Carl's Notes

Way back in 2016, I'd backed the Kickstarter campaign for Jide Tech's Remix Mini, a hand-sized (including fingers, so not palm-sized) Android PC, claiming to be the first Android desktop PC. Being very small and lightweight, but supporting most Android apps at the time, the idea was to get a pretty full desktop experience from the device.

I enjoyed fiddling around with it once I got it, but at the time I hadn't figured out how I was going to use it on a regular basis, as well as them launching a second campaign for a newer device that was supposed to be way more powerful. So I'd shelved it for a while, as I thought it was going to be replaced with a newer model that should have been better.

Unfortunately for me (but I guess fortunate for them), they drew the attention of a thin-client enterprise company, and they were basically swallowed whole. The campaign was shut down, and everybody got their money back, but nobody else got the product in the end.

A few years ago, I'd tried to boot my Remix Mini again to see if it still worked, but it didn't do anything at the time, so I put it even deeper on the shelf and forgot about it again.

Well, I came across the power cables again, and precariously perched it on my desk to give it another try. Unfortunately, I don't have any monitors with a spare HDMI port, so I plugged it into my HDMI capture device, and viewed the stream with VLC. And it booted all the way up, even to the desktop again, with no problems. Even connected to the WiFi again (we might need to change the WiFi information at some point) and realized that I need to update my login credentials!

Anyway, I've shut it back down for the moment so I can figure out my next step. I'd like to be able to have it running on my desk alongside everything else, as I do a lot more things now that would actually work on a system like this. Only, it's a really old OS now, I'm not sure how many of my apps would actually support it anymore.

Oh well. Back on the shelf again. But more towards the front this time, I think...

Well, it's been a while since I used this journal to post about the status of my Android games, so it's probably about time now.

I have two of these on the go right now.
The first is called “Dig Site&rdqou; and is a connect-three matching game where you slide the lines of objects around instead of swapping them.
The second doesn't really have a name just yet, so the working title is “Electrical Connections’. In this one, you work against the computer, trying to connect two electrical bars to each other by putting smaller bars between posts, while the computer tries to block you after each of your moves.

Dig Site work has stalled due to the extremely high amount of graphical code that needs to get massaged to have things working well.
Currently, it's playable, automatically stores your game, has four levels of difficulty, and needs far better graphics than it has right now.

Electrical Connections is currently only a Java prototype, but has passable graphics (for a prototype) and will detect when the current game is over, who won, and will start a new one on the next mouse click.
Currently I'm somewhat stuck on the computer's AI algorithm.

The game has to choose the best place to put a blocking piece based on the grid as it stands after each move the player makes.
This is in no way a trivial operation, as I have to take into account both the best move the player can make as well as the best move the computer can make.
If the best plan of action the computer can make requires more moves to complete than the player's best plan of action, then the computer needs to block the player's next perceived move instead of its own best move.

Despite the fact that I was able to articulate the above, it still hasn't gelled in my head in such a way that I can put it in code.
I think I need more time in front of a whiteboard so I can closely examine what makes this algorithm tick and how it needs to work.

This is particularly important due to the fact that it's this algorithm that will make or break the entire game.
It won't matter if the graphics are awesome, the sound effects perfect, and the music (if any) fit together well.
If the algorithm is too hard or too easy, the game won't be much fun.

A Refreshing of Direction.

My Android game will be delayed a bit further, as I've been reminded that the best indicator of how successful a game will be is how much fun the designer has playing it.
(particularly, does the designer still play after it's been released?)

I've detailed how I hope to extend game-play in my Tumblr article, though I'll also comment on it here in case somebody wants to provide me some feedback.

My original design had the game awarding the player fragments of artifacts at random during play.
Once you had enough pieces to put one artifact together, you could sell it to the museum (or before, if you were desperate), then use the resulting money for "power-ups" and bonuses.
Some power-ups I've thought of so far include hammers (breaks a single block), bombs (destroys a radius of blocks), paint brushes (changes a block's type), and hint bonuses.

All of this is going to take a fair amount of time to code up, so my official release date has to get pushed back significantly.
(all the better to get a good product, you know)

I told you it ran on my tablet! =^.^=
(picture included)

It has a long way to go before it'll be ready, but at least it works!

The list of things that I have left to do on it feels a little long:

• Add support for using the navigation buttons as well as touch.
• Swap out the coloured squares for images.
• Make it harder to erase the last-saved game.
• Add options for level-of-difficulty before starting a new game.
• Add a method for increasing the difficulty as play progresses.
• (optional) Add sounds.

Maybe it just seems long...

I think the "weeeeeeee!" factor has died down by now, and I've started actually using my new tablet for real now.
Though I haven't done any real "work" with it, mostly playing games and browsing the web...

First, a couple of gripes.
Since this was such an inexpensive tablet, it uses a pressure-sensitive screen instead of capacitance, so it's not quite as accurate as it could be, but with the advantage of using almost anything I want for a stylus.
Also since it was so inexpensive, it's running a very old version of Android (1.5 versus the latest 3.2 or so that they're up to now), and as my development kit only goes back to 2.1, I can't write software for it that way.
(it's also underpowered, but I can live with that, for now)

As for games, I've found a couple that I find fun to play:

• Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection is a suite of tiny games that can be ported to almost any platform. You can find an Android version here or on the Android Market.
• Proximity, an interesting variation of Reversi.
• Pentas, a variation on Tetris, where you place 5-piece blocks into a grid.
• Pentas: Stratum, a variation of Pentas where you stack the blocks upwards on one another instead of letting them fall down.

I've found a note-taking application called Note Everything that I've found easy to use.

The web browser I'm rather disappointed with, though.
I use browser tab a lot, and the built-in browser doesn't handle that very well.
So far, I haven't found a good replacement either.

All in all, a little disappointing, but still workable and quite usable.

I know, I know, I should be posting this to my Tumblr blog, but I thought I'd post it here first, as the comment locks are rather restrictive over there.

This past Friday, I'd showed what I currently have off to my mentor, an instructor at my university's closest campus, and got rather positive feedback on it.

He pointed out several very helpful things that I hadn't thought about, like putting the highscores page right in the main menu, some alternative suggestions for handling scoring, several very interesting "bonus/penalty" concepts, and recommended that I write a very simple story to help answer some questions players might have about gameplay, such as "Why am I doing this?", "Am I doing this legally?", and the like.

The story doesn't have to be anything very large, it could even fit on half a page.
Something like "You are an archaeologist at a dig site in [insert area here], looking for relics and artifacts to take back to the museum that hired you." may suffice, though I'll have to think about this for a bit first.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

As I've been writing my code, I've also been having a relatively close look at the developer help section of the Android Market site.

I have to say I'm a little confused.

Apparently, you need to have a Google Checkout account, which is hooked up to either a credit card or a bank account, and it won't let me hook it up to a bank account, and I don't have a credit card right now.
(I've bought about half a dozen pre-paid credit cards, but I'm quite sure those don't count for this)

After trying to read some of the help pages, my brain almost hurts.

Apparently, they have to handle each country separately as far as payment goes (which, I suppose, is to be expected), but the drop-down menu for countries on the Google Checkout Seller page only lists the US and UK, leaving out the vast majority of the list they have elsewhere.

I hope this will become clear when I actually get started, but there's no way to know for sure until I get there.

But I sure do enjoy hanging out on campus.

I had some very nice chats with a few of the instructors I've gotten to know during my years at the university, one of which was very informative, useful, and could go a long way towards either getting a job in the computer games industry or making a small name and associated income for myself as an independent game developer.

Last time I had a chat like this with this instructor, I apparently didn't quite get what he'd said, but this time I think I have it.

I'm going to try writing a "connect-three" game for Android in four to six weeks and release it for sale on Google's official Android Marketplace for the low, low price of ninety-nine cents.

A "connect-three" game is a category of casual game where you have a grid of objects and you have to match three or more of the same 'type' of object to remove them.
For example, Bejeweled and Chuzzle are two examples of connect-three games.

So far I've managed to install the Android developer kit and have started working on a very early prototype, mostly learning how things actually work.

Once I've figured out how things are supposed to go together, I'll work on adding the basics of gameplay for fine-tuning things.
After the game logic is relatively complete, I'll work on the actual graphics to be used.

Right now I'm thinking about using an archaeological theme for the game, matching artifacts like-for-like to obtain points.
(I'd been originally thinking about cutting the artifacts up into tiles and make you put them back together in the grid, but I don't think that's going to be very fun just yet)

Yes, this means that my other projects are more-or-less on hold right now, but I don't think they'll suffer that much for it.

Watch this space for updates and poke me if you think I've been away too long.