfully got team gameplay working! And from our own playthrough’s its pretty fun. That new update went live on the website and by the end of the week ill put it out on test flight.

With the completion of teams I completed my short list of to-do’s. What remains are some of the bigger ticket items. From feedback it seems that Ai will be the next major update that will happen, but before I start work on it I’m waiting to speak to the Ai professor at Champlain. So until then, I’m going to focus on a replay system for the game.

Once a game has been completed, players will (hopefully) be able to watch their game. This replay system will become a learning tool for player to examine their moves and see what they could have done differently at any point in time during their past game.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

The Little Things

I’m headed home next week, just worked out that way with the price of airfare. And while I can do some things at home, I cannot build out to iPad, Which limits how much work I can do. So this week I took my giant wish list, looked forward at the future and began to make some plans.

Yesterday was sound day. I created a Sound Manager for Overflow, which will be (like its name implies) solely responsible for the in-game sound. Button click noises and all of that I’m not really worried about. The major hurdle in front of us when it comes to sound design will be how the tiles sound when they cascade.

I built two different methods yesterday that would give unique sound effects to the cascade depending on how long it goes on for, what I’m waiting on now is to coordinate with Griffen Fargo, a good friend of ours who is helping us with that department.

The goal is to hopefully push an update that is sound oriented the week after we get back from break.

But until we then there is some quality of life stuff and some little things I’ve mapped out to work on over the course of this week.

For you hard-core fans who don’t allow take-backs, the undo button can now be removed from the game! It’s on by default, but in the options menu you can turn it off. In addition, all choices made in the options menu will now be remembered. You like playing with the percent bar always on, well good news, turn it on once and it will always be there.

The map editor got some love yesterday as well; you can now draw the tiles on the board! (Before you had to click each tile) it’s a little laggy, but for the most part I think it works well. + When saving your own maps the font size is no longer ginormous. Still don’t know why the font gets bigger on the iPad, but whatever Apple.

Today is dedicated to creating team play! 2v2,3v1,2v1 that kind of thing.

Monday, December 10, 2012

And now we wait

Apple will get back to us sometime this week and until that happens we wait. But there is still plenty to do. Need to get the gameplay video in order, Marguerite is working on that. Looked over our press contact page, updated it and added a few more people who would be more appropriate to contact, beginning to create new marketing material (banners, backgrounds, etc).

And what I did over the weekend was start to shift through my code and try to find more efficient ways to do things. Those of you with an iPad might notice the lag time it takes for a mass number of tiles to flip over in a single move. That is what I am trying to alleviate.

In addition I’m going through and ripping out defunct functions and unused variables that have just been sitting around since I tried this or that. In addition I’m going through and commenting on what some of the functions do or why I did something in a particular way so that down the line I will remember.

I started a giant wish list of things to add to Overflow as well, ill sort it into major and minor in a few days and see if I can start work on some of them. Based on the feedback from testing most people wanted to see AI added to the game first, which would be a major task. I’ve never coded Ai and it’s a scary task, :<

Matt setup a meeting with a professor from Champlain who teaches Ai, so he will hopefully help to get us on the right path.

Friday, December 7, 2012

Gold Master

The deadline kinda crept up on us. Remembered that the contest was a mobile one, which means they somehow need access to the game. The best way to do that if your building an iOS game is to give your promo codes out. Now The only way you can do that is to submit your game to Apple. Good thing we already went through the first round of apple submission, but we still need to update the build.

So today has become the deadline. At noon we will ship it off to apple, and hope it takes them less than a week to approve it. Once approved we can email out enter the Boston Indie Showcase with our game.

Yesterday was a flurry of activity, looking through tester reports, gathering together the bugs, selecting an icon/new symbol.

Matt and I finally!!!! Squashed the undo bugs that began to appear. He ended up taking the wheel and rewriting a good portion of my code for that to be possible. It was all an issue of restoring the state of the selector tiles…. And ended up being and 3 or 4 hour slog, but in the end we won.

I was also able to tackle the tile flipping bug, where tiles would get permanently stuck in mid flip. Simple fix, thank goodness.

Three little things today and that will be it!

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Little Victories!

So yesterday night we held testing at Champlain college. I printed out 30 testing sheets pulled together 5 iPads and thought that we would be fine.

Little did I know that there was going to be 40+ people coming. The turn out was amazing and from the general chatter they were enjoying the game immensely! A few known (and unknown) bugs crept out of the woodwork. More than half dealing with the undo button breaking something… Making it more and more likely that I might just remove it until I can get it to work 100%.

I now need to shift through all the feedback I got back, so busy morning today!

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Testing tonight!

10 days left.

Finished a tutorial that will stand up on its own for a while. Ended up creating a 16x10 board, pre-populated with some enemy tiles so that in the practice mode players can just kind of experiment with the rule set.

In addition a very simple step by step tutorial is at the bottom of the screen, which the player can read through at their leisure. They can also reset the map instantly, so overall it’s a good playground that was not too difficult to create.

Moving on, now we get to more aesthetic stuff. The main screen is changing a bit. Adding some color, some life to it I feel is really important. The background tiles now flip on their own randomly becoming a triangle/diamond/star tile of a random player color.

Was working on menu transitions as well. As of this moment, going between menus is instantaneous. It could look better if menu’s faded in and out as a transition. At the very least the main menu on game start will fade in because I am hoping to get a birnamwoodgame splash screen in there.

Oh! And Testing Tonight @ Champlain College in Huake 008! We were fortunate enough to secure a slot and this will be the first large scale testing of Overflow! So it will be exciting to see some reactions. In addition we will be voting on a game icon as well as a tier 3 symbol ( we need to change it). Why? Because it shares the same qualities as the Star of David, and while we all don’t believe it will be taken out of context (it also looks like a policeman’s badge) being safe is better than being sorry.

So Marguerite has a bunch of other self-similar shapes that fit the same polygon trend we established with the triangle and diamond.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Day 1 of the Tutorial

Gah…

Quickly turned into the nightmare I thought it was going to be. Sat down and tried to create something dumb simple, a tutorial that would force the player to step through the rules 1 by 1.

Created a small, 7x7 board, with a pop up screen that would direct them to click here, and then here, read some instructions, then click here. However, the system was very easy to fool. It was completely automated, with no checks to see what the player was actually doing. And in order to achieve that I would have to really dig into some of the core code and change it, not what you want to do when you have 11 days left.

So we need something different.

Working towards a free play system where the board is prepopulated with “opposing tiles” yet the player is able to play by themselves. Might do a pop up system in the future, but as of now there will be instructional text at the bottom that players can scroll through and read at their leisure that breaks down everything.

What I have learned from this experience thus far is that tutorials are extremely difficult to build. You have to break your own code & force it to basically slow down so that you can explain what is happening. Its really messy and with that looming date, beginning to get stressed. We have to have a tutorial system. End of story. If we cannot communicate our rules and design to allow complete strangers to play, we have basically failed.

Monday, December 3, 2012

2 Weeks and counting…

Getting close, oh boy. I have 12 days to get Overflow into shape, which means this week is all about the tutorial system. Will be mapping it out today.

Thus far I know that it must be a step by step kind of thing, entirely scripted. Big friendly pop ups that tell you what is supposed to happen and all that jazz. Will probably be creating custom super small boards to make it less frightening for people as well.

There is currently a bug with the undo button after a player attempts to undo resetting their stars to 0. So I also need to tackle that.

We have a testing day at Champlain! So come by Wednesday night 8:30 – 10:30, to play some overflow and give us some comments, advice, etc!

Last, but not least, congrats to all of the Champlain Seniors who presented. You all have created some great games, far beyond the scope of any year previous. Good luck on moving forward into 2nd semester.