Pre-Game Prep

This week I spent my time banging my head against the proverbial wall trying to get GGTwitter to cooperate with me in anticipation of the coming class demo.

Then late in the week Travis made an awesome discovery.  Instead of doing Twitter integration "natively" by calling APIs from within the application, we could harness the fact that our devices have web browsers on board that our applications can also utilize.  Essentially what was discovered is a small piece of HTML code that posts "Tweets" directly from a browsers address bar.  By calling this code in our app, the device recognizes the code as html, opens a browser within our app and makes the tweet (also allowing the user to log in if they aren't already)  Awesome!

Yeah, I know it's not exactly what we were going for, but it works and it's simple.

The rest of the time was spent doing small code cleanup and debugging while trying not to step on anyone else's toes or introduce any more new bugs while the team prepped fro the class demo.  

Guest Blog - Tom Resource

Hello gents, Lee’s spawn here to report my observations on the latest version of the project my dad showed to me. It is coming along rather nicely from the pre- pre- pre- alpha build I got to see after Christmas! I know I, realistically speaking, threw everything I could think of having to do with the shooter genre at you guys with a story tacked on to hold it together and am rather impressed with what you’ve managed to come up with so far. Along with that, I took a very “see what sticks” approach to the throwing, and having gotten a chance to test it out live on Pop Greffin’s Kindle, I got to see how those ideas are working and playing out in real time.

 Storyline wise, the only real concern I have is a clear differentiation between the two opposing sides. This ties into gameplay, as the version I was using didn’t allow a clear choice and kept forcing me to fight against the British. This is tempered, of course, with the realization that there is still a bit of work to do on this extreme coding adventure of yours, but I really worry from a consumer point of view that instead of buying a game with two different yet parallel storylines, they will essentially be the same. Then again, might also just be me and my big mouth running off into the sunset again.

Gameplay wise, the one feature I am really curious about is inclusion of some kind of limited-fire secondary weapons to add some variety to the normal tap-to-shoot gameplay. Again, having tried it out in real practice, I have no idea how ya’ll would go about implementing such a thing, but that was the only major concern I had in that area seeing as they were something of a value in the write-up I made for you.

Other than that, looks good and like a solid step forward. Lee’s spawn, out.

Resource Tom will be checking in from time to time to give pointers, observations, blah...

Liars Figure and Figures Lie...

Did I say that?  Oh my, get out the Phels Naptha soap and get ready for some soap chewin'...

Seriously (well - for me anyways), for this week we have the first of two presentations to make for the group.  I volunteered to get some stats for our work since Q1 of this course.

Well being a programmer - which is a definition of an individual who will do prodigious amounts of work for hours and hours so as to get out of a few minutes of repetitious labor - I found on the intertubes a nice (free! Who can not say free is not nice!!) tool that works with Subversion and does all my work - oh wait - snap - provides analysis, graphs and charts - of what we've accomplished in a fairly short period of time.

The tool is StatSVN- and you get it from here.

Now, I admit I love point and click.  Meaning this whole command line thing just - well - it's not my thing.  So read the darn readme file that is included in the project.  Then kinda think about it.

Meaning - it's a Java file.  Java is - simple?  crippled?  stoopid?  Idunno.  Anyway the absolutely brilliant statsvn.jar COULD NOT FIGURE OUT SPACES IN THE FRIG****G FILE SPEC - sorry, give me a minute - there my mind is back to the right way of thinking....

So.  I re-checked out our SVN branch file to a more kindly file at the root of C (no - this isn't a Sousa march dearies - we is programming now) and then re-followed the instructions.

Oh frabjous joy!  I got the report.  And I'm really impressed.  There is a huge amount of value in using this truly brilliant Java file.  It does a huge amount of work based on the svn.log file that you need to create.  It's well worth your time to figure out and use.  Truly.  You need to do this.  Why  are you waiting?  Do it NOW.  There - dont't you feel better? 

Oh, you didn't do it - well...

DO IT!! NOW!!!

Okay - so besides this I actually did some programming work this week:

1. Fixed the pause bug for the autofire feature
2. Using LuaGlider got rid of warnings/errors in the training/intro code
3. Error/warnings in 'the choice'
4. Added more functionality to the options menu:

The messaging object at the top of the screen tells you what you have picked in terms of autofire and which side you are helping.  And if you make a choice the text changes.  To get back to the main menu you need to click the Main Menu button - so if you have difficulties making choices you may be here a long long time indeed...

Next up - a guest blog entry from Resource Tom!!

TBowers Week 7 Report

This week has been spent, as is becoming more common, fixing bugs and trying resolve the numerous warnings across the code base. On the new feature side, we appear to have a functional implementation of Twitter and Facebook. It took a lot more time than expected integrating these features but it was one non-gaming aspects of Corona we really wanted to explore. After exploring various libraries that purported to facilitate to integration with the two networks, we finally found some success.


A side  benefit of creating our developer Facebook account was the ability to create a community page for the game. This can help serve as both advertising for the product as well as a social page for fans of the game (with and without Facebook accounts) to meet.

Work will continue on the bug fixing side, trying to ensure as much quality as possible in the few weeks we have remaining.

Advanced enemy movement

I've been hell-bent on getting some really cool advanced enemy movement patterns written for our game.  I was truly happy when Lee found a Corona SDK demo showing how this is done with Bezier curves.  Essentially you draw an invisible (or fully transparent) Bezier Curve on screen and write methods to have each enemy plane "follow" that curve from beginning to end.  This didn't sound too bad.  So I thought I'd give it a go.

Yeah right.

The author of the demo, as well as several others that I have subsequently found, never give the full demo source code, nor do they explain the intricacies involved.  It seems as though these authors are using their demos as part of their online portfolios for potential employers to peruse.

John has been coming up with some good standard linear movement patterns that will have to do for now, given the time constraints of the project.  I want to focus on the team delivering a fully playable bug free app.  The bells and whistles can wait till later when we continue to develop the app outside of class.

Social media is simply a moving target

Social media is simply a moving target for developers wanting to write cross-platform apps.  Twitter integration "almost" works now in our app, but I have run into several article that point out that the cose I'm writing should work for Android devices (and Kindle) but not iOS.  Why is that you ask?  Because Apple likes twitter so much that they integrated twitter right into iOS.  This greatly simplifies accessing twitter from within a native iOS app but does nothing but complicate the issue for cross-platform frameworks.

Corona SDK will address this in a future release but for now we're stuck with checking the target OS and writing the appropriate code.

As for "Flights of Fancy"; we will be forced to develop only for Android/Kindle for the moment.

TBowers Week 6 Report

This week was spent working on bug fixes, evaluating a great new Lua IDE Eric discovered, and implementing an level skip feature for internal testing.

Everyone has been on deck this week on the bug fix front following the discovery by James that the last beta we released exhibits strange runtime behavior on the target hardware only. Everything appears fine in the simulator but when running on an actual Android device, the boss doesn't appear to take damage. It is a very strange issue - this sort of inconsistency between simulator and target hardware hasn't been seen before. Based on yesterday's meeting, the current theory is the json library inside our code base (required for the twitter integration) may be conflicting with the json library built natively into  Corona. The why part isn't exactly known at this point but we are still working it.

As I mentioned, Eric discovered and subsequently suggested we all try the Lua Glider IDE. In just a few days with it, I think we all already wish we had started using something this high quality all along. It has built in support for the Corona SDK with realtime debugging that has already proved invaluable. Additionally, it automatically calls out and highlights potential errors and warnings. Running our project through this environment has exposed a lot of issues (mostly minor but numerous in nature) that we need to work through and try to correct to increase quality.

I also had time to implement a level skip feature for our internal testing. I added a global debug_build flag that can be checked anywhere. When the pause scene is created, it checks for this flag and adds an additional button to cycle through the available levels. Once you have the one you want picked, hit the "jump" button to set the selection and then unpause. When the originating scene resumes after the pause, it checks to see if it should perform a level skip and if so, it automatically transitions to that scene. The OO nature of the storyboard API makes this sort of jumping clean and consistent. Hopefully this feature will help us in testing issues within specific levels without having to constantly play through the game itself.