Recently I've had one of my Software Developer friends join me on the project to help push the app side of the project forward. Glen has spent the past few years honing his craft as as Web Developer, which makes him perfect to bring on board for this frontend work for the project.

This is a really positive thing for multiple reasons:

1. He can fill in the gaps of my web development knowledge.
2. He will quickly be able to get a Frontend Web/Mobile application up and running.
3. He will bring new found motivation to the project work.

Already he has made a huge impact on the project. We've decided to use React Native for the application portion of the project. This gives us the benefit of utilising Glen's Javascript knowledge while allowing us to create Native Mobile applications for the project.

Anyway lets show off some progress photos!

Here are some of the basic screens we have put together for the moodster mobile apps:
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So we currently have:

• Login screen.
• Mood submit screen.
• Team member screen.
• Mood history screen.

These are only basic designs and they are mostly filled with dummy data but I think they look fantastic and I'm super excited to have Glen join me on this project.

Okay so I've been doing a lot of work on the Colour Match Project and I wanted to show an update on the current state of the project. I currently have:

• Title screen
• Level screen
• UI navigation
• Colour hue rotation
• Touch to start level functionality
• Release touch to choose matching colour
• Scoring for how close the colour is to the original colour for that level
• Pickups that will also add to the level score
• Multiple levels with differing starting colours
• Level and user game data loaded in from files

As you can see I've been very busy but I think a picture or more to the point a video tells a much better story so here is a video of a basic run through of the game:

I know it's been quite a  while since my last post about this but I've been making  quite good progress. A lot of my time has been spent learning general Godot practices and getting to grips with the GDScript language. It is actually fairly simple as it is fairly similar to python but with it's own quirks.

The only thing I'm not a huge fan on is that unit testing isn't baked into the engine/language like it is with python so for larger projects I think I will try using the python bindings to gain that ability to unit test the functionality and also make use of many of the great python packages out there.

​You can see all the updates and clone/fork it for yourself at the Github repository.

Thanks :)

I recently read an article about hyper casual games and also have been watching a few videos on YouTube from Dilmer Valecillos where he talks about some of the simple games that he has released on the app store. This really intrigued me as I've always struggled to stay motivated on some of my personal projects and I believe a lot of this was due to project scope. I was simple choosing projects that were too large for a single person to stay motivated enough to complete.

That's when I decided to come up with a really simple game Idea and see if I could take it to completion.

Along with choosing a project of a small enough size I also needed to choose the correct tooling that would enable me to keep that project scope small. I decided to pick up the Godot game engine as it's a fairly established engine and also is free and open source.

There will be some what of a learning curve to learning the engine but that would be the case if I had chosen Unity/Unreal/Other Game Engine. Also I though I am focusing on making small mobile games that something like Unity might be overkill. Finally I found out that Godot has bindings for Python which really impressed me. I am going to focus on doing everything using the GDScript for this first project to make following the tutorials and documentation as easy as possible. It is always good to know that the option is there though.

Okay so the game idea I have currently thought of is a colour match game. Here is the basic process for a single level:

• The player will be shown a particular colour for a number of seconds over the whole screen and the player is expected to memorise what colour it was.
  
• The player will then need to press their finger on the screen, which will begin the level.
• A starting colour will be shown on the background and will begin cycling through the colour ranges.
• The player will remove their finger from the screen when they think the matching colour is on the screen.

This is only the simplest form of the idea and what I'm considering MVP(Minimum Viable Product). There are other ideas I have for scaling the difficulty and player interaction up but I don't want to start with too much at once.

Okay so that's my simple game idea, I am hoping to make good progress on it.

Thanks

So I've been working on this little application in Cocos2d-x 3.1 and I've got the idea fleshed out a little and started developing a few things. 

There were a few issues with getting the code to compile perfectly each time on different devices. The first of which is that when you add any new classes to the project you need to add them to the visual studio solution if you want to compile for Win32, you also have to add the new cpp files to the Android.mk file under LOCAL_SRC_FILES: for it to compile properly for android. 

Another thing to remember is making sure that the images that you use are stored in the Resources folder so that they can be found when compiling for the different platforms. 

After figuring out these little things I have now got a fairly streamlined development cycle. Initially developing for iOS when on my Mac and then testing on android fairly often.

Here is what the game looks like so far ( mind the poor graphics ):

So there isn't really much to the game right now but the main purpose is to round up some sheep into a specified area on each level. I am at a crossroads with the design at the moment as I am stuck on how I want the dog to be controlled, I have two ideas:

1. Have the dog be controlled by dragging him towards the sheep in real time. The dog will have an energy bar which runs down as you move him and all the sheep need to be in the specified area before the energy runs out.
2. You draw a path for the dog to take but again you only have so far you can make him go and then you let him run and see if all the sheep are rounded up. If they weren't then you have to start again and draw a new path. 

Both these ideas will potentially work but finding the one that is most fun will be a challenge so I'm going to play with both and choose the one I feel is best.

Currently there is a flocking algorithm implemented with the predator avoidance added in so that they always run away from the dog. This algorithm will need tweaking quite a bit to get right but it's hopefully not too far off.

Next thing to be done is adding some obstacle avoidance, i.e. making sure they don't wander off the screen or bump into each other. With the flocking algorithm, they shouldn't bump into each other at all but there may be a point when I want to put fences or rocks or other obstacles in the scene to make it more challenging. Cocos2d-x comes with Box2D and Chipmunk but I'm not too sure which to use yet, or whether to roll my own as the collision detection stuff really isn't too complex for this game. 

Anyway Development is going well :)