ugggggggg, more tutorials

Testing meeting tonight!

Will be doing an informational meeting @ Champlain in the Hauke 008 Lab for any of those interested. I will be talking about what we are looking for, etc.

Ummmm, so I guess we really should give a build to Apple by Friday. Cannot believe its Wednesday already. In full bug hunting mode at the moment. Pathogen is not yet bullet proof and while playing it may in-explicitly break for no apparent reason. I will be trying to find & squash those.

Matt is going to be creating the in-game tutorial, which is kinda like a flip book of rules. Little animations play on each page, showing the player some core gameplay items.

Originally I just wanted these animations to be done by our artist. She would then hand them off, I would make movie clips out of them and bam, we would have a looping animation.

Forgot that animations require space on a sprite sheet. The artist handed them over & they are all about 100 frames long, with pretty large dimensions, somewhere in the 400x200 range. Which means, in order to use them we would have to make 3 2048x2048 sprite sheets. That would DOUBLE the current amount of sprites in the game.

My fault...

So, what we need to do is re-create the tutorial animations via code. This is pretty difficult however as we would have to clone & adapt the core game code to run these animations.

Getting very tired of tutorials...

Take that Apple!

Finally caught a break with my iPhone 5 issues. Thank goodness...

Apple requires all applications to have a Launch Image, in particular they want to ensure that the iPhone 5 has one. In x-code & Unity these Launch Images are very simple to slot in. However in Flash its a bit more round-about.

The image must be named in a very particular way. For instance the iPhone 5 Launch Image is named: Default-568h@2x.png....

And this is the iPad 3 name: Default@2x-Landscape-ipad

Kinda strange...

We attempted to push to Apple a little while ago, but received this error message:

iPhone 5 Launch Image

Phone 5 Optimization Requirement - Your binary is not optimized for iPhone 5. New iPhone apps and app updates submitted targeting iOS 6 and above must support the 4-inch display on iPhone 5 and   must include a launch image with the -568h size modifier immediately following the <basename> portion of the launch image's filename.  Launch images must be PNG files and located at the top-level of your bundle, or provided within each .lproj folder if you localize your launch images. Learn more about iPhone 5 support and app launch images by reviewing the iOS Human Interface Guidelines and iOS App Programming Guide.

Fun times...

The big problem is that we don't even have an iPhone 5 in the office. Thankfully Thatcher had one and came in to give us a hand.

Sometimes the most frustrating problem is caused by the simplest error. It ended up being a typo: Default-586h@2x.png

Without these Launch Images the device actually cannot give the correct screen height x screen width to the application. Go figure...

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In other news work continues on about a million little polish items that will help make Pathogen shiny.

Working with a publisher is an interesting experience, we check in once a week, sit down Skype chat kinda thing, though Marguerite touches base much more often then that.

We go over the changes & then talk about what else could help strength the game as a whole. Social integration, tweeting from the game, or posting on your wall is something we are currently looking at. In addition to potentially making slight changes to how progression works in the single player campaign.

Script that tutorial

Very dark outside in Burlington today.

After a very active weekend, its back to work.

Matt is back! Yay! He came in & banged out a sound manager with no effort at all. We now have a ambient looping audio track. At the end of all things, we will have a total of 3 that we will cross fade between to give the experience a little more variety.

Tutorial stuff yet again for me. Though it is coming together pretty well I believe. Maybe by the end of the day I'll be able to put it out.

Going on to campus this afternoon to encourage people to attend the informational meeting on Wednesday. The goal is to get a group of kids who can be "on call" for when we need them. First testing session will be on Friday I think.

Wow, end of the month is coming up quick. We set a soft deadline of the 1st week in September for our contest builds for both the French competition & FIG. So we are rushing to get everything all squared away.

Universal Language

Another sunny day in Burlington, weather this weekend is supposed to be up there.

Still working on Achievements today, the framework is complete & I am now putting the hooks into the code to update the achievements as players progress. Working pretty well thus far I believe.


Potentially going down to New York in a few weeks to meet up with the marketing team.

Oh, we were accepted as finalists to this competition: http://strasbourgfestival.com/page/soumettre-jeux.php Which is really awesome. Unfortunately we wont be attending, but its nice to be showcased & once again, you never know what is going to happen.

We were looking at attending this http://storyhackvt.com/ in October, to take a quick break from traditional development & do something new. Stretch some narrative muscle potentially.

If you teach a man to fish...

Summer warm today.

Working on achievements. Using Stickman Sports GameCenter.ANE to hook up with the iOS game center. Functions pretty well, very simple & quick. The only downside is that the documentation hosted on git is terrible. No real additional information about how its used. Caused me to run in circles for an hour or two trying to figure out to how post a completed achievement.

All good now & create the list of basic achievements. Will be working on getting them into the game next.

Matt brought up a good point & highlighted our need for some kind of testing base for the online system. Need to begin recruiting for that, good thing Champlain goes back to school on Monday. I'll be posting on campus for our need & hopefully we can find some testers.

Marguerite made business cards today after Lucy finished the logo designs. Looking good thus far & we will be getting them printed soon.

Rolling

A very nice day to be in Burlington today.

Success yesterday! Built a practice system that allows the player to see the result of the move before they make it. It should help players understand how a move cascades.

A few more polish items have been added as well, its starting to look pretty sharp. Thank goodness for Plants Vs. Zombies 2 for being so good at UI & tutorial systems.

Matt is continuing his advance into online territory. Trying to create the framework for ranking & how all of that information is calculated.

Boston FIG is now T-Minus 25 days...

Teach me how to open a door.

Friction today,

More than just a few conflicting opinions & thoughts. Its a case of the Monday's.

Working on the tutorial, trying to make it as transparent and understandable as possible. Exploring alternative control methods as well. The game is currently driven by taps, but we could do more drag options when moving cells.

Played a lot of Plants Vs. Zombies 2 this weekend which is helping point out what we are missing from the experience.

Matt continues to tackle online. We needed to construct an additional project that will manage the back-end without having to jump onto FLOX & sort through the data. This also give us a control for when we want to expand the online system.

Plenty to do.

9:32 AM

A summery day out again, nice to see that summer hadn't given up.

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And the war with the UI continues. The Game Setup screen has finally been conquered, a major victory! A few accessory screens need to be built today before I attempt to confront the Online Home screen. One step at a time.

Matt is making some awesome progress on the Online Play. After several tough days he got moves to correctly send from one to another. He is setting up the shell of competitive play & the ranking system. We should be able to test this pretty soon.

I need to start looking into creating an Elo Rating system which will be responsible for calculating a players position on the ladder as well as when they can shift between tiers.

Sailing along at a pretty good rate I believe.

Oh, we have been officially accepted to Boston FIG!

Evolutionary

For the past few days I have been solely focused on creating a new UI (User Interface) system for Pathogen. The goal is to create something aesthetically pleasing, unified and easy to navigate.

UI 101

Windows XP

But before we can get into the nitty-gritty, some of you may not know what I'm talking about. So lets look at some examples. These images on the right are all everyday UI systems.

So I guess a definition of a UI system is that it is: An organizational structure that allows the user to navigate from one element to another.

Creating UI

Star Wars DVD

So how do you go about trying to create a UI system?

The first thing we do is ask what does the screen needs to be able to service. If you look at the Star Wars DVD example it services four functions:

1. Play Movie: Allow the user to player the film
2. Chapters: Allow the user to "fast forward" their content
3. Options: Allow the user to access handy utilities like Languages & subtitles

Sketch_01

4. Special Features: Allow the user to view additional material about the film.

So we do the same thing, list out what the Main screen of Pathogen needs to handle:

1. Campaign: Access the Campaign/single player mode.
2. Online Play: Access the Online Hub
3. Local Play: Navigate to Game Setup
4. Map Editor: Access the editor
5. Map Browser: Access the online workshop of user created maps

Sketch_02

6. Game Center: Allow users to login/out & check achievements
7. Options: Utility for managing sound & credits.

Once we list out everything we know that a screen needs to handle its time to start creating mock-ups. I begin simply on paper, sketching out how the screens could layout. From there we translate the sketches into a mock'ed up version of what it could look like on device.

In general we try a bunch of different designs to see what works, what doesn't & evolve from there.

The Results
After several hours and without too much bloodshed we decided on this design.

It worked for several reasons:

1. Its familiar.
2. Simple to navigate
3. non-obtrusive.
4. This standard worked well across a wide variety of additional screens *this was key.

 The Game Setup screen has been a thorn in our side for a long while. It must convey an incredible amount of information, while remaining easy to navigate.

The new standard allows the Game Setup screen to mimic a online-check out process. This familiar interface will help easy new players into the game.



Why change?

 Our old menu, while interestingly unique, was flawed. It could only hold three elements and maintain our concerns for ease of navigation and a pleasing aesthetic. 

As we added more elements (online, map browser, etc) the visual space got crowded and it became harder to navigate. This design was also so unique that we could not incorporate its design into any of our other screens such as the Game Setup.

Our original Game Setup menu crammed all of the necessary information into a single screen. Which meant that advanced user could change any element of play quickly.

However we found that our new users had trouble navigating it and we we often asked, How do i change my player color?

Often if a user made a mistake they would exit the screen entirely and then re-enter so they could be prompted for their selections.

 History

But this wasn't our first rodeo. The UI in Pathogen has evolved several times. Here is a look back on Pathogen's development as told through the UI.

March 2013

March 2013

January 2013

January 2013

December 2012

December 2012

November 2012

November 2012

Heavy Duty

Warmer than I thought it was going to be when I looked out the window this morning.

Matt is back! Time to buckle down and get to work. Boston FIG is roughly a month from today & we could be potentially launching two months from now.

Sat down this morning and had a good company meeting about general stuff as well as Pathogen's development. From that we identified the most important aspects that deserve our time and how to split them up. UI design is my life for the next few weeks as we decided on how we want to unify everything, while Matt is headed towards the dream of ranked online games.

On the social side of things, we bought our domain for Pathogen which will have its own little site that we push people towards. Mike is going to be stepping up our twitter/facebook campaign to help garner interest.

Listening To: As if to Prove a Point by Grouse
Reading: Double Dexter by Jeff Lindsey
Watching: Nikita

Rain rain go away...

 Come Again another day...

UI design today, or at least this morning for a little while. Pathogen currently suffers from inconsistent UI. Every screen is laid out in a different way and I really want to unify it. This was sparked when Marguerite and I started talking about the beginning of the online hub.

That is going to potentially be a pretty large change.

On the positive side, yesterday I did get the game to port out to iPhone4 successfully. Which was very cool. Ran a little slow, but that is because its importing in assets meant for the iPad & scaling them down (rather expensive). We could conceivably take our current assets and scale everything down to the size they need to be on the ipad and load those in instead.

Went to UVM this morning as well to speak to a bunch of kids at a Tech camp who are learning Ruby/HTML. We spoke about game development, showed them Pathogen & a brief glimpse at Flash. We came in to basically tell them that the skills they are developing can easily be used to create games especially with their current coding experience.

Still a little worried about performance when someone plays for an extended period of time in the campaign. The game appears to slow down & I cannot figure out why.... Not having a 64 bit system (for Scout) & using Flash Builder 4.6 is not helping either.

The Mountain just got a little bigger.

Stormy morning without any rain, hopefully it won't on my way home.

Yesterday we took a field trip down to Concord NH to meet with our publishing contact. Roughly half way for both of us and we ended up eating at a nice play on the Concord Boardwalk, neat little town. Kinda strangely laid out, but warmer down there than in Vermont.

We had a great conversation about the future of Pathogen. Now we have plenty to get done, oh boy.

Lots of planning this morning about the nature and scope of Online. Thank you Starcraft/Bnet for being a great role model in what we need to accomplish. Tomorrow will be UI design day so we can get off and running with it next week when Matt gets back.

I am working on trying to get the game to deploy to iPhone 4s, a brand new challenge I had avoided confronting for a very long time. Thankfully it's very easy to deploy to thanks to Flash Builder and the efficiency work I did in the past might make this possible.

Boston FIG seems to be THE moment for us. Its going to be so huge... and there are so many other good developers there. Oh boy, so much to do.

Navigation

Getting fallish here, cool enough for jeans.

Been on a roll with Pathogen, starting to look very professional/polished with those animations finally in & working. Stabilized the build this morning and planning on pushing to Test-Flight here in a few.

Matt grabbed the animation changes and rolled with them, updating the Online portion of things as well which is awesome. 

Apple build is the focus for the end of the week, maybe sooner. Really need to play through the campaign again the ensure everything is ok.

Meeting with our publishing contact tonight to touch base and start charting the course further down-stream. Boston FIG is looking to be our spotlight and we are trying to think/account for everything.

Flash lost some points last week...

Ah ha! After a very long week I finally found the root of our issue when exporting from Flash.

Flash has trouble creating a 1 to 1 conversion into Bitmap if the exported Movieclip has any Filters on it. If a filter exists, such as BLUR or GLOW the effect does not translate well from Vector into Pixels, they end up taking up more space per pixel than vector does.

Here is a visual demonstration. 
This is the exported image from Flash. Note that 1. it is a lot bigger, 2. that it is not centered.These are two important factors in game development.

Size costs. The larger an asset is the more space it takes up on our sprite sheets. The more sprite sheets we have the slower the game runes.

The center point is very valuable in Pathogens case because so many of our animations are rotated to services all of our possible animation needs. If an asset is centered its much easier to identify the center point via code. center point == object.width/2 & object.height/2.

So how did we end up with the bottom result?

Well, we turned to a third party program called Kurst which captures the data of a .SWF and prints them out as PNG's. Its basically like taking a screen shot of every frame of the animation while its playing.

Animations are finally looking good in engine as a result. Sibyl is giving the rest of the colors to me today, had her only export out Green so I could figure out the issues, so by the end of the week we should have a build that is all good to go.

Ugg

Biked home in the rain yesterday & its threatening to do so again later today.

Its been a nightmare of code/art for the past two days as I attempt to get these new assets in. The ultimate goal is to switch between multiple animations without any of the popping issues you experience currently in Pathogen.

This has become far harder than first imagined. Assets are not exporting correctly, pivot points are offset and the result is not even close to what I'm looking for.

I think the ultimate answer is to flip the table and just re-write the whole animation system...