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

I spent some time thinking about hats, yesterday, and trying to find the best way to illustrate the lifespan of the hats. Annoyingly, they're all slightly different. Shields have hit-points, Speedups have timers, Weapons have ammo. Complicated trying to find a way to display all that. I think I'll probably just end up shoving a bar somewhere on the screen, or something. That'd probably work best. The old version had the Arc surrounding Platdude, but I don't think that's very...

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

Bah, things are always more complicated, aren't they? When I first started doing OUYA games, I would happily throw up the .apk's without any Certificates or Signing, because realistically they're freeware, so who cares.. Right!? Plus.. "It's easier this way, just throw them up.. when are you ever going to update them, anyway!?!?!?" Well, as per usual, that's come back to bite me in the arse. I can't update those, because since creating them I've bought a new laptop, upgrade...

Developments

After finally getting my Forge/NewYA stuff working, I figured I should let TeamOUYA take a look at what I've got so far. The feedback was roughly "Needs an Exit button". Because the Forge doesn't have the big obvious "OUYA BUTTON" that the OUYA controller has, it's much harder to assume the player has a single button to exit the game. As such, I spent a fair amount of time, yesterday, adding a Quit button into my frameworks. I now need to replace old menus with new menus, incorp...

Developments

Yesterday's devtime was mostly spent tackling the Controller code for future (and past) OUYA games, so that it works nicely with the new Forge TV doohickey. After a lot of tweaking, poking and prodding, I finally got my framework to work with a whole variety of different Android targets, from a single compile. This *should* mean that any future OUYA.apk's will work happily on all devices, instead of requiring both an OUYA special edition and a stock Android version. The Store stu...

Developments

Last night I started to reimplement a host of the alternative bad guys. So far I'd only been using a single set of 7 for all my testing, but now it's time to ramp it all up a bit. I need a bunch of enemies, alongside a variety of stylesheets, before things start to look nice and varied, ingame. (URL "https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/NPA2_015.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/NPA2_015-1024x597.png" alt="NPA2_015" width="604" ...