Tinkering with side-projects like Mancala has taken a back seat over the last week, despite my previous raving about wanting to get back into Blitzmax once again. Aaron and I discussed the relative merits of using something huge like Unity for Paradroid and we ended up deciding that it’s overkill for the type of game we’re trying to recreate, and probably for the types of games we usually prototype or develop as well.
(more…)Putting it all on screen
With a mocked up game board in place it’s straight onto probably the hardest part of the project, which is handling all the objects needed for the game. There are 14 holes to keep track of on the board, and 48 pegs. We need to know the hole location of each of those pegs, the x and y positions of them on screen, the status of these pegs (as they could be moving between holes) and what kind of pegs they actually are.
(more…)Mancala & stepping back in time.
Today was possibly the most productive day I’ve had programming in possibly as much as a year. If any of it is of practical benefit, apart from the pursuit of knowledge and keeping the mind sharp, I’d very much doubt, but I like to think that any time spent in front of the computer putting code together, working with development systems, and just generally plugging away at getting it right is always a good thing.
(more…)Getting the basics right
The reason for developing our Paradroid project is primarily a learning exersise in how to “Unity”
(more…)Project Paradroid
When creating Paradroid back in the early eighties, Andrew Braybrook created a masterpiece. A game consistently rated as one of the greatest games ever written on the C64, and also one of the most fun to play.
(more…)Moving forward. New technology and terminated games.
I originally wrote this entry back in October but, as it wasn’t finished at the time, I didn’t get to actually put it online. As we’re up and running with something again – more on this next post – it’s time to put my house in order again.
(more…)Infection
Welcome back to my ramblings, if you’re a previous reader, and an even bigger welcome if you’re new here via our website, or however else you have found me.
(more…)The evolution of iDef
So, almost two weeks on from the last posting, here’s where Dexterity Design are right now:
Aaron has stopped messing with maze testing and tinkering with asteroids to help out with my little project. He’s now neck deep in iDef code again doing the conversion into SpriteKit. This is being done because conditions can be set in Swift source code to compile certain sections of code only if compiling for a particular platform which gives all sorts of power to bring it to more people.
(more…)Swift 2 – The future of IOS development.
With iDef up on the appStore with no – aparent – bugs found as yet, Aaron and I are both looking into Swift for future development of our games. iDef was written completely in Objective C, with the use of Cocos2D as the framework for all the funky stuff.
(more…)iDef gets released. What’s next for Dexterity Design?
iDef finally went on sale on the IOS store a couple of days ago which meant that, as a live project, we’ve finished actively working on it. Providing there’s no patching needed – which shouldn’t be needed due to all the testing we’ve done – then we’re concentrating now on getting it out there. The main hurdle with releasing any kind of Iphone or Ipad game now is actually getting it visible. There are so many products competing for attention on IOS that it’s really, really hard. We could have hundreds of people who would really like to buy and play the game but they’re never going to hear about it. In fact, in some ways, it’s even more work making people aware of the game than it was in the final stages of development, getting Apple to accept, and agree to sell it.
(more…)