Midnight Tangent Devblog

2 Devs Talking About The Crazy Things They Do

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Happy Halloween

BOOO!!

It’s ok… catch your breath. I know I scared you.

Alright, so that wasn’t really scary. What IS scary is the fact that we haven’t posted in over a week. We have been working on the game, though, I promise! Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff has been behind-the-scenes changes so we won’t have too many pictures for you, but I’ll try to make this interesting all the same.

The main thing that was sucking our time has been this website. We’re hoping to to do some things in the weeks to come to get some more traffic, so we wanted to make sure we had a presentable facade for our game. No one will stay and read your blog if it doesn’t look nice, so we decided we needed to focus on that for a bit. We changed the homepage to have an introduction of our game with a gameplay demo, and have pushed our blog onto it’s own page. If you’re reading this then that means you figured it out. GOOD WORK! Go get a cookie! We’ve also made a few aesthetic changes and even added a pretty cool sign-up and commenting feature to make it easy for you to sign in with Facebook/Google/ whatever you like. If Twitter ever restores our account (which they suspended for NO REASON!) then you’ll be able to use that, too. read more

Posted in Design, Featured Tagged Android Game, Android Game Development, Blog, Game Design, Halloween, Website Design, Wordpress 4 Comments

Ice Cream Paint Job

I’m baaaaaaaccckkkkkkk. Finally! I know you were probably worried sick about my safety since I haven’t posted in a couple weeks I think, but in case you haven’t noticed, I was hard at work sexifying our site. It’s been hard, and VERY frustrating, and we still have some work to do, but I finally feel good enough about it to move on and get back to why we’re here. UPSAT!

Unfortunately, I haven’t done very much coding lately unless you count PHP and CSS, but I promise I will be getting back to it today. Some of the minor things I have worked on have been finishing that Big X animation I talked about last time and adding a cool press-down effect to buttons on the menus so they look like actual buttons. I’ve also revamped the training system a bit to make it more intuitive to the user that the first time you play, you MUST complete training mode. After the first time, you can quit and come back to training at your leisure. Today I plan on getting back to it by implementing the game over screen that will list your stats, achievements, and let you enter your initials if you get a highscore. read more

Posted in Design Tagged Android, Android Game, Android Game Development, Android Programming, Design, Game Design Leave a comment

Art Update: Magic 8-Ball

Whoa. It’s been awhile since my last update. Luckily, I have a couple pictures to show of the completed art for the next game: Magic 8-Ball. It’s an accelerometer based game, so get ready to shake those phones! (We’re not responsible for errant shaking which may send your phone flying at walls, cement floors, tv screens, or puppies.)

That’s right, real men don’t lose. There are also a bunch of other supportive quips in there for you to discover, if you make it that far… read more

Posted in Art Tagged 2D Art, Android, Android Artwork, Android Game Development, Animation, Art, Artwork, Blog, Design, Development, Droid, First Game, Game, Game Art, Game Design, Indie, Indie Game 1 Comment

Keeping With Tradition

Gather ’round boys and girls. For story time today we’re going to talk about the importance of meeting user expectations for how android apps operate. If you’ve ever used an android phone, you’ve probably noticed that the two most important buttons are the Back and Home keys.  When you press the Back button you expect to, well duh, go back. And when you press home (and click your heels together three times) you expect to be brought back to rural kansas with Todo by your side. No? Oh well then you probably were just trying to get back to your home screen.   TECHNICAL CONTENT WARNING!   Now what you may not be aware of is what these two buttons are actually doing. I won’t get too bogged down in the details, but essentially Android OS uses different stacks for your applications that hold the different things you are doing, known as activities. You could have a messaging stack, web browser stack, or a contacts stack for example. If you’re in the messaging stack, the first screen you see is put on the bottom of the stack. Once you select “text messages” from this screen, your list of text messages is called forward and placed on the top of the stack while the message service select activity is paused in the background. Likewise, when you click on a particular text, the text message is displayed as the top activity on the stack while the other two are paused beneath it.   When you hit the Back button, your phone destroys the activity on top of the stack which leaves the one beneath it. In our example, hitting the Back button would result in you returning to your text message list. Hitting it a second and third time would bring you back to the messaging service select screen and then the home screen. The interesting thing here is what happens when you push the Home button. Android returns you to the home screen, but keeps the current state of the activity stack in place. Therefore, you can go on opening other apps and creating many different stacks, but when you return to the messaging stack you will see the same thing that you saw before you pressed the Home key (providing your phone didn’t decide it needed to conserve memory and destroy the stack). There’s a lot more to it than that, but for the purposes of this conversation that’s all you need to know. If you want to learn more, the android dev site is great.   You can come back now, it’s safe   Based on what we just talked about, there is an expectation among android users that when you press the Back button the phone goes back and when you press Home the phone returns to the home screen but remembers where you were when you left.  In order to have more flexibility, most games are created using only a single activity. This lets them draw to the screen as fast as possible which, in turn, generates smoother graphics. The downside of this is that we can no longer allow the Android OS to handle moving around within our game because it sees it as only one activity and will immediately destroy it once the back button is pushed.   I thought it was important that our game mimic the android experience, however, and have intercepted the back key so that I can control what happens instead of the OS. The implementation was pretty straighforward; everything launches from the main menu so that’s realy the only place you have to go back to. From any point in the game or secondary menus, if you press the Back key, you return to the main menu as expected. If you press the back key on the main menu, a message is displayed prompting you if you really want to exit. From here you can either check yes or no, but if you push the Back key on this screen the game will exit. I did this because, if anyone else is like me, they just keep mashing the back key until the application has exited and I wanted to make sure this still worked.   The Home key was a little less straightforward. Did we want the user to return to the same place? The answer for this pretty much came from our earlier decision not to have a pause screen because the the user would be able to exploit it during faster rounds. If you were in the middle of a game and pressed the home key (or got a phone call), when you returned you’d be in the middle of game. Instead, we decided that you’ll just return to the main menu. Now this DOES mean that if you were having a really awesome game and someone calls you that you’ll have to start over, but we felt this was the best solution. For you diehard highscore fiends, might I suggest Airplane Mode?   Words? I just want PICTURES!  Awwwww

 Fine, fine! Here’s some pictures of a few changes we’ve made. Notice the new heart that floats away when you pet the kitty. She loves you! We’ve also made the notification bar larger so we can insult praise you with more words.

I thought green means go?!

 Here you can see the insult bar twisting the knife after you make a mistake on a really easy level. Seriously, how hard is it to pop the red balloon? Actually, I’ve noticed it’s really hard at first because our minds always want to avoid the red one. I guess you’ll just have to adjust. You can also see our REALLY big X that pops up when you lose a life. I’m currently in the process of animating the X to shrink down and fly into the lives bar. It’ll look cool once it’s completed and you will all worship me! read more

Posted in Featured, Programming Tagged Activity Life Cycle, Android, Android Game Development, Android Programming, Back Button, Blog, Coding, Design, Development, Droid, First Game, Game, Game Design, Home Button, Indie, Indie Game, Java, Programming, User Expectations 2 Comments

Art Update: Are You Scared of the Dark!?

Quick art update. I finished the “Pet Da Kitty Cat” and “Slam Dunk” title screens, and finished the game and title screen for “Lights Out!” Check ’em out…

I think that’s some good work for two days… Keep on trucking…

Posted in Art Tagged 2D Art, Android, Android Artwork, Android Game Development, Animation, Art, Artwork, Blog, Design, Development, Droid, First Game, Game, Game Art, Game Design, Indie, Indie Game 1 Comment
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