Well it's the end of July now...

...and here's a progress image of my mobile game as it was when I was working on Gingerbread (Android 3.2).

Late May Update: What's been accomplished

So progress with my mobile project has gone slower than I'd thought and liked, but that's life and until I win the lottery and become an indie developer I think there will be inevitable delays to my project's work schedule.

Any who...I guess I started this project a couple of months ago and so far I have completed the following:

• Layout of the menu flow and one game mode scene
• Input of letters and output of their corresponding value (once submit button is pressed)
• Submit button to clear array and output word score
• Delete button to clear array
• Store a list of "dummy" data a.k.a four letter words
• Player score incremented when the correct word is entered

There's so much more for me to do and it can get a little depressing thinking about everything that I need to get through to achieve this massive goal solo, but I will finish this game and publish it.

I have also spent time this month documenting the game fully so that in the event that I need to convince anyone external to the project that it's awesome and they should support me financially I have this to whip out.

The design has changed since I started this project a number of times, but I feel that I finally have a good game designed and will not be making any more massive changes to the design only tweaks.  I did initially want to use June to tidy up the code and improve the UI but as I still have a lot of the functionality unfinished there's no point in wasting time playing in Photoshop making designs for a game that's not nearly finished.

Once I have the word matching script sorted out that will be quite a significant part of the work done as it's the core functionality for all game modes.  So then and only then will I get to add fantastic colours to my game, I'm hoping this will drive me forwards and act a reward for me.

With the release of Ice-cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) on Android and my phone contract coming up for renewal it's a great time for me to test whether my game will work on this new firmware update.  So once I get my upgrade (when I decide on a phone) I'll be testing the game in both versions of Android.

Game-wise, I completed Mass Effect 3 and have now started Darksiders.  This month I don't intend to get as much gaming done as work on my mobile game.  This should ensure I haven't got the added pressure of having to do both and should let me work on the word matching functionality.

I've seriously failed on producing a game dissection of both ME3 and Blue Toad and I probably won't get it done this month either at least not early this month anyway.  Luckily both of these are still fresh in my mind so I can write up something when I do have some spare time later this month.

So this month the plan is:

• More mobile game development with a hope to get the word matching complete, some output for the player when they enter a word, saving to their profile high score board and implementing a pause menu.  
• Game: Darksiders

If anyone's got an Android phone and would be interested in helping me test my game once it's ready let me know :)

May: Progress update

So around mid-May I finally completed Mass Effect 3. So now I have two game dissections to write before the end of the month. I could probably get the single player of Portal 2 out of the way before June hits (I know it's shocking that I haven't played it yet) but I'm going to use this time to work solely on my mobile game. Progress took a nose dive after the last update post but I have gotten back on the horse and am back to work.

Hopefully my friends with Android phones will let me share with them the first version.

Bounty: The Proposition

A few weeks ago I got some time to revisit this chapter for my story Bounty.  I have continued where I left off last where the protagonist and her family had been captured and had come face-to-face with their captor.

I have decided to give my protagonist the name of "Angela" so that I'm not constantly referring to her as "the woman".  I think the discovery of her name to the player will be introduced within the first section.  After researching an appropriate name for this character I have decided to give her the name Angela as this was a common female name from the renaissance time.  It may change later but for now I'm content with it.

Please feel free to comment and let me know what you think.  All names of people and cities are placeholder at the moment.

Quick catch up

So last week, I worked to consolidate my menus into one script file.  So when I want to display any menu it calls the one file and from there the correct scene.  Later, I hope to change this to use only one scene to display the menus.  This shouldn't be such a big job so I'm happy to leave it until the project is functional when I'm optimising the entire game.  I was also working to resolve this one particular issue last week for ages, but now that I'm over that I can press on :)

I have to say my break down development plan has really helped me focus on what tasks I need to achieve and I'll definitely be doing this more in the future.  The times I spend on it each day do vary i.e. with this one issue I spent a lot more time than my estimated length to sort it so it has obviously had an impact on the remainder of my workload.

Out of 20 tasks I have 15 left to do.  Ok, so not massive progression, but I'm getting there slowly and I can track exactly how much work I have left.

I'm getting through Mass Effect 3.  I haven't sunk a vast amount of time into it, but I am prioritising my Unity work over it.  At the mmoment I think this is alright.  I think I'm 16 hours in so that's not too bad, it is quite hard to avoid the constant discussions about the ending though. I find I have to run away from people "lalala-ing" with my hands over my ears to keep myself from being prematurely exposed.  Soon I'll be safe to listen again in public.

I've also written short extension to my bounty idea which I'll be posting probably next week. I'm not sure whether to keep writing in a linear fashion for this idea or move on to something else.  Time will tell.

So, April's going well so far.