Tuesday 4 June 2013

Designing ALL of the things!

Hey all :D

Just got home from work so I thought I’d do a quick update to talk about what I'm currently in the process of working on.

I'm currently working on the designs for two games. I may have mentioned some of these in previous posts.

The first project is in a very early stage. I want this game to be really good. Like super good. So I am spending time getting the design properly thought out. I'm also thinking about the art style and once I decided that I can decide what I want to develop it in and which engine I want to use with it. More on this later though :D

The other project is a small android app game. I thought it was time I added to the extremely sparse android marketplace :P The game will be free to play - mostly because I am developing it to teach myself android development. I am currently designing it while I clue myself up on all the android stuffs.

I read through most of the SDK stuff, did the “hello world” button tutorial and I'm currently reading through "Beginning Android 4 Games Development". I was a little bit overwhelmed by all the API information. So when in doubt, get a book!

Originally I was planning on using the Unity engine but I thought I'd learn more if I didn't abstract myself from a lot of the grunt work. So instead I'm going to try and develop my project in Java. Seeing as how it's going to be a pretty basic game I don't think this is unreaslistic.

I love the way android development looks thus far. Using bundles to save data making it easy to resume from where the user left off is awesome. Localisation made easy, use of XML and making it easy to support multiple devices (well in theory anyhow) is awesome! :D

Anyhow I'm trying to quickly work my way through this book while at the same time working on my game designs. Hopefully once the book is done I can hit the ground running on my very own android project! I really can't wait!

By the way, I thought I'd try out a "mind mapping" method of doing early designs. I do this so that I have a whole project planned out properly this time. My plan is to iterate on the mind map design rather than use prototyping as with my Runes game. Since this lead to really messy code and a silly amount of bugs. It's just to damn tempting to use prototypes as the real deal.

I've been using Freemind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) to do the mind mapping and I really like it. It's nice and basic and allows me to get my ideas organised in a quick and easy way! Just thought I'd give a small shout out, since it’s been helping me lots :)

Well time to get back to it. (*Peon voice* Work-work!)

Thanks for reading!
Rob

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