Where did the time go?

It seems like a lot of time has been passing between my posts lately. And I swear it FEELS like only hours have passed. Time is moving ridiculously fast right now for me. I cannot seem to keep up with everything. For those not in the know, my wife had a baby just under a couple weeks ago (so now we are a family of four) and that has definitely been something new. My son had spent a while in the NICU when he was born, so I missed out on all the fun newborn-y stuff, like the horrible black-tar shits, and the need to feed a zillion times throughout the day and night. So I've gotten little sleep recently, and it's got my head all over the place.

I'm trying to work on the minuscule freelance stuff I have left on my plate, and find new work to bring in the much-needed income we need. (Read: I have no work. Need Money. If you have something you need done, please contact me!)

I am also working on some new things to sell online. In particular, I am currently working on a post-modern top-down RPG tileset intended to be sold through gamedevfort.com I've been working on this thing for 3 days, and it's turning out pretty sweet. No, I won't show it off until it's up for sale on gamedevfort.com

My game projects have been stalled, but not forgotten. I learned some cool tricks from my daily "social media scan" process which I want to give a try for my S3D game project, and I have been planning some new projects in my head. Soon to be dropped into concept docs, and fleshed out more....Well, soon I hope. Father Time has been a real ass. Someone give him a sleeping pill so I can find the time to get things done!

...Back to work... er... no, wait. Off to sleep...dammit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Poisoned

I got pretty bad chemical poisoning from some home renovations and was stuck in bed for a couple days, and my wife is now ill from taking care of me and the kid and tending to things, so now I gotta take care of her, so more delays in development it seems. Pitch WILL be finished eventually, but with how the lemons are being handed out by life right now, I just don't know when.

So much for that

Doesn't look like I will be getting any progress on Pitch today either. I spent most of the day doing accounting crap for the wonderful taxes that need to be handled. 10,000 Deaths are not enough for the asshole who invented taxes. And 10,000 Deaths are not enough for the assholes who continue the tradition.

Wasted Time

Yesterday was a total bust. My juices just were not flowing I guess. Everything I tried to do went to shit. I haven't had a day like that in a long time. Whatever, here is hoping today is better.

Why is the new Unity UI so insane?

Hello, March 2015. My aren't you a crazy cold one aren't you? (About a foot of snow covers everything as far as I can see out my window...)

Well my first encounter with Unity's new UI has left me searching for answers to something that really shouldn't have been a question. What? The retarded over-sized Canvas that gets drawn in the Scene view. What the hell were the Unity devs thinking?

This sums up the problem with Unity UI Canvas pretty well.

The image above I found in a thread on the Unity forums. Credit to the owner. It is not mine. And I think that it sums up the problem with Unity UI rather perfectly. I'm using the Unity 2D Sprite system to create my game, and then I was going to add the menu using the shiny new UI system, and a hair-pulling, mind-numbing truly baffling situation occurs when one tries to add in a menu. I added in a Button control to my scene, which tosses in the Canvas and EventSystem objects as well. But the Text on the Button never showed up. Why? Because the stupid text was sitting about 4000 pixels off screen!

After a few google searches, I learned that this is the proper behavior of Unity UI. Why? I don't know why. It's stupid. But once you know about this really stupid design, then you can get down to using the seriously powerful and useful Unity UI.

More to Life than you see at first glance.

I've been playing Fantasy Life for the 3DS (Nintendo's great little mobile gaming platform for those that have been living under a rock) and I absolutely am addicted to the game. I play for anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours every day or every other day. Finding the time to play isn't too hard. I usually play on man's favorite throne, or just before bed, or sometimes just while hanging out in the living room with my family. Anyway, the game is great.

I've beaten the main story of the game and there is still so much more to do. The replay-ability is insane. I'll not write any spoilers here for anyone who may be playing the game at this time. I will say that there are side-quests that you will get early on that you cannot complete until after you beat the game, and even later. I'm a pretty high level, and have done a lot of grinding, and there are still over 500 monsters that I cannot even put a dent into with my best weaponry.

I highly recommend that you give the game a try if you have a 3DS, and if not, then go get one and get Fantasy Life, because it's a great game with a lot to do, and a lot to enjoy. Everything from the graphics to the music, the story, the gameplay mechanics, the balancing. It's all there. I'm thoroughly impressed by this title, and there are very few games I've played which are able to come close to the fun factor which can be found here.

In other news, I realized that my version of Unity was not up to date compared to my wife's version; so I downloaded the latest build last night before bed. Time to go install it and get back to Flip16.