Ghosts in the Wrapper

A GHOST POSSESSED MY GRANOLA BAR WRAPPER AND COMPLETED A PUZZLE ON MY ANDROID TABLET!

...Or, y'know some logical explanation...

I absentmindedly placed the wrapper for a granola bar on top of my android tablet, and it moved around a bit from the air flow in the room, and apparently the material is conductive or something, because my tablet started to respond as if I were using it. And to top it off, I had a game open on the tablet and the granola bar wrapper solved a puzzle in the android game.

Testing the Market

I submitted my first item for sale to the CodeCanyon Envato marketplace before heading to bed last night. Crossing my fingers in hopes that it gets accepted and gets some sales so I can start to see some kind of ROI for my time investment.

If things don't go well with CodeCanyon, then I will end up selling the item myself directly via a PayPal button. But I really hope that things do go well. I've got a lot on my mind lately, and some extra funds would help relieve the stress.

Zombies Til Dawn has seen under 20 plays so far, and hasn't made a penny in ad revenue, so I'm rather depressed about that. I am considering selling the source to the game. Interested? Let me know.

My dashboard says that people are watching this blog, but I'm suspicious that it's mostly just bots. Please prove me wrong by actually writing a comment.

Zombies Til Dawn

Well it's been a little while since I posted anything. Even though I completely missed out on LD32, I finished my game anyway and today I am here to announce the fully-playable and mobile-ready (to the best of my knowledge) HTML5 game Zombies Til Dawn.

You can play the game by clicking here.

I opted to avoid the use of any third party libraries. The game is made with pure JS, and should run equally well on all platforms. I've tested with my desktop in 3 browsers, and my android phone and tablet. I'd love to hear if the game works or does not work on your iOS devices or your browser.

I kept a log of all the time that went into the game, and it totals at 13 hours, 13 minutes, and 13 seconds... yeah, lol it surprised me too.

The game has an adsense banner so I can try to make a few pennies off of it. If you really like the game, I'd be happy to sell you an ad-free license. Contact me.

So... I know you are wondering What IS Zombies Til Dawn?

Zombies Til Dawn is a turn-based strategy game where the goal is simple. You must survive until dawn. Your means of survival is in surrounding yourself with explosives and hoping that the zombies get blown up and don't get to you.

I hope that you enjoy my little game. Well, not little, but minimalist. It clocks in at 1965 lines of code! Please, try out Zombies Til Dawn and let me know what you thought about the game!

Of all the luck...

Seriously. WTF!? My ENTIRE day has been pretty much a complete waste of time. I woke up and noticed that my phone was sitting on the "boot" animation screen. I shrugged and ignored it. I checked it again about 30 minutes later, and it STILL was on the boot animation screen. So I knew there was a problem. This tends to happen every once in a while when over-the-air updates come through, or a system app crashes. The fix is usually to pop out the battery and then pop it back in and power the phone back on...

Well, I did just that, and it resumed the boot animation for an hour, then the animation froze and the phone did nothing. SHIT! Alright, so time to dig in and try to resolve this quickly so I can get on with my day...HAH!

I've got an old smartphone. No, really, an OLD AT&T branded HTC Inspire 4G (Also known correctly as the HTC Desire HD aka The "ACE".) Several years ago I unlocked the phone and flashed a custom ROM to the device; And until today it had worked great. MUCH better than the stock HTC Sense that ships with the phone. So, the first thing I did was boot into recovery mode using the Volume-down button + Power-button power-on trick and choose RECOVERY from the hboot bootloader. And then I proceeded to attempt to create a backup of my device's data, settings, apps, and shit. Well, that failed miserably for whatever reason. Maybe it has to do with the screwed up boot? I don't have a clue. It doesn't matter at this point anyway...

So with all my data lost anyway, I formatted all my partitions and cleared my dalvik cache and proceeded to attempt to re-install my custom rom. Things appeared to be going smoothly just like it did years ago when I first installed it...

Then, after booting the freshly installed rom and going through all the motions of setting up my google account, and configuring all the settings how I like them....I have a nice ugly NO SERVICE notice on the screen. Well that's just great. I have a phone with no way to use it as a PHONE. I've had that message pop up a couple times over the last two years, and the solution was to simply reboot, then things were fine... NOT THIS TIME, NOoooo. So, NO SERVICE is pretty useless. I went back into the recovery mode and tried again, cause y'know, maybe something dropped a bit somewhere...

After the THIRD attempt, I decided to say FUCK IT and go back to the stock rom...7 failed attempts of finding a working HTC Sense rom, and I said screw it, and started looking at other options... I tried out 12, yes, TWELVE different custom roms and NOT ONE OF THEM worked for me. In the process, I ended up installing two new recovery images, flashing 6 new boot images, and factory-reset/formatting more times than I can remember...

I finally have gotten truly fed-up and I have yet another custom rom installed, and it still says NO SERVICE on my phone, and I've decided to contact customer support. So I head over to the AT&T site and after a chat with a rep, I learn that it's too damn early to talk to a technical support agent, and that I gotta try back later during business hours!

So here I am, more than 12 hours later, still with no usable phone, and that's not the only problem. I did not get to finish my LD32 entry because of all of this bullshit today. I was so close to finishing last night, but I needed to get sleep. In hind sight that was a mistake, because I got shit sleep, and then did not get to finish my entry because I was stuck dealing with a stupid piece of shit smartphone.

Right, so yeah. end-rant and all that.
Until next time, this is the Rambling Indie Richard Marks.

Behind the scenes

The past few days I have been carefully considering our studio's next move. Some things have come to light which have brought us to a position of needing to make some serious decisions with how to proceed. We have a few new projects that are starting the early stages of concept and design, and we are working on some new marketable resources which will become available for purchase in the near future.

I am working on a high resolution stylized castle tileset completely in vector format using Inkscape. I'm pretty satisfied with the results so far. I will have some visuals to show off soon.

Pushing Pixels

I have spent most of today working on some isometric tiles for a client. Tasked with creating damaged roman roads with a near photo-realistic aesthetic. I am needing to really stretch my pixel pushing powers to get this one done. I don't think I can show off the work publicly yet, so I won't be posting any screenshots of the set until I clear it with the client.

In other news, we've not been getting any positive feedback from publishers for our HTML5 game. So that sucks. Still waiting to hear back from a few more. I'm not going to get my hopes up though. I think the market is done for.

A Day of Rest

I didn't get anything done today. Just relaxed, did some reading, and light programming just for the hell of it (solved a few challenges on codeeval.com) and pushed a few pixels in GIMP toying with the many features that I never usually touch. Nothing to really show, as I didn't save any of the images.

Something fun

I have realized that I really want to work on an RPG. Nothing massive, just a simple down-scaled fun little RPG. I thought of first creating a typical top-down 2D RPG, but I wanted to create something that I could possibly turn into a larger game down the line, and I wanted to learn some more new things and hone my current skill set. Thus I have chosen to build a 3D RPG for the first time. I don't expect this to be a simple project, but I do intend to bring it around full-circle from concept to completion. I am creating a 3D remake of my SAWD RPG project. I am taking the game world and expanding from ASCII graphics to full-blown 3D. I am going with a low-poly aesthetic for my own sanity since I am the one modeling everything. I'm going to use low-resolution textures as well, with 64x64 being the most common size texture, with maybe 128x128 for characters. I'm not going to use normal mapping, or complex lighting.

3D modeling will be done with Wings3D for the static meshes, and I have yet to come to a decision for animated models. Textures will be created with GIMP. The game development will be done with Unity 5 using C# scripting.

Indie Legwork

We are trying to locate a publisher/sponsor for one of our HTML5 games, and have been contacting as many as we can find. You would be surprised how many there are, and how much effort it can take to dig up their contact information and write them! Each has their own set of quality standards and requirements too, and many are not English-native, so acceptance may require localization. Hopefully we find a bite soon and can actually see a return on our investment.

A change is needed

After much deliberation, we at Bang Bang Attack Studios have decided to change our course for our business. There is much work to be done on this front, and I may not be posting as frequently here as I have been until the work is done.
I'm not going to disclose our new direction just yet, but just know that there is going to be a very drastic change in what Bang Bang Attack Studios is all about.

Mobile Music Creation

Working on a piece in AudioSauna
(blurred notes and removed keyboard to avoid illegal reproductions of my work)

For one of my HTML5 games, I needed to create some music tracks which were not crazy-long and large files, and sounded great on my mobile devices' shitty little speakers. I typically use SunVox for my music creations, however, I recently have started using a web-based composition tool called AudioSauna.

This tool provides a multi-track sequencer and apparently a sampler (which I have not used yet) and a piano-roll for editing patterns. Two synthesizer modules can be used to create nearly an endless variety of sounds, which opens up the doors to creativity.

You can save your project files to continue working on them later, and you can export both loops and your full song to .wav format.

This amazing tool is easy to use, and I highly recommend giving it a try for your next music composition.

Disappointed

Why am I disappointed? Because my unityAds dashboard says

Revenue: $ 0.00

and it's not exactly what I was hoping for with releasing into the Pitch. Oh well, will just have to make a better game, and use a better ad provider. Clearly unityAds is a waste of time.

Spent much of today cleaning again. I'll have some dev-related stuff to report tomorrow though.

Spring Cleaning

Didn't get much development done today. Had a house to clean, and I've got an injured hand which makes it take even more time and effort. Probably will not get any dev done today, as it's already getting late. Oh well.

More Pixeling Practice

I had so much fun creating the MasterS of MagiC logo design, that I decided to create another one. Here is the Kingdom Carnage logo.

Kingdom Carnage NES Pixel-art logo design.

Once again, this was created using GIMP, and the original NES palette colors. (Except the watermark overlay)

I think that will be all the artsy things that I work on for myself for a little while. I have some freelance work that needs to get done, and it's time to work on the next game project for Bang Bang Attack Studios.

Pixeling Practice

In order to practice my pixeling skill,and to prepare for the possibility of getting an NES-style logo design freelance gig, I created this piece today.

MasterS of MagiC NES Pixel-art logo design.

Created using GIMP, and the original NES palette colors. (Except the watermark overlay)

Pouring Java

I've spent most of today working on some in-house tools for increasing productivity. I got tired of writing out boilerplate code for my Java classes, and using an IDE's class wizards was annoying me to no end, so I ended up writing a little command line utility which I call pour. Get it? You pour java...anyway...

I developed my little tool using Ruby, since it is so great for string manipulation, and easy file handling. Pour is short on features, but works exactly as I expect it to, and only outputs exactly what I want, and is far faster than any class wizard I've found.

I can specify a local template file to pour, and it will use it to create the classes, or, I can create a template in my home directory to use the template globally, or I can use the built-in template. I can specify to generate an entry point function, and I can specify a package. These few features turned a task that normally takes about 3 minutes, and turns it into about a 5 second task.

In addition, I set up gradle and grunt for a very simple auto-build workflow that allows me to focus on the code editing, and not on having to build the project, run tests, build the jar, and execute the program. I can just edit the code, save it, and my auto-build setup does the rest. Very fast workflow. I like it a lot, and I'm going to have to find a similar solution for my C++ development now, because this kicks major ass.