Update

While we were at the state house it quickly became apparent that Overflow, on our iPad2, was getting slower and slower after every game I completed. To make sure I wasn't mistaken i quit out of the application and launched it again, and sure enough the game ran better. All this can only mean one thing, a memory leak...

I believe it stems from the online component somewhere, stopping & starting online games, something like that. So that's another project to add to the list of things to do. Running diagnostics like that with Flash is a tricky piece of business. Mike told me that Unity can be run in a diagnostic mode when hooked up to a mac running Xcode, and it will print out what functions are being call.

So we are going to try something in that vein at some point in the future, because currently the game is all kinds of broken. Putting in a new animation system has caused me to reassess how the game code recursively runs the cascade of tiles. So on top of integrating animations I have to debug and make sure that change doesn't create complications in other systems.

Still working on art direction, got a kind of prototype working, basic stuff, which was good. But we are still battling over what the tiles should look like, should we change the symbols? etc. Lots of animation tests to try to predict what something will look like, however it becomes difficult because there are simply so many tiles on the board. The animation might look good alone, but when its surrounded by other tiles, maybe not. Or, will it look good when its repeated several times? Or even in various color shades.

Overall, a lot to think about moving forward. We had tentative deadlines since we are trying to polish the core game up as much as possible for the MassDigi competition in Cambridge that we are attending on March 1st.