I have started a new game project. It is a twin stick dungeon crawler with procedurally generated levels. I have some basic room designs and basic character movement controls (going to overhaul them but current ones will do for now). Currently working on coding the enemies I have come up with and re-familiarizing myself with A* path-finding.

Goals for this project are:

Procedurally generated levels

Xbox controller and Mouse and keyboard controls

Randomly generated loot

Boss rooms every X floors

Scoring system

Got through a few more tutorials today covering check boxes and radio buttons. The basics are that these are buttons designed for toggle states of off or on. Check boxes allow you to select multiple options while radio buttons only allow one selection per group. But as with other buttons the functionality is all determined by the programmer. Probably the most common use for these types of buttons is to make multiple choice selections, but I see no reason they couldn’t do anything a normal button couldn’t do.

I have been working on a life counter app for the last week or two as a learning exercise and have learned a great deal so far. However I have been learning things in a somewhat random order and parts of the project have been put together with the digital equivalent of duct tape and a prayer. So I have decided to start another “project” of following some tutorials I have found and learning from them. I will be continuing work on the Life Counter but it will not be my main focus. My main focus will be learning android development from the ground up.

One of the reasons I have come to this decision is that I was working on making the dice roller part of the app in to its own activity and I succeeded at this and adding a “up” navigation functionality but discovered that upon returning to the main part of the app the any changes to the life counts was lost and they reset to twenty. If I was working in Unity I could fix this very simply by storing the data in a script I would make in an instantiate scene and then reference in other scenes. But I am unsure of how to fix it in android studio. As such I am going to learn all I can.

I have the bare bones of a Magic life counter app and now I am slowly learning new things to add more features to it. The first thing I am learning is how to use multiple activities so that I can have the Dice roller function be its own screen. This will save screen space and allow me to do fancier things with the Dice Rolling/Coin Flip.

I am also considering starting up some reviews on the blog. Reviews of what? Whatever I want! Web comics, video games, food, tv shows, basically anything I find interesting.

For this last week I have been starting development of my first android app, a simple magic life counter. Last week was lots of frustration as I was learning a new development tool (android studio) and how to code for android apps. Lots of frustration simply getting the system set up so that I could test apps because I wasn’t sure if I had missed a step, had written bad code, or something else. Turns out it was mostly part three with a little bit of part two. I had accidentally deleted a part of the project that I needed and didn’t realize that java functions that communicated with the xml file needed to pass a View variable. With those two problems out of my way I have managed to create the bare bones of my project and am moving on to other parts of app design now that i have the basics.

I only have 4 responses so far but the data I am getting is still interesting. The most wanted features so far are 4-player capacity, customizable UI, Coin flip, and role D20. The least wanted feature is the activity history. Some of the suggested features I am considering are links to a card search database (most likely gather) and keeping track of the added cost of a commander.

I made a quick survey on Survey Monkey about the features that I will implement in my Magic Life counter app. The questions on the survey are: “Have you used a life counter app?” “What method do you use to record your life total?” “Of these features please list them in order of importance to you.” “Would you rather pay up front or have adds on the app?” “Any additional suggestions? Features I haven’t thought of?” And I posted this to a group of friends on Facebook, now to wait and see what result I get.

Today was the last day I am going to be doing any serious work or thinking about my top down shooter game. Tomorrow I am going to put up download links and a description on my website and then I am going to move on to my App project.

So my plan of going out to Cogswell and getting my buddies to play my game didn’t work very well. There were far too many distractions for the tester to focus on my game and the unscheduled nature of it made it difficult to get people to test it.

But even with these difficulties I learned some things. First about my game. I need some instructional text on the main menu for how to play. The auto-fire has a worse feed-back than holding a fire button. I either need to lower player damage or reduce number of projectiles. Delay between death and re-spawn is too long.

Now for what I learned about play-testing. First you need to plan ahead with the people you want to test your game, let them know so that they can be ready and put some time aside for it. Second do the testing in as sterile an environment as possible.

Everything for my game has been put together and I have a build but I have one last step before I consider it to be complete. Balancing. And for balancing I need play-testers. Those that are heavily involved in the development of the game can be some of the worst play-testers for multiple reasons. The first is because they are invested in the project and don’t want anything to change. The second reason is because they know how it works, or at least how it is supposed to work, this means that intentional surprises don’t catch the tester off guard and things that aren’t supposed to be surprises can come in unexpectedly. It also means that an invested tester might overlook something that feels weird or could work better.

The problem is that I need people to test the game. I have a few neighbors that I can have test it but the groups I want to test it have significantly different daily schedules than me and can be unreliable about weekly events we all attend. Tomorrow’s schedule is to try and get those in my neighborhood to try my game and then to see about the groups that gather at Cogswell on Fridays: The Game Development club and Friday Night Magic.