We’re coming up on being half-way through our weekend game dev party and I’m glad to say that we have a lot to show for it. You’ve probably already seen some of the artwork Ryan has created in his last post and I’ve made huge progress with the UI.  If things keep going this way we’ll be done with this game in no time!

I’ll try to touch on some of the stuff I’ve worked on during the past day. All of the UI elements besides the achievement/insult bar are up and running. I spent a good amount of time coding debugging the animations for the timer and multiplier bars to make sure that they’d work on different size screens. I got pretty lucky on this one because the animations ran fine on my phone, but I tried running the game on a 320×240 screen to test for another issue and discovered they weren’t running properly there. Thankfully it didn’t take very long for me to figure out what the issue was. (Designing for different size screens is pretty much the most difficult thing about working with the Android platform)

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing about an issue I had with using the phones back button to return to the main menu. Now, if you’re familiar with android, this isn’t generally a recommended practice because it could interfere with the activity life cycle, but we just thought that having an exit button on screen during the game made it look too cluttered. I changed the code to what I thought would give us the functionality we needed and OF COURSE it didn’t work. Now, I can’t even begin to tell you how frustrated this made me. I spent about 2.5 hrs debugging until I finally thought to reference a bit of code that I had used back when I was working through one of my android books. I made the same change to that code that I made to ours and it worked. This just served to make me even more frustrated because I couldn’t see any difference in the two programs. I finally discovered that there was a typo in the book I used to help us with our framework and once I corrected it… BOOM, HEADSHOT!

Other than that, everything has been coming along smoothly. I even had time to add in a nice little bonus score animation that falls from the timer and increments up from zero to show you how much extra you’re getting by completing each round faster than the time allotted. It looks really cool and I’m hoping we can figure out how to get a little game play demonstration up here later tonight.

For now, though, back to work. Next on my list is the lovely loading screen that Ryan showed you guys and implementing the main menu. Time to brush up on my knowledge of IOStreams 🙂