Wow, I missed posting something yesterday! I’ve been hard at work coding and adding art to the game. My artist delivered a whole bunch of assets to me yesterday and I spent the day getting the game updated with a whole lot of new art. The game took a huge leap forward in terms of aesthetics yesterday. It’s starting to feel like a real game now, not just something I’m hacking together. If I can figure out how to post pictures through WordPress, I’ll post a screenshot next week.

This morning I started building a front-end (FE) system for the game. I’ve done this about 4 times in my career now (I was a Lead User Interface Programmer on several large games), so it’s nice to do some coding I already know how to do. Here’s hoping it goes smoothly. I have a small FE (about 10 screens or so), so I’m cutting out a lot of complexity in terms of what the FE system needs to handle. Mostly it just needs to be able to open a screen on one of two levels (Main screen or Pop-up) and send input to the right one.

I’m cutting out of work a bit early today (don’t tell my boss) and I’m pledging not to do any work, nor read any work-related emails this weekend.

I’ve also instituted a new rule for myself: no reading work emails after 7:00PM. I’ve been having trouble sleeping over the last week. As I’ve been trying to fall asleep my mind has been racing going over design decisions, lists of things that need to be done, bugs and what’s causing them, and other business stuff. I put my new policy into effect last night and it was the first good night’s sleep I’ve had in a week. I’m going to keep it up.

Have a good weekend, everyone! See you on Monday.

Owen

Kotaku posted an iPhone Gaming Gift Guide today:

• The iPhone Gaming Gift Guide (www.kotaku.com)

They’ve got a list of their picks of games for iPhone or iPod Touch broken down into 4 categories: Bargains, Essentials, Socializers, and Epics. The Bargains games are all free, so I’m looking forward to downloading some of those tonight. There’s also a tower defense game listed there that I wasn’t aware of. I love tower defense games…I might need to drop the $4.99 on that…

Owen

I’m completely obsessed with the game right now. I’m finding it difficult to concentrate on anything else. It’s what I do while I’m working, it’s what I play on the subway, it’s what I play during commercial breaks on TV, it’s what I think about while I’m doing the dishes, it’s what I obsess over when I’m trying to get to sleep. I haven’t really experienced this kind of all-encompassing obsession over a game I’ve worked on before. Even when I’ve done large amounts of over-time on past games, I’ve usually been able to detach myself from it when I went home at the end of the day.

Last night I lay in bed, trying to get to sleep for over an hour and a half, but all I could think about was: “where should I put the indicator for the player’s current multiplier?” and “I wonder if the way I’m counting tiles in a match has introduced a bug in the special items that one of the people testing my game thinks he has encountered?” It doesn’t feel healthy.

I realised this morning that I hadn’t left the building since Sunday, so that probably wasn’t helping. I decided to go for a run in the snow. It seems to have helped a little; my mind feels a bit more clear. I think I’m also going to go to a coffee shop after lunch to work for a few hours. I desperately need a change of scenery. I’m also making a pledge right now: I’m not going to do any work on the game this weekend. This weekend is game-free. I’m not even going to play it. I think I need some time away from the game.

I suppose this is the danger of working on something at home and having that product available with you at all times on your iPod.

Owen

I got a lot done today. This morning I fixed a bug in my rendering code. I had used some Apple sample code to get my OpenGL view set up and they were using a “replace” texture function instead of a “modulate” texture function. The end result being that textures that had alpha channels wouldn’t fade. That took me a couple of hours of reading my OpenGL book and digging through code to figure out. I haven’t done rendering code this low-level for a number of years, but it’s starting to come back to me. It’s fun.

After I fixed the texture bug I implemented a new score algorithm. Until now the game was scored something like this:

match score = current level * ((number of tiles in the match * tile modifier) + (number of special items matched * special item modifier))

What I did today was put in a score multiplier that increases with every successive combo you make, so the scoring now works like this:

match score = multiplier *  current level * ((number of tiles in the match * tile modifier) + (number of special items matched * special item modifier))

This meant, though, that I needed to re-tune the modifier values to bring the scores back down to reasonable levels.

I’m finding the score tuning to be quite tricky though. I want it to give large enough scores that it feels fun (what’s a “fun” number? 1,000,000?), but that results in enough of a standard deviation that experienced players have noticeably better scores than new players. I don’t think I’m quite there yet. I also think I lowered the modifiers too much today. A good score in my game used to be over 1,000,000 points, but now on really good games I’m scoring around 500,000. Maybe I just need to double or triple the modifier.

Finally, this afternoon I added a new animation for the game when your multiplier increases. Yesterday I added some new animations that show your current match’s score. However, now I’m starting to get concerned about how much is going on on the screen at once. When I dropped the multiplier animation in this afternoon things were getting pretty busy. I think I need to move that animation off the board somewhere and make it less obtrusive.

Seeing the game with all these animations in it is pretty exciting, though. It’s making the experience of playing it that much more fun, because there’s extra visual reward for doing cool things. Hooray for cool things!

Owen

Things are really feeling like they’re starting to come together. I think a large part of that is because the artist I’m working has been sending me some great stuff that’s got me really excited about the visual direction she’s taking. Although the decision to pay to hire an artist is a scary one (it’s the biggest part of my budget for this game, aside from my own time), I’m already seeing how important it is.

I’m one of those programmers who has always had an interest in art. Both my parents are artists, my grandfather was a portrait painter, my grandmother was an art teacher for years and is now a stone sculptor, and my aunt is a painter and art teacher. I grew up around art. I took a lot of art classes in high school and continued taking some classes at university. However, I know my limitations: I’m a hobbyist artist; I’m not a professional. I knew from the start that I’d have to hire someone to do the artwork if I wanted to push the level of polish in the game to a point that I’d be happy releasing. It appears that it was the right decision.

Right now the art is still in the mockup stages, so I can’t wait until I get some assets to drop into the game. Once I get a first pass of the art in the game, I might even post a screenshot or two! *gasp* I know…a shocking move forward. I’ll just have to make sure the artist is ok with me releasing the art prior to completion.

This morning I started realising that I had little notes everywhere about all the stuff I still need to change/fix/tweak/implement. I decided it was time to start compiling it into a central list of “things that still need to get done”. My plan was to take the list and plug it into my project planning software, but I’m not sure if I will. A big part of me knows that this will help me to track my progress and I can use the metrics I gather from it to plan my next project better. The other part of me just keeps screaming “let’s code something cool!” Right now the screaming part is winning out. Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel more like project planning.

Back to coding…

Owen