Monday, February 27, 2017

Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game- New Tutorial System started!

This week I finally got a start on my new tutorial system, which you can see below. It will basically be a series of checkpoints that are unlocked, giving you clues as to the next thing that you need to do, until you've learned how the basic systems of the game work.


This week I'm planning on finishing importing the original tutorial files in to the system, and do some testing to see how well the tutorial works. I'm also going to work with ways to let the user know to check the status of achievements, if it changes.

If you haven't yet, feel free to like me on Facebook, join my Google Group, subscribe to my Sub Reddit, or follow me on Twitter, where you are likely to get frequent updates! 

Monday, February 20, 2017

Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game- Continuing conditions, reaction to similar game

This has been an interesting week. I was able to fix a number of annoying bugs, although I still have a few more to squash in the process. But more than that, I was able to get the game to actually work, including a "You Win!" alert that can appear! Note that the final version will have a sandbox mode, but it will also have some missions, if nothing else than for the tutorial.






The main thing I did this week was to improve the dialog displaying the victory conditions. I'm still trying to decide exactly what I want it to do, but I can greatly improve it once I have the decision made on exactly what I want to do with this dialog. It is coming along, slowly, however.


One of the big things I did this week was to look in to a similar game that has just been released, Winds of Trade. I've known about this game for about 8 months, which was about 6 months after I started my own project. Those early looks, well, I wasn't discouraged too much. When I first looked at the released version, however, I became a bit discouraged, I will admit. In a lot of ways, it is the game that I set out to make when I first started. But the more I've looked in to it, the more I realize that while it is certainly in the same space, and has a lot of the same features, there are quite a few differences, and I think those differences will make a huge difference in the feel of the game overall. In the end, I've decided to study the game, learn from it, possibly including a few similar UI/UX type features, but in the end, my game will be different than it will be. One thing that I have been convinced of as a result, however, is to defer my game a bit until I've made it better, and that when released, it should be of a similar quality level, if not higher, than Winds of Trade.

This next week I'm continuing the conditions, and tutorial fixes. I'm going to also start working on squashing some bugs that have been on my plate for a while.

If you haven't yet, feel free to like me on Facebook, join my Google Group, subscribe to my Sub Reddit, or follow me on Twitter, where you are likely to get frequent updates! 

Monday, February 13, 2017

Android Privacy Policy for my apps

This blog post will serve as my privacy policy.

I do not store any personal data, with the exception of grid squares for those who report location issues with Ham Finder. I will provide your location to the various APIs that I use to determine your location.

I do use a unique id for each phone to ensure that a token is unique to a given device. This is stored via a complex system of hashing, which will not allow me to identify any devices. That token is only stored on the local device, and is not sent anywhere.

Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game- Moving conditions to files

This has been a busy week, but not unfortunately for game development. The major thing that I was able to accomplish this week was to get conditions processing to an external file. This will allow for tweaking the conditions without re-compiling, eventually leading to mods being allowed. I was able to make a decent start, however, I've realized that this will be far more complex than I had previously considered, owing to the fact of adding checks and actions to make it smoother. I'm going to be continuing this effort this week, with a focus on moving the tutorial system to a conditions based setup as I have been desiring to do for a while.

Monday, February 6, 2017

Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game- Displaying mission goals

The big improvement this week was to activate the objective display diagram. In order to make it work, I had to do some re-organization of underlying items. The end result is as shown below:





I'm going to play with the background and colors somewhat, but it looks fine for now. There will be 2 types of objectives, those things to avoid, which will appear on the bottom, and those which you need to achieve, which are on the top. I will also show the status of these. There is a simple system that shows the status but that will be improved dramatically soon.

Next on the plate is to replace the tutorial system with this new objective system. Until next time!

If you haven't yet, feel free to like me on Facebook, join my Google Group, subscribe to my Sub Reddit, or follow me on Twitter, where you are likely to get frequent updates!