Minor update (and, sorry, no screenshots again). Last night I managed to get the character in and moving over the grid. No animation, and no collisions, so that's not ideal, but at least some minor progress was made.

After dropping better than $300 for a year of Unity as motivation... and, typically, waiting two months to actually put time into it... I'm actively working on project for a game jam. It's called 1-Room RPG; I've set phased goals for myself, which is a pattern I hope to repeat on future projects. I'll outline that here.

Perhaps predictably, my last effort at picking up game development went about as well and as far as the previous ones (well, not nearly, actually, since I released exactly nothing last time).

At least this time I'm not attempting to switch game engines; we're still attempting Unity. I've since invested a bit of time in it (money as well; a second monitor has helped specifically with Unity dev), so we'll see.

As mentioned last time, I ripped the basic elements out of several reasonably simple game ideas to come up with obnoxiously basic game ideas -- essentially single game mechanics out of which I intend to create one game a month using Unity. My intention is to target Android with all of them, as that's the platform I'm mainly interested in working with.

Up first: Match 3.

I'm going all out this time! I've abandoned my Twitter avoidance, further challened myself to actually ship things by joining up with OneGameAMonth, and even laid out the (single) central mechanics for my first 11 games. No, seriously, it's not as stupid as it sounds.

That last part, at least.

Let me explain. Please?

Over the last... fifteen years, probably, I've been through several blog platforms and at least half a dozen combinations of programming languages, frameworks, and deployment targets. On the plus side, each time I get closer to actually releasing something. On the minus side, "closer."

In another mild letdown, I've managed to do something visually cool without making any particularly impressive progress on the whole actual gameplay thing. But that's coming! I did diagram the fight API, so I think the next thing that gets done will be the actual UI for that. Exciting! In the meantime, a picture!

Yep! Not exactly a huge advancement, but hey, it's something else to show off. Unit listing and detail views were the first thing I wanted to get running, partially to make sure I was actually getting the right info from the server, and partially to have something to look at for encouragement as I start getting into the actual difficult parts.

A quick update to the benchmarks... surprisingly, with an actual login action in place, it's running faster than it was before.

After finishing this term's final exams (Japanese language school) yesterday, a nice, relaxing Thursday spent pulling my hair out over Java sounded great, so... little bit of masochism there, yes.

I actually made quite a bit of progress!

I didn't have a lot of time tonight, but I finally did something gameplay-related! So that's a step!

Despite having to abandon quite a bit of the more advanced Tornado-Redis interaction I was hoping for (the state of the art is apparently either kind of crap or a little beyond me just yet), I'm finally at the point where my lovely, speedy websocket server is taking orders and serving up piping hot data to the Android client. So the basics are technically in place!

In response to a post on this project's TIGSource development log (thanks to to Tiblanc for commenting!), this is my rundown on the aforementioned really, really naive websocket performance tests I've done.

In another (hopefully temporary) retreat, after exhaustively testing tornado-redis' connections and deciding that either I utterly fail to understand them or they Just Don't Work, I ripped them out and went with the standard Python redis library. Which, of course, works like a charm. Go figure.

The reality of tornado-redis is either massively convoluted (if that's what I wanted, I would have gone with twisted) or it just does not work outside of the tornado event loop (hoping this is the case). I'd have probably gotten further tonight if I'd excluded the beer, but hey, it's the weekend!

Yep, I'm going to flatter myself a little bit here.

Assuming anyone is interested enough to keep tabs, I'm going to go ahead and lay out how I'm hoping to do things and what that means both for this project and for this blog. If you actually read this, let alone anything that follows it... I love you a little bit.

It begins... again!

After my previous attempt at an Android Seven-Day Roguelike entry (we parted on friendly but premature terms), I figured I would go back to what I know to give myself a better chance at actually releasing something. Since I'm primarily a server-side developer, that means online gaming. Hooray!

Today's victim: Nikola

I've gone through several platforms in my ongoing attempt to fail at blogging as often as possible. This site previously ran on Textpattern, which I liked, but the admin area was... confused. Also, I kind of forgot to update it for about seven years, and applying all those fixes at once... well, it wasn't happy. Understandably so.