The Making of Color Coder

Now that we've recently released a new Color Coder update, I thought it might be cool to show some images that depict the evolution of the game from concept to finished product.

 

First up we have a picture of one of the pages out of my notebook with sketches of the game page layout and the game's logo, along with some notes about the game play itself.

 

 Next we have a couple screen shots from a very early version of the game's main menu and game pages. Notice the simplistic cell graphics used for initial game testing. The game also lacks any settings at this point, and therefore lacks a settings button on the main page as well. I believe at this point I was testing to see where the game was picking it's starting locations for the code, and so the "Codes Completed" info is a bit weird. At this point in development, the game actually lasted 3 minutes (180 seconds) instead of 60 seconds.

 

Later, we see the addition of the setting button on the main screen, and the classic cell images that are currently being used. However, there is still no clear or hint button.

Next we get the addition of the hint button the game page as well as the classic colored background. We also have our Egyptian cell images, but no Egyptian background yet.

 

 

After our initial release of our first version, we got a lot of feedback that there needed to be a clear button for if the player screwed up a code. I had originally intended to have the player touch a cell away from the code to start a new one, and then touch back in the area where the code is to begin again (which you can still do) but the suggestion to add a clear button as well was a good one and we added it for the next release. We also released our Christmas version of the game.

 

At this point we put new backgrounds in for the different themes we offered in the full version.

Then we decided to finally get rid of the default android buttons and replace them with our own button images.

Then, we increased the size of the game page buttons in the full version of the game. Finally, we added Scoreloop to the game, centered everything on the screen, and put in some background music by Andrew Bragg.

 

And there you go. That's how it all came about in to the product we have on the market today.

Color Coder Update

The work I've done with Scoreloop might actually start to pay off now. We've released a new update of Color Coder that includes Scoreloop global leaderboards and some new background music by Andrew Bragg.

Check it out:
 

There is a submission process on the Scoreloop end as well. I'm not really sure what it entails, but I made the mistake of submitting it on a Friday afternoon, and with time difference between me and the Scoreloop HQ, they were already gone for the weekend, so I have to wait until they come in to work on Monday to actually have them check it out. Even then it may take a couple days for them to get around to checking it out or what ever they do. So for now I just need to wait it out. After that I'm hoping Scoreloop users may take notice of the game. It would be really cool to start getting a bunch of users posting scores on the leaderboards, but we'll see.

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.

Lite Versions of Color Coder

So pretty much all the work I did yesterday was getting the Lite versions of Color Coder ready for an update. This entailed getting the content centered on the screen, adding Scoreloop, setting up music, and changing game sounds over from MediaPlayer to SoundPool. It was all pretty easy but also very tedious and time consuming, especially since there were two Lite versions I needed to update.

I added Scoreloop to the Lite versions and they share the same leader boards as the Full version. This means that people with either of the Lite versions can put their scores up on the Classic mode leader boards, but not the Time Trial one.

I asked the Scoreloop support staff about the possibility of not showing the info that was irrelevant to the game mode (like I mentioned in an earlier post) but apparently that isn't currently an implemented feature. The good news is that there is already an "enhancement request" for that feature, so hopefully they will be adding it soon. I don't know when that request was added to their queue or how fast they add requested features, but this seems like a problem that would be fairly common so maybe they will get to it pretty soon. I hope they do at least because I plan to have several more games with similar modes and it going to get pretty annoying if all their leader boards look like that.

A New Game

I'm pretty much done coding Color Coder and my puzzle game so I've started working on a new game in the last couple days. Well, it's a new Android game. It's a conversion of the Zombie Maze game I worked on when I was playing around with OpenGL. You can see a video of that project HERE. I have a lot of the basic code done already from that project, so this new project has been going very well. There are only a couple conversion issues that have been hard to deal with switching from OpenGL C++ to AndEngine Java. With the OpenGL I did all the collision detection myself, and now I can handle it with AndEngine. This sounds like it would be way easier, but it has actually left me with a couple of problems to work through. For example, with the OpenGL project, the walls were all individual, but with the Android project, the walls were all a single image so they couldn't be differentiated. The solution I came up with was to use the AndEngine Line class to outline all the walls and then detect collisions with those instead of the wall pictures.

Right now the game is actually a tiny bit playable. I've added an AndEngine control that looks a bit like a thumb stick and that moves around the player. Eight zombies randomly spawn, each in one of 16 predetermined spawn points. When the game starts, the zombies move through the maze towards the player. When a zombie reaches the player and makes contact, the zombie dies, and the player takes a point in damage. If the player takes 4 hits, they also die. The zombie movements are the extremely simple for now. If the player is above the zombie, the zombie moves up. If the player is below the zombie, the zombie moves down. Same deal with left and right. I'll be making the movement stuff better like it was the OpenGL version. That way the zombies negotiate around walls instead of just stopping at them if they are lined up with the player. I'm going to take this opportunity to clean it up a bit from the way it was in old version. A lot of my work today was creating a hero class and a zombie class, and then the different playable characters will inherit from the hero class.

I'm going to start with just the first character, get the game all working with that, then make the rest of the characters. Getting the game working means I need to add projectiles and weapons, zombie respawning, at least 2 more maps, and a few smaller things like player/zombie animations depending on what direction they are moving, etc. But the next thing I'll be working on is the better zombie movements.

Leaderboards Working

The Scoreloop leaderboards are working. After tinkering with them for about a week, they are finally showing codes found for Classic Easy and Hard modes, and times for Time Trial mode. The only issue now is that the scores for both modes show on the leaderboards, so instead of a score for Classic Easy mode showing as "12" it shows up as "12 00:00.00" and instead of a Time Trial mode time showing up as "01:02.34" it shows up as "0 01:02.34". It isn't the worst of problems, and it is barely noticeable for the Time Trial leaderboard since it is a single additional character. For the Classic modes, it is a little bit more annoying since it is actually 8 characters of meaningless information. I asked about showing just the relevant info for different leaderboards on the support "forums" on the Scoreloop website. The reply I got from the support staff was that they weren't even sure if it was possible to show only the time for Time Trial and only the score for Classic modes. While it isn't a big deal, and I'm actually quite happy with how it is currently working, I find it a bit odd that they don't already support this option. It's hard to believe that I'm the only one that wants to have a time leaderboard and a score leaderboard in the same game. The new game that I'm working on has both of those modes as well, so apparently, not only am I the only one who wants both mode types in the same game, I've also made two games that use them.

I'm going to have something similar going on with a new game I'm thinking up. It'll have like a speed run mode where you try to beat it as fast as you can, but also a survival mode where you try to stay alive as long as you can. The problem here is that one of leaderboards will be ascending and the other descending. It can be done with Scoreloop, but it will look terrible on the leaderboard. Something like "00:00.00 01:23.45" or "01:23.45 00:00.00", which isn't the best look. Again, I'm just surprised that Scoreloop, which has gotten pretty huge in mobile gaming, hasn't accounted for this kind of stuff already. It seems like making it so it doesn't show up if the score was set to null or something would work out nicely, but they haven't done anything like that apparently so I'm out of luck in that department for now.

Music, Sounds, and Waiting

I'm hoping that it won't take many more back and forth posts on Scoreloop's support discussions before everything is set up. I feel like I'm close enough that the problem will be solved in one or two more replies. I kinda got my hopes up today, thinking that the final reply post that solves my leader board issues once and for all might be on the board when I woke up. Unfortunately, I forgot it is now the weekend and Scoreloop support team members probably don't spend their time replying to help messages on their days off. So, now I just have to wait a little longer. Here's hoping that I get the leader boards fully working on Monday or Tuesday.

I've got the music in my new game working just as well as the "music" in Color Coder. I ended up going with a background service so that I can keep the music going across all my activities (or different screens) without it restarting every time. As a result of using a service, the music is just being played with the Android MediaPlayer stuff, instead of something Android specific, but it seems to be working out well in my current play testing. When I was trying to understand services better, I saw a couple topics on programming support forums like stackoverflow.com where people asked for help with services and then people replied saying to avoid using them. The only thing is, nobody seems to explain why services should be avoided, and when I even attempted to look up why services might be bad or their pros and cons, I didn't find anything that described them negatively at all. As far as I can tell, most people just tend to steer clear because they can get complicated and a lot of people that use them don't understand their life-cycles or something. The background music that I've been doing with them isn't that complicated though, and I'm not attempting to do any complex data management or anything in a background service, so I think I'll be fine. If I come across an explanation to why services or bad, or somebody manages to convince me of a better way of doing things, I'll likely go back and reformat the code for my music playing, but for now it is working out quite well.

Oh, I also went back and switched the sound effects in Color Coder to being played with SoundPool instead of MediaPlayer. When I initially added the sound effects in I didn't really understand the difference between the two. I looked into it a bit more and it turns out that SoundPool is the better choice for short little clips (like the cell selection sound) while MediaPlayer is better for playing longer sound files, like music. So, I switched it all out and boom: my sound effects work better. Sometimes before they weren't playing in a way that felt very responsive. If you clicked cells too fast you would only hear 2 animations when you had clearly tapped 3 or 4 cells. Now (as far as I can tell) you get a sound for every tap, so I'm pretty happy with that. The sound only playing once or twice for 3 or 4 cell selections was one of my pet peeves in Color Coder.

Color Coder Upgrades

So lately I've been focusing primarily on adding new stuff to Color Coder. Still sorting out the Scoreloop issues, but I'm close to resolving them. Contrary to what I said in an earlier post, the Scoreloop support "forums" have been pretty helpful. I've been getting tips from a member of the support staff and that has been nice. I'm pretty sure that we are in way different time zones. Scoreloop is based in Germany and while that doesn't necessarily mean the support staff is from there, I think its a pretty safe bet that they are, and so all my posted questions get answered while I'm asleep. So, I pretty much get a single reply a day. As such, trying the tips I get in those replies has been a pretty slow process. Attempt the solution they describe, it helps but doesn't fully solve the problem, post what the outcome is and what I still need it to do, wait until the next day when I have another reply. Hopefully the next time I add Scoreloop to a game it will be much easier because of this experience, but that would be too easy, so I will probably run in to just as many new problems next time.

I've also been getting music set up in Color Coder. It was actually a little more complicated than I thought it would be, but I have it all working now. It turns off when you hit the home button and doesn't restart when you switch activities. Right now the "music" isn't really music, but actually the game over sound playing on a loop. It will all be good to go when there is an actual music file to play. As a result of adding music to the game, I've also added a music on/off radio button toggle to the settings page. Because of that addition I rearranged the specific sound check boxes to be a 2x2 setup instead of a 4x1 arrangement. This has the additional benefit of giving me some room on the setting page to put a "more games" button in the future. The space isn't really a problem on the full version, but on the Lite versions of the game there isn't much room with the ad on it.

More Leaderboard Stuff

Haven't been working on much code. I messed with the main menu of Color Coder a bit. I played with the spacing between buttons and added a nice looking Scoreloop one to get to that information. Still trying to get the Time Trial leader board working since the other two are good to go. The Scoreloop documentation makes it look like what I want to do is, in fact, doable. I just can't figure out how to do it. I also can't tell if it is possible to have an ascending leader board in the same game as a descending one (which I need). I can't be the only one who wants both types of leader boards in a game, so you would think it would be an option, but I have no idea how to set it up on the Scoreloop website. Then again, their controls for developers aren't terribly user friendly and when you click the little "i" information image next to stuff, it barely tells you anything helpful.

I posted a discussion on the Scoreloop support "forums" so now I just need to wait for it to be answered. This, however, could potentially be a while, so I will have to find something to work on in the meantime. I think it'll be trying to get the music in my new game working better. Right now it restarts the music every time you switch activities. Its fine once you get to the game page, but no good everywhere else. So, I'm going to try and get that all sorted out.

On a side note, I beat my high scores for both Color Coder classic modes with 14 on hard and a sweet 18 on easy, so that's pretty cool.

More Commenting and Scoreloop

So the work I've done in the last couple days has mostly been commenting and working with Scoreloop. My main game activity is commented really well (in my opinion), possibly too much in some places. I still have 5 other activities to comment, but they are much smaller and shouldn't be a problem.

I've also started integrating Scoreloop in to Color Coder. So far I have a working leader board for classic easy mode, but I need to make two more for classic hard mode and time trial mode. Scoreloop was pretty easy to integrate since they have some pretty good documentation that comes with the APK download, but their support "forums" are a bit lack luster. If you post a topic asking for help, it first has to be approved from moderation. Then you have to wait for a variable amount of time, up to 4 days that I've seen, to get any response from a member of the support team. As there are only 4 of them I can imagine that they get overwhelmed from time to time.

Regardless, I've got it set up so there is a leader board for classic mode of Color Coder. You can only have a single score on the boards and if you submit a score lower than your current score on the boards, it doesn't get updated. It seems weird to not just put all your scores up there since I'm used to Arcade style leader boards where one person can flood the screen if they are good enough. This setup makes more sense though, especially since I expect that most of the people on the top scores list to have the same score, at least on Classic Easy and Hard modes. On Time Trial I think there will be a bit more separation. Now I just need to get the other two leader boards set up and get a new button image on the main screen for Scoreloop stuff. Otherwise, Color Coder is pretty much set up for an update including Scoreloop leader boards, hopefully in the next week.

Tweaks and Commenting

Today has been pretty boring so this will be a short post. The only thing I did to the game was altering the position of some text so that it is better centered and such. I've also been doing inline comments to better document the code, but there is still a lot to do there so it will take quite a bit more time. The game is almost done and up until this point I haven't been taking a whole lot of time to any inline commenting so I need to get that going before I forget why I did certain things.

New Posts and New Games

I don't quite expect anybody to read this, so I suppose it will act more as a journal of my game development progress than anything else. I've been playing around with java and working on mobile games for the Android platform. Prior to starting work on Android apps I had no experience with Java, but had a strong background in C++, so the biggest problem has been getting used to the new syntax.

I started by making a couple games with basic Android layouts and image views. Little puzzle games that didn't involve anything fancy, but were fun to play and worked pretty well. With the help of my friend Tia working on the graphics for the games, they turned out pretty nice. My first game, Color Coder, is in the Android Market.

I've since moved on to working with AndEngine in the hopes of making more complicated and visually better games, using crazy new inventions like moving, animated sprites. AndEngine is a great resource for people like me, that enjoy working on things such as game logic, but very much dislike working on low level things like getting sprites to animate properly or having them react to gravity.

The current game I'm working on is a bit like Bejeweled in the fact that tiles will fall and chain with each other in a similar manner, but the game is played in a way that is different enough to set it apart from Bejeweled clones. Its working for the most part as of this post, but I have yet to add scoring or a timer, so right now its an infinite play game with now points. Games don't have a point if they don't have points, so I'll be adding a scoring system later today. The game also isn't much visually since it is currently comprised of sprites and backgrounds made using my awesome MS Paint skills, but the sprites are good enough to tell what you are doing until I can replace them with good looking images. I've already pseudo-coded most of the scoring algorithm, so it should be pretty smooth to add it, and once I put a timer in the game, it will be fully playable though subject to future tweaks.

I'm feeling pretty excited about this game, and really looking forward to working more with AndEngine.