General

Scratch N Score Another game ‘rolled’ out to the eval group (pardon the pun). Since the process was never truly explained, and because it’s pretty self-explanatory, that’s where a game goes to live or die.. Does it feel like it has a home on the table? And is it good enough. My biggest fear is that that same eval team is going to come back one day and say, nah, we don’t think this fits. Normally that would be fine and dandy, except for the fact that I don’t publish anywhere else now. It’s just not worth it.  One of my big things with all the major stores is the tremendous amount of shovelware and reskins, hundreds of thousands of identical games with different names, and at least 60-70% of it is trash. Sure, there are some gems out there, but you have to shovel through bad to find the good. One of the things I love about the platform I develop for is generally, most of the games are higher quality stuff that feels like it belongs there. Ok, there’s a couple that probably shouldn’t have made it, but hey… 😉 So I do my damndest to make sure my stuff is at least a couple notches above average. They may not be perfect, but I do my best to polish the hell out of them and I try to avoid using and of the thousands of prebuilt templates out there. This weekend I finally finished up and pushed out Scratch N Score to the eval group. Yes, it’s a clone, but it’s also one that doesn’t exist in their ecosystem, plus it’s one requested by many owners of the device on different facebook groups I have seen, so I am pretty confident it will be a success! Well, fingers crossed! I even added multiple gameplay variations and a lot of options for choosing your playstyle to give it that extra little boost. So once the eval team tries it out, makes their holy determination, then we go to the beta team. Those guys… MONSTERS!!! They can find bugs where bugs don’t exist. It’s my firm belief that they have a backdoor to my pc and are secretly coding the bugs in so that I have to go fix em. Honestly, they have an amazing team over there, and a ton of dedicated testers who really put a game through its paces. Every now and then something slips through the cracks, but wow! So that’s the next step, we wait, we let the testers get their hands on it and then we sit back and wait for the reports to roll in. I’m sure a certain tester will find something, probably some obscure combination of button presses on screen that no normal player would even try, and another one will find my spelling and grammar errors… But that’s what makes it a great team. Those guys deserve a lot of credit, because while I consider myself a great programmer, I readily admit as a one man team doing it all, I miss a lot sometimes. Just like this game, I originally wrote the gameplay routines, the scoring and then after a couple weeks realized I had completely screwed it up and had to rewrite 90% of the game play code. It’s better now, but that’s a big hit.

One major thing most developers do – myself included – is to fail to target the right platform. And by that I don’t mean the whole android or iPhone or windows debate, I mean those all-important system specs. Do you focus on your end user’s system specs to start? Or is it better to tweak later? You have a shiny new super powerful computer that you do all your coding, your graphic design, your entire game on this amazing machine, and it performs beautifully. But then you realize it must run on ‘normal’ systems. All those amazing glows and animations, are they going to look good, much less perform decently on a lower end device? That’s the big question! I know I am guilty of doing the same thing and I have a bad habit of developing almost the entire game to completion before I upload it to my target device to test, and then it bombs. Ok, so most of the time it doesn’t bomb, but I have to go back and make numerous performance tweaks and adjustments to get it to run acceptably. Same thing with the latest project, Scratch’n Score. It’s a pretty simple 2D game though using some 3D dice that use physics to roll. It runs great on my system and in the editor with everything on screen at around 6-800 fps. Amazing! Then you remember the device you develop for is a much lower end device, think entry to barely mid-level android devices, and bam, now you’re struggling to hit 60fps during some of the ‘cool’ stuff. I just did exactly that. In fact, I spent hours on one animation, slicing and aligning the images, designing the animation, all to play when the player scratches and loses all their points that round. Does it look great? Yep! Does it play on the device? Well, barely. By the time the device catches up, the whole animation is over halfway done and then bam, it’s gone… Not to mention, now that I see it playing on the device, I really don’t like how it looks. But that’s a developer’s dilemma. It takes time to save and compile everything and deploy it to the device in question to test, depending on the project it can take anywhere from 3 minutes to an hour. Is it worth it to do this on a regular basis or is it better to develop and then tweak it later after testing. That’s up to you and how valuable your time is. On the bright side, deciding out of the blue to test it on the device today (mostly because I wanted to show off a bit), I realized I don’t like that animation anymore and thought of a much better solution, AND saved myself some time since I was thinking about doing some other animations the same way. Overall, testing it on the device probably saved me several hours of designing more animations like that that I would have ultimately tossed out anyways. Well, since the wife is out of state for the weekend, I am going to take advantage of her absense get back to some coding! This project is wrapping up nicely and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The gameplay is essentially done, it’s all the polish and animations that I need to work on now, along with a couple game variations just to add some spice and keep replayability up there! Then all the boring stuff, settings menus, etc.. Ugh.. 

With Stak! scheduled for release soon, there are a ton of other projects in the works.. Here’s a few that might be making their way to the game table soon! Gremlins Grotto – A simple yet complex strategy game that involves placing gems on a grid in order to complete magic spells. This one is currently in beta testing and has some bugs that still need to be fixed! Rogues N Riches – Another strategy game where you’re goal is to collect the treasure from the vault and make your way to the exit at the other end of the board! Sound easy? It’s definitely not. Plenty of obstacles from monsters, spells and even other players will try to thwart you! Opanico – A custom card game where you need to match different elements on the cards. Your goal? Get rid of all your cards first; but even that may not crown you the winner! Scratch N Score – A common dice game where you take your chances on each roll in order to score the highest amount of points without scratching! Rollin Bonez – Another card game, this time with a pirate twist. Roll your dice in order to collect as many gold coins as you can, but be careful. Ship battles, Raids, Krakens and more are there to oppose you! Can you collect all the treasure and plunder the rest of the players? Unnamed Acronym Game – A concept I am working on that will pit players wits against each other. If I give you an acronym, can you come up with the best meaning for it? Everyone submits their answers and then votes on the winner!  SWASQF – Skunks Will Always Smell Quite Funky ! This concept will allow players to use their mobile devices to connect and enter their answers and vote in secrecy!  

And next up on the list is Stak! Coming soon for the Infinity Game Table! Stak! is based on the classic game of skipbo, which in turn is actually based on several other games. This title has now been brought to the game table with a host of new features! Stak! Is the ultimate card game for players of all ages combining elements of sequencing, luck, and skill to keep you on the edge of your seat. The goal is simple: be the first player to empty your draw pile by building stacks of cards in numerical order. With it’s easy to learn rules, it’s fun for all ages! There are several game options you can customize to get the style of game you prefer. You can adjust the number of cards in your draw pile or you can even add cards to the game and go from 1 to 15! If you’re ready to have some fun, Stak! is for you!   

Another year, another great game release, and hopefully only the first of many! In their terminology, CashFlo has been code released. What does that mean? We have a release date! Wooooohooooo! So, on Feb 6th, jump onto your gameboard or table and snatch this one up fast! They found a lot of bugs, and some especially difficult ones to track down as well. It left me searching through code until the very last moment. You’d think a board game would be pretty simplistic, but, lesson learned.. It’s anything but! It did however give me a lot of ideas and a lot of reuseable code and things to work with for upcoming releases, and with each version and each game, some of those components get better and better and more and more robust, like the player select code.. Yea, I limit to 4 players typically, but if I had to my player select will handle pretty much whatever I throw at it, and it works surprisingly well. It was copied into Rogues and Riches, and is being copied into the next 4 projects as well. I have about 6 total projects in the work, so i’m hoping I can keep pace and release something new every 2 months or so. We’ll see how this goes! For now, it’s time to get back to work!

Cribbage was released on 12/5.. and despite the bugs, (that we have fixed!)  it continues to climb in sales, already surpassing Popalot and two thirds of the way to Tetridoku! Definitely surpassed my expectations, especially in the first 30 days. Now, there numbers and mine didn’t exactly line up, but theres a lot of reasons for that. I did see a bunch posts on social media where people had connectivity issues , so they’d only connect to a hotspot to download, and not stay connected while playing, which would in turn affect my tracking.. So, looks like my portion will be a little more than I expected..  But now that that is done and out of the way, it’s been back to work on some of the other projects sitting around, notably CashFlo, which is currently in beta testing and looking to be released next month. Also coming up will be Rogues & Riches, a board and card game based on robbing the vault and escaping before you’re caught! Definitely a lot of quick fun and strategy involved, and I’m having a blast with it! Once Rogues is off to beta test, it will be time to move on to other projects.. still have goblins grotto, delve, opanico, skip, frustration and more.. I have enough on my plate to last through the year, and maybe then some.. Sigh.. That’s ok I guess, I am loving it and loving that people are having a great time playing my games! Thank you!

It was about time.. time for a new web host that is. My old provider gave me a LOT of flexibility, and to be honest, I am going to miss that. However, the server speed and everything seemed to really be slowing down, especially moving to wordpress.  I’ve always hated wordpress, it’s a complicated nightmare of a system where everything you need is a plugin, and guess what, every one of those plugins wants you to pay like “Only $99 a year”.. now add that up for the 10-30 plugins you need, and yeah. To get your premium, you’re going pay out your a$$.. Fortunately if you look around and make do and settle, it may not be perfect but at least I dont have fork over a ton of cash.. Now the complexities of setting things up, thats another story. No matter what they say, wordpress is a pain in the ass to work with and set up.  But, moving to the new host the speed is there, and updated database and PHP versions, which is something I needed. The new host is more convoluted, it’s one of those new “you can have up to 10 websites on this plan!” and of course, each website is like it’s own little virtual space, which means all my previous redirects and subdomains to different things all had to be redone and reworked to work within their system. PITA, but I think it’s done.. I hope so at least, since i already moved the DNS and yeah.. Also in the works, and slowing any actual work down, I had to design and get a new website up for my wifes daycare as well, so if you want to check hers out, here ya go:  http://littlefingers.online/ The final kink, is my little NAS server has outgrown itself in terms of age and capacity, so there is a nice upgrade going on and moving codebases and music and art packages and everything over to the shiny new Synology NAS with the 8TB drive I stuck in there. Doesn’t help that a lot of stuff is stored on this little 4TB usb drive, which is SLOWER than hell copying files.. Oh well.. It’s been a week of things keeping me from meaningful progress, but it’s stuff that needed to be done, and it’s almost done..