Speech bubbles

I have been wanting to give my game a bit more personality, so I have been focusing on four characters that offer options and upgrades. For example, approaching the bard exposes his speech bubble to toggle music and he animates accordingly. This should intuitively lay out all the options for the player to explore, rather than offering some gargantuan menu with text everywhere.

I was very impressed by the performance on my Android device, where dozens of characters were fully animated and moving around with no apparent loss of frame rate. It is as optimized as it ever will be. Plus it will have an expected release size of only 15mb.

It looks like it is going to be just design and programming from here on out. All the weapons, backgrounds, and animations are finished.

PAX East

I will be attending PAX East in Boston! This will be my first visit, so I am stoked. The trip should be easy considering I will be going with someone, while stopping midway in New Haven, Connecticut, for sights of historic lighthouses and museums, and tastes of some classic American restaurants.

It is great leaving at a good stopping point. I just spent two days trying to build Goat Mechanic for iOS because of certificate and entitlement garbage. Anyone who has made an iOS app knows the number of potential problems because the process is more sensitive than a rotten cavity. To me, the number of possible solutions to each problem is worse.

It turns out my Mac Mini is now five years old; it cannot be upgraded to Mountain Lion OS X with the latest version of Xcode that Corona now requires. I have to use an earlier build, so hopefully there are no severe issues later down the road.

IGDA Meeting

I am one of the two presenters at the next IGDA Baltimore chapter meeting tomorrow, Thursday the 14th. My talk will be 20 minutes long, accompanied with a PowerPoint presentation titled "The Motivation Behind Small Games". Already at least 50 people are coming, so join now!

Today, I am heading to New York City to attend this MeetUp on "Making Money with HTML5 Games in 2013". It should be very interesting to hear from individuals who specialize in this technology.