Spent a bit more time on the game at lunch time, it's moving towards where I want:

I've switched the orientation of the screen since it gives me more real-estate for text messages. At the bottom you're going to get your stats read out (as shown) and on the right some spells/actions that you can take to get you past certain monsters/encounters.

You can currently move round the dungeon ignoring the monsters. The messages are just test data but it shows how the thing is going to look and of course gives me a chance to try out the display on the phone. I'm wondering whether it might be more sensible to move the messages and UI to the top so you can see it on the phone while you tap away at the dungeon... infact that just makes sense. on more change then :)

Well, life has been a bit interesting for the last 8 months. I've been up and down all over the place. This last week I'm finally feeling back enough to start on... yes... a new game....

It looks like and feels like an old idea I had that I never completed. Reading around I see tiny crawl has done something pretty similar which I'm using for inspiration.. so far just a prototype.

It's using that bit of code I built to abstract between applets in Java2D and Android. The API looks like a very very light slick but allows me to test the game before putting it on the handset without any of the emulator nonsense.

More updates as it goes ahead in my now limited time.

At work I have to provide a progress report. It details what I've achieved and what I'm going to do. Seems to help keep me moving (I dread the idea of filing a progress report that says this week I've mostly achieved nothing) so I thought I'd try it here.

All past game attempts are currently on the cutting room floor. I need to make some cash so I'm gonna try my hand at money making games for a bit. Current plan includes and is probably ordered in priority:

• Finish reviewing 4K games for the contest. These need to be done by next week and I'm only about a third of the way through.
• Do the Slick bug run. I know I know, there are lots of bugs outstanding and I will be getting to them ASAP.
• Start porting some of my mobile creations to Flash with a view to selling them on. Hopefully this will be reasonably easy using Flex and FlashDevelop
• Facebook games, I have a few ideas here and I think I'd like to give them a go. It seems like a place you can make an impact pretty quickly if you get it right and looking around some other indies I can see some extensions to existing ideas that might fit the facebook platform pretty well.
• Finally the circle art game. I have this art farty idea about a game with circles. Thats about all I have but there will be lots of circles. Possibly in different colours. I'm sure it's going to be great :)

Just read on the google blog that a new release of the NDK (release 3) has been made available. The NDK really hasn't been getting the press it deserves but this latest release should be of great interest to games developers.

The new NDK release includes native access to the OpenGL stack for applications targeting Android 2.0 or greater. While you might be forgiven for stepping pass this, because we've had access to OpenGL via Java APIs all along this really is an important step.

One of the problems we've seen with OpenGL and Java in the past is how noisy the API is (lots of calls) and how slow the native interface is. This native layer finally gives Android developers the chance to write high level scene graph APIs to expose to the Java API and then write tight C OpenGL code underneath. This hopefully gives us all the ability to build games that really utilise the hardware on these new android platforms.

Smartphones heh? Apparantly there is a sudden surge in the market and we're all going to be rich! Great. But, um, what exactly is a "Smart" Phone and does everything we currently call Smart Phone really fit the term?

Smartphones.. what have we got?.... we've got 3 serious contenders and a whole lot of cheap but crap alternatives. Blackberry, Android and the ever popular iPhone. So what makes them smart? Outside of the normal "it can do interweb see" and "hey, I can pick up my mail" I think there are a few really SMART things:

1) Applications

One major feature that all the smart phones share, the ability to extend their functionality through 3rd party applications. For quantity of application the clear winner here is iPhone. Astounding! Unfortunately due to Apple's rather draconian approval process it takes a long time from a new web technology becoming provailant to an application actually being available. Android and Blackberry have significant application numbers and their model seems set to make them more desireable platforms in the long run.

Applications are cool, cute and fun. But smart? Not very.

2) Integration

Integrated applications. Now, thats smart. I add one application to my phone and I get one feature. Install another, and I get another feature. Ha! Brilliant. What if when I installed those two applications together they knew about each other, or at least each others features. Maybe they could work together to get me yet more feature(s)!

Integration is key to future technologies. One application builds on another on another. We have a chaotic growth of feature set in which we should be constantly surprised by what our smart phones can do for us!

Unfortunately this isn't really the case for iPhone. The platform doesn't lend itself well to this. Nor does the programming environment. The applications are locked down, intentionally for ease of use but this limits the future possibilities pretty horribly.

3) Aggregation

We have integrated applications, what about integarated data? My mail needs to feed my calendar. Ok, thats basic, and I think phones have been doing that for years before smart phones came along. What about twitter and facebook and . Each new technology/network/fad is going to produce a new set of data. I want the smarts on my phone to aggregate all the incoming data and feed it into my other applications.

I want location based twitters which enter stuff into my calendar and then remind me and the other participants via email, prompting me to take a video of it which will automatically be fed back into the facebook event. Aggregate my inputs phone! Aggregate my outputs! I want it all to work together.

It's all possible, and with the right framework.. well thought out and secure, it's all going to be possible. Unfortunately a locked down platform with the tight constraints isn't going to lend itself that way (read iPhone)

So, what makes your phone smart? What is it doing above and beyond exactly what you told it to? How is it using it's smarts to make your life easier? Does the iPhone really stack up here? Seems more like an mobile gaming and gimmick platform to me? Give me Android! Give me Blackberry! Hell, give me Maemo! Give me a really smart phone!

Many moons ago when I started this blog one of my earliest posts was about joining the gym. That was what, about 6 years ago? The Gym as an activity lasted a sum total of a month. I think my lack of motivation had a little to do with having no real reason to go to the gym. It just seemed like a "good idea" (tm)

A few weeks ago I decided I needed to try again. Today and signed up and took my first session. It was great, I actually feel energised and looking forward to going again. What's different this time? I'm older and have more to gain. First I now have a little girl getting heavier all the time who I have to lift regularly. Seocnd I have a wife who gets more ill every day, there are more things I have to do for her and more of the time I don't seem strong/fit enough.

Finally, I'm far far more vain than I used to be. My beer gut is getting embarrasing and not being able to keep up with a simple game of footie is just sad.

First session, 35 minutes. 5 minutes warm up walking on the tread mill. 15 cardio running. 15 minutes on the weights. Oh, and few minutes "cooling down" which for me means a few stretches, a little bit of walking it off and a hell of lot trying not to vomit.

Here's hoping I last a bit longer this time.

Due to work and random life events (read emotional turmoil!) the past week hasn't really had much in the way of development time for my home projects. I'm still not working on what I should be working on, the space trading game is just too appealing.

The couple of hours I did get the space trader has a new important feature for a trading game... you can trade!

Some more progress today (lunch) and tonight. The status screen is now updated to include a customizeable avatar (built out of pieces) on the status screen:

Mostly today I've worked on the navigation screen which is you'll be travelling the galaxy. It looks like this:

I think it's just on the brink of being too complicated. Using the LCARS GUI system is nice though, it seems really obvious where things should fit together.

The RPG has lost momentum, it's too complicated and I just can't get it right. I'm spending so much time on other things (yesterday Slick til 2am, tonight XMLVM til 11) it's just not going anywhere.

So, I have of course started a new game. It's not much yet but hopefully should be much more simple to develop since I'm basing it on an couple of existing games. Strangely, the new one is space based, not something I ususally go for. It's definitely trading related but I'm not sure really what makes it any different to past games - probably not very much. Still, for your viewing pleasure. A quick in game screen shot showing, well, some text:

And something else I'm playing with, since there will mostly like be lots of crew members to recruit I'm going to need pictures of them.. so a quick avatar building tool with some random resources found online. Yay!

Are you noticing a theme yet? Yes, I'm a big fan.

Fingers crossed this one will get past the prototype to see if it's fun stage!

Well, Android 2.0 is here and along with a bunch of other interesting bits and pieces it brings us multiple resolutions - previously all devices were expected to be the 320x480 resolution (G1, G2, Hero, Pulse etc). However, in the new 2.0 we have the 240x320 (HTC Tattoo) and the 480x800 (Motorola Droid). These resolutions seem great for UIs where the controls generally had plenty of space already. However, they may cause problems for games (as they did with J2ME).

First, we now have to cope with multiple resolutions. While this isn't a big problem it does mean for high quality output you need to create assets for the different variants. This can be time consuming and hence costly. The alternative is to change the game layout based on the resolution (more on this in a moment). The SDK has given us some new tools to manage different sets of drawables for different screen dimensions (which is a step better than J2ME) but this really is an overhead we didn't need in small indie game development. The interesting news is that games written for the standard resoltion are apparantly running and being scaled on the new Droid handset. This is a welcome feature (if it is indeed true) but scaled sprites don't often look great.

So, onto the next alternative, and the important one to me. I'm writing an RPG, it's dungeon based, you might have seen it spammed over everywhere I can get to. The nicest way to adapt to the higher screen resolution would be show more of the dungeon. The game requires you to touch the tiles of the dungeon to have you characters move round. This is similar to many Android games, i.e. you have to touch reasonably small areas on the screen. However, if the resolution grows but the physical screen size doesn't (or not by much) then these touched areas are going to get physically smaller. Unless your fingers are scalable, this is going to be a problem.

So.. what to do? Increase the detail on sprites for the bigger resoltions? Hope the for the best and just let it scale. I sorta wonder if this has really been thought out? The net problem seems to be:

If resolution gets higher, but physical screen size stays the same then the trigger area on the screen will get smaller - and your fingers won't.

EDIT: As a friend points out, another issue with these varying screen sizes is that they're all different aspect ratios. This will make auto-scaling pretty wierd looking. Thin tall dwarfs anyone?