Daily Blog

Spending time on Xmassy stuff.

Daily Blog

I forgot how busy this gets.. Uhoh!!

Daily Blog

Getting ready for Advent!

Daily Blog

A few hats, and a lot of music..

Daily Blog

A very Platdude based blog entry, today!

Daily Blog

What'll be happening with Beta Collexion? How can I get my games on Steam? And.. Snooker?!

Developments

Yesterday I got a rejection email from "OUYA" to say that my references to "OUYA" in the game The Final Warrior on "OUYA" was enough to get it rejected from being on "OUYA". It seems that now that OUYA are no longer OUYA, and are now instead "Razer/Cortex", and as a result I need to stop making so many references to OUYA in my OUYA games. .. Or something to that effect. Changes have been made and the game re-uploaded, and hopefully the new edition will be passed through withou...

Developments

Yesterday I recreated Hoppy Bobby in the Advent Calendar. It's not an amazing feat, but it is at least something. Other than that, I spent some time rejigging Neon Bike Championships for OUYA, and also sent PlayJam a copy so they can test it to see if it's Multiplayer code is any less crappy than JNKBombers was. I'll keep that copy aside, incase they decide it is indeed worthy of a proper upload, but if you don't ever see it on GameStick/FlarePlay, that'll be why. Today I have...

Developments

Feedback from PlayJam suggests that my newest controller code is still causing some kind of lagging ingame, when more than one player's connected at a time. An ultimatum, then. If I can't get it fixed by Monday, then that's it.. I can't fix it, and it's an issue to be dealt with later. I've spent about 2 weeks, straight, trying to solve this one single issue, and I realistically can't keep focussing on it, especially if I'm also trying to get an Advent Calendar AND NeonPlat's C...

Developments

Given that I've got so much on my plate, what with having to fix up the 42 OUYA games, and get NeonPlat's Cosmic Adventure done, you'd probably not expect me to start a new project right now. Ooops! Last night I took Alpha Collexion, stripped out all the games and graphics, and settled down to do it all again. Work on Beta Collexion has begun, and I'm halfway through Game #1. In reality, if I want to get everything ready for Dec 1st, I should be ready to start on Game #2, so...

Developments

Another day fiddling with the base code for my NewYA Monkey-X target. Most of the issues that the FlarePlay is bringing up appear to be related to the fact that the devkit they're using is leaving multitasking games running in the background, thus it all eventually clogs up. The actual retail unit instead does what OUYA/GameStick normally does, and closes all apps before launching the next. As a result, *most* of the problems they were having seem to vanish when tested on a rea...

Developments

I've never had to properly debug an Android device, before, so yesterday's attempts were new ground for me. Usually when one of my games break, I can easily repeat the break, and figure out exactly why it's happening, but feedback from PlayJam over my games crashing on their latest device, have had me somewhat baffled. There doesn't seem to be a specific point where they're crashing, or rather, there's no reason for them to be crashing where they are, as other Android devices carr...

Developments

Getting close to the end of my first run through all the OUYA games. Only (Only?!) another 15 or so games to go, and we'll have a complete OUYA collection. So far there's been no major issues, but since I'm nearing the end of the list, there are a few kinks that need ironed out. For starters, I need to stress test my multiplayer code. JNKBombers, Neon Bike Challenge and NeonPlat Extreme all include varying degrees of Multiplayer interaction. Previously, if a certain controller ...

Developments

How long have I been coding NeonPlat Adventures 2? Because last night I only just got around to adding moving platforms, and that was one of the first thing I wanted to add to the thing. Grrrr. All this OUYA-Recompile stuff is certainly taking it's toll on getting the newer things done. Other things I wanted to do this year include getting an online scoreboard system working, making a new version of The Gear That Works, and of course making a new Advent Collexion, as well as g...

Developments

All of this New-OUYA recompiling and fixing has certainly taken it's toll on NeonPlat. The game should've easily been finished by now, but instead I'm still working on enemy placements and trying to come up with Hats, which is still fairly early days in the world of NeonPlat.. *sigh* Yesterday I finished off Karl's Tiny Adventure and got it uploaded to both GameStick and OUYA. The OUYA one will be the better edition, since it includes the music. Worryingly, NeonPlat's Cosmic Ad...

Developments

I've spent more than enough time on Karl's Tiny Adventure. It's time to stop trying to fix the issue and just get the damn game uploaded. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to do two distinct editions. One for OUYA/Etc and one specifically for GameStick. The GameStick edition will have the music disabled. Why? Because apparently the GameStick doesn't like playing audio. I mean, it does, it just doesn't always play what you ask it, when you ask it to. For 99.9% of cases, it'l...

Developments

Did I miss a day?! Yeah, I basically didn't want to make a "Still full of flu!" post, so.. I didn't! Anyhoo, back to coding, and Karl's Tiny Adventure (which is next on the fixup list) has a bit of a bug in it, when played on the GameStick. The music is hopping and skipping about like some sort of broken record. I'm really not sure why that's happening, but today I'll be trawling through my timing code to see if I can figure it out. I imagine it might be that it's heavily ...

Developments

I got a new "Timer or Event" bar under the score, in NeonPlat's Cosmic Adventure, which either displays a depleting timer for things like Shields and Speedups, or a set of blocks when displaying weapons and whatnot. It's a fairly simply little bar, and isn't much to write home about, but there it is! Meanwhile I'm also finding (or rather, other people are finding..) a weird quirk with some of my older games, on some Android devices. It seems that upon first load, the games occa...

Developments

NPA2 is now NPCA, as it finally finds a proper title, "NeonPlat's Cosmic Adventure". I spent about 5 or 6 hours trying out various programs desperate to find a nice way to get a properly designed logo that would curve around the edge of the planet. In the end, I did what I usually did, and opted to just do the bloomin' thing myself. Ingredients 1. (URL "https://blitzmax.com">BlitzMax) 2. Selection of Fonts from (URL "https://www.1001freefonts.com/">10...

Developments

Yesterday I spent far too long attempting something that, inevitably didn't actually go anywhere. As I continue on my alphabetised fixups of OUYA games, I found myself reaching Boxsplodings. I've never been happy with the fact that there are "only" 64 levels in this game, and last night I attempted to make a random level generator for the game. Unfortunately, all resulting attempts ended up looking boring, dull, and somewhat similar. More work on that, in the future, I reckon. ...

Developments

The first of my games finally passed through PlayJam/GameStick review, yesterday. (Good to know that ONLY took 5 days, even though I was on "the fast track"!! Compare that to the fact that OUYA's reviewed all 5 of the games I've so far uploaded!) A very thorough review, where the only complaints were as follows. 1. If you pause the game, go into the menu, turn off the music, then turn it back on, it doesn't actually restart until you've quit the game. This has been a "feat...

Developments

I'm seriously struggling to remember what all I did, yesterday! I oughta keep a note of these things. I know I uploaded another game to OUYA and PlayJam, and I also know I spent a good hour or so tweaking NeonPlat Adventures 2.. .. But I can't, for the life of me, remember what it was that I actually did!! I blame the cat, who woke me up far too early, which led to a day of messing about and not really accomplishing much, before finally heading back to bed for a "short nap"...

Developments

Yesterday, I finally (*finally!!*) got around to adding a life display to NeonPlat Adventures 2! (URL "https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/NPA2_017.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/NPA2_017-1024x597.png" alt="NPA2_017" width="604" height="352" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-5060" /> There they are at the top, between the score and the "coin" count. Two little NeonPlats doing ...

Developments

So, with all my games now missing from OUYA, it's time to start popping them all back on again. One by one, I'm opening old code, fixing up any issues, and getting the games updated to the newer framework. The new controller code is a piece of piss, since I did all that work in the Monkey Target part of Monkey. Essentially, I need only hit the recompile button, and the new controller code magically fits itself into the game. The tricky part is adding a "Quit Game" menu item to...

Developments

Here's, approximately, the insane list of things that did/didn't happen, yesterday. 1. Compile first of about 40 games for the big OUYA Fixup. Went easy enough, and the new controls seem to work just fine. Woot! 2. Upload to OUYA. Didn't work. The whole Certificate thing stopped me, so instead I asked Team OUYA to DELETE ALL MY GAMES!! This gives me a fresh, clean slate to work with, and should help things run a little bit smoother. 3. Waiting for them to do that.. They...

Developments

Yesterday was spent doing four tasks. 1. Converting recent ALChoons to work with NeonPlat's ingame music engine. Not all of them were a success, mind! Some of the more frantic choons ended up being a bit of a mess, so have been scrapped. 2. Recreating some of the "Hat" powerups from NeonPlat Adventures 1. I've now turned all 6 of the turret enemies into "8 bullets" hats. I'm not sure how to display "bullets remaining", as at the moment, the character's looking a bit .. um.. ...

Developments

Yesterday I posted a test version of NeonPlat Adventure 2 over on the OUYA Forum, where people could download and test the game, to see how it is in it's current state. Of the two commenters so far, I don't think either of them actually have tried it out, yet, which is a shame because in the world of AGameAWeek, I'm going to be ploughing ahead, and any issues they come up with will probably be out of date by the time they tell me about them! (This is why AGameAWeek is usually done...