#justking

02/22/16

So many highs and lows this week.  The genre itself offered so many possibilities and chances that I was practically giddy, but alas some of the more extravagant ideas had to be pushed aside (one day I will build a tower defense staircase game).  I was, however, able to add A.I. to my game, which I was quite pleased to see in action.  Hopefully I’ll have a chance to modify the program before I submit it so that the pathways the enemies take have a bit more randomness to them.  I would also like to turn down the sound on my game, add a limiter to the number of sound producing objects, and add a cherry bomb tree, but my time is limited and I am so very very tired.

This project has managed to reveal one crucially important thing to me.  There is so much time I waste every day and hopefully as the weeks go on less and less of that time will be wasted.

Let me just take a moment to say how very, very, very, very important it is to test on an actual device when it comes to making IOS games.  I did a quick test of my Match 3 game right before I was about to submit it and the entire screen was black except for when something moved.  Turns out in the beginning I was telling the background color to be nan(not a number), which is fine for the simulator, but not good on a real device.

This week’s game was only running at 3-10 fps on the simulator, but on the actual device its running close to 60. 

Looks like I won’t have any trouble getting this done by tomorrow night, but given how simple this game is, it has me worried about the following weeks.  Scheduling is going to be very important.

Really all that’s left is to deal with more complex combos, and clean up some of the features.  Ideally this’ll be finished and submitted for review by late tonight or tomorrow afternoon.

Over the course of the next 12 weeks (and possibly beyond) I will be making a different game of a different genre every week and will be recording my journey here.  Each week the genre will be pulled randomly from a list of about twenty (subject to change), but for the first week I’ve decided to start with one of the most iconic game genres: Match 3. 

Thanks to Candy Crush: Saga this is a billion dollar industry so clearly before I start I need to play Candy Crush

(5 minutes later)

Okay now I’m down $12,000, but I’ve got some great info on what makes Candy Crush so popular (watching the Extra Credits video helped, too).  Unlike most traditional Match 3 games, it offers custom-shaped levels and goal outside of reaching a specific score, which allow the player to see just how close they were to their goal.

Obviously I’ve no intention of making a Candy Crush clone, but I can definitely make use of the information I’ve gotten on what makes Candy Crush so popular.