The Reel World...

Since I'm giving AGameAWeek a little rest, I can now concentrate on iPhings a bit better than I have been.

There's been some crazy "Why won't it do that!?" issues with Arcade Slots, mostly based on memory issues.

As I try switching the game from one set of reels to another, it'd try loading in a mountain of images, which all clashed together, and resulted in Evil Nasty Crashes..

I'd been trying to focus on fixing all that, but with AGAW continuing on in the background, and the horrible nasty illness that's been here for the past few weeks/months, it's been a struggle.

After a couple of days off, I'm back in the middle of the action, and I've spent most of this morning solving those memory bugs.

I've made a simple "Load new reels" button on the front menu, which when clicked, will erase all current reels, erase all "fruit", and then reload everything generating a nice new batch of reels and "fruit", ready for the next game.

This happens over the course of about 20 frames, being about 0.7 seconds on the emulator, but slowing to around 2 seconds on the iPod Touch (3gen,8gb)

It's a short gap between tapping the button, and having the selected slotmachine up and running, and it'll have to do. 'cos that's as fast as I can get it!

Meanwhile, I also did a deadly-bulk-test, and left it reloading and reloading and reloading and reloading and reloading (on the iPod) for about 5 minutes, whilst filling up the little debug console, and Leak tests on the Mac. All seems nice and happy, so I'm going to leave the reels where they are, now, and actually get into the lovely bits of the game.

Tomorrow starts the lovely bits.

Getting Game #1 up and running, and having it 100% playable.

...

Should only take about 3 weeks to get that bit done ;)

(no screenshots, it's still looking about the same!!)

The signature was invalid....

Don't you hate it when stupid things cause you to lose insane numbers of hours from your day?

Yesterday I noticed a little Code-Sign warning popping up in XCode. It hadn't happened before, and I thought something might be up with Arcade Slots.

So, I hopped back over to Cardagain, and recompiled it, only for the exact same message to appear!

Oh no!!

What's happened!?

Why is my Code Signing/Developers Certification thing no longer working?!!

Adding Buttons..

Although my previous video of Arcade Slots did have a pretty button on it, it wasn't a reusable one.

Today was the first Arcade Slot work I've done since the video! eek!! slow progress..

Anyhoo, I decided to make reusable buttons.

What a chore!

After a strangely insane amount of tweaking and refitting of little tiny awkward bits of code, and some finger crossing, I finally got it all working.

Up to 20 buttons, all flashing when needed, scalable to different sizes, multicoloured, pushable, clickable, and sending reports to the game whenever they're pressed.

wootsocks!

I hope 20's enough, 'cos I really don't feel like tweaking all my none-variable numbers!!

Next, creating some sort of display limit, or overlay, or something, so the reels don't take up the whole of the screen..

Annoyingly, a simple overlay would completely mess up my previously created gradiented background.

D'oh!

Cardagain Update

I actually uploaded this on Friday, and it even went into Review-Mode on Friday, but it's taken the Apple Guys all weekend to actually review it.

My guess? They couldn't stop playing it.

...

Yup.. That's the only possible reason I can imagine, anyway!

Cardagain 1.1 should be ready for download right now, and contains a whole bunch of different card decks, and a fair few backgrounds, too.

Everything's all nice and Retina-Ready (I forgot to add a Retina Background, last time! silly me..) and it all plays a little smoother, with a simple new Loading screen being used to keep things nice and organised.

No new gameplay types, yet, though.

If you'd like to see something special, let me know!

Free Cardagain!

Cardagain's been set free for a few days.

The price hops back up to 59p on Sunday, but in the meantime you can let all your friends see how addictive it actually is!

Simple Card based fun for all the family. Give it a try, and spread the word.

Arcade Slots : A proper start..

Today I finally got all my little bits and pieces together, and started to build up a proper edition of Arcade Slots.

Cardagain updates inprogress

I finally got my different decks to load, today, although it took some tweaking to get it going. Now to spend a bit of time making up even more silly decks.

To the right is a preview, and is from the recently released Windows/Linux/Mac quicky edition of the game, which you can get here. (But the iPhing version is infinitely better. Touchscreen beats Mouse, hands down!!)

Meanwhile progress has slowed in Arcade Slots, not because it's not working, but because I'm struggling to come up with game ideas that aren't insanely copyright infringing!

I'll probably just slam a bunch of my older sprites together, and see what pops up.

More info as it happens...

Tutorial 1-3 : The Beat Box

Tutorial 1 : The Beat Box

A multipart tutorial teaching sprites, views, sounds, clicking and more!

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, More to come.

It's probably about time that we started to draw things onscreen.

In order that we can then do things, as we play, we need to setup a "PerFrame" function, and get it to run every few milliseconds.

Let's do both things at once. We'll set up a timer that ticks every few milliseconds, and also add the function.

Tutorial 1-2 : The Beat Box

Tutorial 1 : The Beat Box

A multipart tutorial teaching sprites, views, sounds, clicking and more!

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, More to come.

For our multiple sprites, we need an array to hold them. Within .h we'll make an array to do that.

Tutorial 1-1 : The Beat Box

Tutorial 1 : The Beat Box

A multipart tutorial teaching sprites, views, sounds, clicking and more!

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, More to come.

Today, we're going to create one of those little apps where the player taps a few boxes, and then the app plays a tune/rhythm based upon the locations of the highlighted boxes.
If you've played with TonePad on the iPhings, you'll know what we're aiming for.