Some of My Favorite Games

I don't have much to talk about development wise, so I thought I would write about a couple Android games that I've particularly enjoyed.

Cartoon Wars is a pretty awesome tower defense type game. Basically you just send out waves of your various stick figure warriors to fight against comic book looking monsters. Its a tug-of-war until one team destroys the tower at the other team's end. Your different unit types can be upgraded to deal with the harder levels and more challenging enemy monsters. Some games become such a back and forth fight that they end up lasting 15 minutes or more, which is rough because you only have 20 minutes to destroy the enemy tower or you lose. All in all, its a solid tower defense game that is definitely worth a play.

A game that I've recently started playing is Temple Run. In this game your character has stolen a treasure from an ancient temple and is now in the process of fleeing as they are chased by some sort of vicious ape creatures. The game involves swiping the screen in different directions to turn corners, jump over or slide under obstacles. It also uses the device's accelerometers to strafe back and forth on the track you are running on. If you think about it, this game is played a lot like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero for your phone, but instead of pushing one of the 4 buttons in time with music, you swipe in the correct direction to jump over a pit or slide under a fire spitting statue. When you add in the "Temple of Doom" style setting, you feel more like you are a fast paced Pitfall or even a Tomb Raider type game. At first I felt the game was too repetitive, but it quickly grew on me and the upgrades you can buy with the gold you collect while playing keep me coming back to try get better power-ups.

Music and Achievements

Still haven't been working on anything terribly exciting, but we have had a couple cool developments. First of all, Andrew has made some music for color coder and for two of our other puzzle games in development. They all sound really good and he has made them so they loop really well. Now that Color Coder has music in it, there's not much else left to do before we release a new update with Scoreloop in it.

Speaking of Scoreloop, I've been playing around with achievements in a different game. The Scoreloop achievement setup is actually pretty cool. Right now I have a couple of them set up so that they are earned simply by playing games. For example, one achievement is awarded when the player has played 100 games and on the Scoreloop award page it has a progress bar that fills up the more you play. When you do manage to earn it, a little popup will appear on the screen to inform you of the achievement. It is pretty cool, and I'll definitely be using it more in the future.

More Documenting and More IDEs

Haven't been working on any projects as of late. I finished inline documentation of my second project and have moved on to the third. The third one is my biggest project to date, so it is going to take a while to get it all commented. Luckily, I already commented some of the major parts of it while I was coding it, so that is nice. I'm pretty happy with the inline comments so far. I can easily give it a quick read and right away understand what is going on, which is pretty much the only goal of commenting.

In addition, I've also been trying to get the Eclipse IDE installed on my laptop, which has been a time consuming pain. It has been problematic for two main reasons: 1) My laptop is like 5 or 6 years old and 2) Eclipse is still a pain to get installed. At one point I was using the SDK Manager to get things updated and it kept stopping at a certain point saying that it couldn't update a folder because it was in use. After trying for a while to figure out what other programs I had running and close them down to free up the folder, I came to find out that the SDK Manager itself was what was using the folder. Several hours later, I got everything sorted (for the most part) and Eclipse is now useable on my laptop, although I still need to get some things with AndEngine set up on there as well if I want to play around with that at all.

Inline Documentation and a New IDE

It hasn't been an exciting couple of days for my development projects. I decided that I've been working on so many different projects recently that it was probably a good idea to take a step back and actually get them documented. I commented all the activities involved in Color Coder. Previously it was just the main game activity that was commented. Then I started in on a couple other activities from other games I'm working on. I've still got a lot to go. I think it is a smart idea to comment all this stuff now while I remember it, just in case I come back to it later for upgrades or additions I'll be able to tell what I was doing when I first wrote it.

In addition to the commenting, I decided it would probably be good to upgrade my Eclipse IDE. I was using Galileo before, but after today I'm using Indigo, which is presumably better. I don't see that much of a difference though. The layout is pretty much the same but LogCat is a little bit different looking. I've also seen a couple changes to some of the drop down menus, but overall it seems to work out the same. Still it seems like it'll probably be worth it. I did run in to some issues though. I used the same workspace that I was previously using, which I guess can cause some problems. Long story short, it broke several of my projects. Luckily I remembered to back my projects up right before I set up the new IDE and fixing them was just a simple matter of replacing them with the backups. Of course Scoreloop gave me a bunch of issues and that took me a while to get figured, but it all ended up working out all right.

Now I'll probably be back to commenting for the next couple days. Its a little tedious and boring but having good inline documentation is always a good idea. Can't say I'm looking forward to it though. I have three more projects I need to get commented, so this could take a while.

Carnival Game Menus

Yesterday I added a couple menus to my carnival game that have really improved its playability. First, I added a large start button to the game when it first starts. Clicking it removes the button and, obviously, starts the game. Before, the game just started when the activity loaded up and the player really had no time to get ready. Now they can start the game when they please. The second menu addition I've made is a Reset/Quit menu that pops up when you click the back or menu buttons when the game is active. The options do exactly what they say. The reset button simply restarts the game, bringing up the start button again, and setting the game back up to be played. The quit option brings the user back to the game select screen.

Next I plan to start doing some high score saving. I don't expect the saving part to be hard, but I also want a menu type screen to pop up telling people what their end score was and if it is a new high score or not. I also want to display those high scores somewhere on the game selection screen. I'm not really sure where to put those scores though. I'll be playing around with that a bit, trying to determine the best place to put those scores. Then its on to the settings page, help page, and a main menu page where you get access to all these things.

The 4th Mini-Game

Didn't really work on anything yesterday. Somewhere nearby there was a car accident and one of the vehicles ended up hitting a power pole, apparently causing it to catch on fire, so I had no power for several hours yesterday. Prior to and following the power outage I didn't really work on anything worth mentioning. The day before, however, I managed to complete the fourth and, for now, final mini-game of my carnival game pack.

The new mini-game is a whack-a-mole game that I have called "Tap-A-Mole". It turned out really well and its actually a lot more fun than I thought it would be. The screen consists of a series of mole hills. Every second, moles randomly pop up from the mole hills, pause for a bit, then duck back into their holes. If the player touches a mole, it is replaced with a colorful flashing star to show that they touched it, and the player is awarded 10 points. If the mole manages to duck back into their hole without being tapped, a chat bubble saying "Missed Me!" appears over the whole. The player has 60 seconds to tap as many moles as they can. In easy mode, two moles pop up every second. In hard mode, 3 moles pop up every second, and they pause for a shorter time before ducking back into their holes. Since the games last for 60 seconds and hard mode pops up three moles a second instead of easy mode's two, it is possible to get a higher score in hard mode than in easy mode.

Now that this mini-game is pretty much finished, I need to start working on some of the more basic stuff: reset menus, high score displays, a settings page, etc. I'll be working on that and my maze game on and off.