As THE OCTOBER GAME nears completion, it’s all debugging and cleanup. It can be both tedious and frustrating working on the same codebase for so long. I’ve mentioned before the little side-projects I work on. But there’s another kind of … Continue reading →
My third attempt at a level editor for THE OCTOBER GAME succeeded, but not how I expected. As I mentioned last time, the game was feature complete including scaffolding like the Top Scores and Help screens. I’d found creating levels by hand to … Continue reading →
My second attempt at a level editor for THE OCTOBER GAME was a useful failure. A few months after my last effort, I wanted to try a new method of app development. Previously, I tended to write code in a … Continue reading →
My first attempt at a level editor for THE OCTOBER GAME was an instructive failure. Writing code is fun and this leads me to jump into projects, then drown in rising complexity. To counteract this, I try the simplest thing … Continue reading →
Early on, I decided the THE OCTOBER GAME would have designed levels rather than random ones. That decision led to significant complexity, here’s how: The core of the game is simple, the player jumps up to hit enemies flying across … Continue reading →
What came before At the end of last month, I transplanted THE OCTOBER GAME to a fresh app template. For the next week, I fixed lots of niggling little bugs, did more code cleanup, then another round of tweaking artwork. … Continue reading →
After regenerating all the art assets, it was time to move THE OCTOBER GAME core to a fresh app template. The game architecture had changed over the months, leaving the project with lots of cruft. Classes had unused methods, or had been superseded. Many, many obsolete variations of artwork and sounds were cluttering up the [...]
At the end of October I started on a sprint to regenerate and rework all the game artwork. Partly to upgrade to Retina resolution and partly to match the character art more closely to the user interface style. Less retro pixels & more children’s book illustration. I estimated about 100 items of work that would [...]
I listen to the Merlin Mann podcast Back To Work. One topic was Getting Unstuck (time 1:18:00 to 1:20:15). I recognized some areas where I’ve made progress. Let me show you them. Too many options I list options on paper to take them out of my head. Then I quickly prioritize them. After about an [...]
Last week I finished a long-overdue upgrade to Lion, Xcode 4 and the latest cocos2d. After I got THE OCTOBER GAME running again, I turned to updating the artwork that I talked about last time. The work wasn’t hard, but I just couldn’t bring myself to focus on it. I think I’d worn a dent [...]
