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 :)

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,

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!

I've been out of the loop again! Apparantly this very cool stuff by Roger Alsing was posted on Slashdot last year. Well I didn't see it, if I had I would have jumped to trying to implement the same thing - it's just so cool. I'm not sure there are any practical uses for it (maybe some texture compression stuff for games?) but it's just such a cool idea.

So, given that I saw it posted on JGO a few days ago, I ran at it and tried to implement the process. A few painful bugs later and I had a command line tool. Since I had the day off I spent some time tidying the whole lot into a GUI based application.

Whats happening here then? First we generate a set of polygons. Next we mutate the polygons (move them about, add some, remove some, change colours). Compare the first set and the new set of polygons to the original image. Choose the one that is closest and mutate again. Repeat. Alot.

Update: Couple more examples using 150 polygons

You can get some pretty cool results with a bit of time. The image above was captured over 2 hours. My version of the GUI tool looks like this:

The tool is available as an executable jar (i.e. you'll need java installed). The source code is also available here in an Eclipse project.

There will of course be bugs and improvements to be done. I might find some time but even if not, a very enjoyable distraction!