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?

Been working on a some random stuff tonight, not what I should have been working on really.. but a nice bit of relaxation. Yore is going to have an overall story line that leads the player through a non-linear list of quests, hence it'll need an overworld map. Here it is:

Normally I hell of a time generating anything that looks reasonable as a land mass. All the tools I've found in the past have been either too complicated or a pain to work with. This time, after searching again, I ran into the Greenfish Relief Map Generator. It's really a great simple tool and after a bit of GIMP editing I got basically what I was looking for.

This is a little turn based RPG/Adventure I'm working on for Android eventually. It also runs as an Applet. At the moment there's just a bit of combat and some small scripted pieces. I've been trying to write this game for about 4 months now and this is the 5th iteration. Not sure if it's any better or worse but this is the first time it's felt slightly playable.

For this interation there's a little level designer and some XML based scripting. I'm hoping I can build the scripting into something that I can tell a nice fantasy story with. As you can tell I'm not entirely sure where I'm going but so far it's been good fun getting here.

The game is playable online as an Applet

It's also available for Android handsets (only support for 320x480 res).

I'm aware of a couple of bugs and expect a bunch of typos. However, I'd really appreciate knowing it works on various browser and/or handsets. Also ideas on how to extend and improve it. Currently the turns feel a little broken up and it's easy to get your characters in situation where they're getting pounding with no support.

Of course, any feedback is appreciated,

My little monkey/girl Megan is three today! It doesn't seem like that long ago we were in the states worrying about how the health care works and hoping that we'd be able to cope. She's grown into a lovely little girl with bags of energy and personality. Friday she had her birthday at Nursery, Yesterday we went to Bristol Zoo, and today is a birthday tea! Next week, off to Grandma's for another one. One very lucky little monkey:

Having a blog is a wonderful thing at times like this, especially one that existed before she did. Looking back over her life we have:

When she was just a scan
The one when she was one
Then she reached two

For those who have been reading all that time, thanks! And sorry if you're getting a bit bored by now ;) On, for another lovely year with my little star.

A couple more variants..

If you use just rectangles, it doesn't work out well


Mixing ellipses, rectangles and polygons gives the best results yet at only 500k generations.

Shannon commented on the last post, why don't we use circles instead of polygons on the generation stuff. What a fantastic idea? I swapped Ellipses for Cirlces (to leave more room for mutation) and update the tool, results:

How cool is that? Now I'm starting to wonder what about mixing the shapes and allowing shapes to mutate between each other? What other shapes are there to reduce data, rectangles next?

What a fantastic comment and idea!