Otto Von Dev Blog

2012 Updates and Such

2012-01-04T14:51:00.000-07:00

So I totally suck at updating this thing in any reasonable sense. It was a very busy period since February of last year through the end of the year. My son, Andrew, was born in April and a lot cascaded from that event, as you'd expect. Summer vacation was then upon us and a lot of things cropped up meaning that nothing happened with OttoJotts. Then the new school year was upon us and then Halloween and then Turkey Day and then Christmas (holy crap where did December go?!) and then New Year's. Wow.
So now it's 2012. The end of the world will be upon us in 352 days so I better get cracking on this game. What's on tap for right now is finishing up the two-player games which are started (mostly it's just friend management right now) and getting out Alpha 4 with those and then getting the rest of the functionality into Alpha 5 so I can get Beta 1 polished and out the door. The goal for Alpha 4 is to be out to testers by the end of February, Alpha 5 by Memorial Day, and the final game by Independence Day. What? You don't measure your year by holidays?
So that's the plan. It looks good on paper and may actually be do-able. We'll have to see. I just feel that there's an awful lot left to do and this really, sadly, isn't my full-time job. It's not even really a part-time job what with playing dad with the kiddos and stuff. Hopefully I'll be able to devote some more time to getting this project done. I've only got like 5 other ideas I want to get working on before the world ends in, *checking* yup, 352 days.

New OttoJotts UI Ideas

2011-02-27T23:41:00.000-07:00

I was in the shower today getting ready to pick up Cathy from a birthday party (no, not that one - we unfortunately missed that one *headdesk*). This was not her cousin Zavi's party in Laramie but my best friend Dan's son Matthew's 6th birthday. It was at Chuck E Cheese's and now that I've wasted far too much time with off-topic over-explanation, let me get back to the point of this post - user interface ideas for OttoJotts.
So while I was in the shower I began thinking back to the days when I used to play Jotto and what usually had to suffice for Jotto sheets when we'd exhausted our supply. We opted for legal pads, a ruler, and a pen. So this made me wonder - what if I made the UI look like a legal pad (or at least just lined paper) and then had all of the buttons and letters be handwritten? I think it might be "retro", but I think retro is hip these days (it's so hard to tell sometimes). PLUS, it's something that I, with my limited graphic artist skills could likely pull off. That was a definite benefit.
I think it would be very cool to have a slick UI like, say, Words with Friends, but I'm just NOT a graphic artist. Been there, done that, got my wrist slapped. I may just need to accept my limitations on this particular point (not that I ever thought I was a graphic artist). What does this mean for Alpha 4? Absolutely nothing. I'm sure I'll find ways to try to derail myself from actually working on code and work on the cool new UI, but it needs to wait until Beta 1. The alphas are all about functionality; betas are about polish. So that's kind of the thinking for, say, April. And I've got a cool idea for the badges, but that's later as well.
I guess we'll see how well I can keep this "shiny new toy" on the back burner. I've actually managed to get most of the friend and game creation code done and in, which was surprisingly smooth. There's still a lot of hardening that needs to happen, but I think that once I get into that mode it will be straightforward to do pretty much the same thing to every file. Plus, I need to make the code a little harder to exploit, which I hope I can get done with a minimum of fuss. Let's just hope I can keep up some of the focus here to make this project FINALLY successful.

Decisions, decisions

2011-02-26T09:40:00.000-07:00

So after sleeping on it last night, I have a plan. Scary, I know. I've always planned on integrating OttoJotts into Facebook as well and, since I'm going to do that, I think I need to release the game with 2 player games. First, as I mentioned in my previous post, I don't think there's really enough solitaire content to make the game compelling for 1 player. The 2 player game is really where it's at and, when I honestly think about why I did the 1 player game version, it was mostly to vet the concept and test the subsystems. Now that the 1 player game is mostly complete (sans hardening) it's time to really get into the 2 player game. I need to remind myself about the success that Words with Friends had and it's only a 2 player game - there is no solitaire game available.
So, with that said, I've recommitted myself to finishing the bloody thing with 2 player games available. I've been a bit down about the lack of progress and I'm sure that's what's going on (plus it's been a bit tight financially at Chez DeVoe). I think the need to make a bigger, better splash with OttoJotts is far more important than trying to get just something out the door. If I put out a piece of crap (fart apps, anyone?) then people are less likely to trust that my follow-up games are going to be any good. As the first app from the "studio", I need to make sure that it's a good one that people will think is good quality and good value for the money (if not excellent). Then, as my other apps come online, they'll be more inclined to get something else from me.
What this all means, I guess, is that I'm back on the initial track. After a reasonable night's sleep, I actually have some ideas for handling the game creation. Yes, it will take a little time to get it sorted, but I think it will be cleaner in the end, re-use some code (which is always good), and still meet the needs that the 2 player games require. So, back to the salt mines.

What to do?

2011-02-25T18:59:00.000-07:00

So I've been having a bit of crisis of faith on OttoJotts. I think the game is pretty fun and should be enjoyable for total word geeks like me. The concern I'm having, though, is that as I get further and further into the two player games, the more things crop up that need to be addressed. For example, most recently I realized that in order to do two player games I need to revamp how the games are set up - and that they'll be different for 2 player than for solitaire. This, in and of itself, isn't what's causing the crisis, but rather it's the whole process. I've been working on 2 player games all this year. I haven't been doing it full time, but I've spent upwards of 2 weeks of actual time (80 hrs) working on it and I keep finding whole new sets of things I need to do before I can move forward. So now the question is - should I keep moving forward with the 2 player games and have them available at launch or should I launch the single player (solitaire) games and then, in an update, add the 2 player games?
I'd say that a fair portion of the games in the App Store are single player. You might be able to challenge someone to beat your score or something, but in general the two player/multiplayer market isn't quite as prevalent. So having 2 player, competitive gaming would be a differentiator for my game, but the time it's taking (or at least seems to be taking) is making me wonder if it will EVER get out.
Currently I'm still torn on what to do. I'm not sure that the single player/solitaire game is going to be compelling enough to keep someone playing. There's not enough there yet (achievements, etc) to make it something that a player would come back to over and over again. The graphics need to be redone to make it look a bit more professional (any graphic artists willing to work on a royalty basis out there?) and the game play needs to be cleaned up and the app hardened overall (error handling, etc). So I've still got at least 2 weeks of work left to do all of that, even if I dump 2 player games for now.
So, what to do?

Been WAAAAAY Too Long

2011-02-19T23:51:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a LONG time since I've posted, but we've had a LOT going on here. To give a quick run-down:

The 9-5 got interesting at the end of the year as my contract may have ended abruptly. Thankfully it didn't, but it was still quite a bit of shock that it might have happened.
The spousal unit got REALLY sick. Sick to the point where she's still on short-term disability from HER job trying to recover. And when she does recover, she likely won't have said job. *sigh* She's been overly prone to illness lately because...
The spousal unit is PREGNANT! Yeah, trust me - it was a surprise. A wonderful one, no doubt, but a surprise nonetheless. SO much to do and so little time. Due date is May 2nd and his name is going to be Andrew Ximun William. Yeah, we're sort of into two middle names. His big sister is just thrilled that she's going to be a big sister. :)

Other than that, the work I've decided to tackle for Alpha 4 is the meat of the project - two player, server-based games. That's requiring a lot of doing both PHP and Objective-C, but things are progressing. I've gotten a lot accomplished over the past few days, getting friends lists into the database and retrievable. I just finished creating accounts/logging into an existing account code. Took longer than I'd hoped but it came together nicely at the end. I'm storing hashed passwords (obviously) in the DB, but when I looked at the size of the hash I calculated half the size it really was, so I couldn't log in (because the two hashes didn't match - I wonder why?). I finally got that sorted out and things have progressed wonderfully since then.
Today has been a day about friends and creating games. I've got code in there to randomly find an opponent who's similarly rated (I'm using a modified Elo system for rankings). The idea is that you'll play someone who won't completely blow you away - unless you choose a friend who so far-outclasses you that it's ridiculous. Good thing is that Elo takes that into account and more than 400 point ratings differences tend to result in no change (as the result is practically guaranteed).
Searching for an opponent by their email is almost there as well. I just need to hook up the iOS code to do the query, but the PHP is solid on the back-end. One thing that I haven't done yet and I really need to make sure happens before release is to bullet-proof the PHP back-end. PHP is generally derided for being not-as-security-rich as some other technologies. If you've got pretty confined entry/exit points, though, I think it can be pretty solid. Regardless, in the interest of getting Alpha 4 done and out to testers I've neglected that, but it will need to happen for Alpha 5/Beta 1.
Also thrown into the mix is a new website design. I think I'm getting a lot closer to actually finishing this bloody project and I thought the old design (while state of the art in 2001) has not aged well and was in sore need of replacement. I've gone with a Wordpress front end, but I need to tweak the hell out of it to make it more aligned with my ideas. There are some things that I'm not grokking from the posting/pages side of things with WP, but I'll beat up on it once I'm done with Alpha 3.
So, that's it from here for now. LOTS happening, but hopefully this will be done by May and I can take my paternity leave in the knowledge that I've got my game in the App Store paying for at least some of the diapers we'll need to get.

Alpha 3 Release

2010-10-02T22:03:00.000-06:00

The announcement on Facebook!

It's official - I just sent out Alpha 3 tonight. I wish it were a little more solid, but I've been testing it for a while and it seems stable. I've had a couple of bugs that I haven't been able to reproduce, so I'm going to spend a little time this next build working on using the Build and Analyze functionality. The next version is going to be HUGE, so it's important to get it all working solidly.
As I posted previously, the UI and game play changes for Alpha 3 are pretty good. I've added difficulty levels (making the game a lot easier to actually play), and the UI is cleaner. I've also captured some things and sent it over to a designer friend I'm hoping will be able to help with the graphics and the layout. I feel like there are places where it's pretty good but that there are far more places where it's just clunky and not working at all.
Of course the big thing is that this should let people play a little more frequently as the game won't be quite as impossible as the original. Jotto was a pretty niche product (and my mom and I were firmly centered in that niche), but I think it just couldn't really excel as a game because of it's difficulty. I expect that the game will be much more approachable now and to a wider variety of people.
There is still one thing I need to sort out with the word list, though, which is creating a simple word evaluation page so that people can rate words as Easy, Medium, or Hard. That should help segment some of the much harder words from casual players. I'm hoping that some of my Facebook friends will be able to help parse the list (it's pretty extensive) and provide a basic clumping of words by difficulty. It should be a quick change to the code to enable that in the code.
The next big step (and the next Alpha) will be to have two player games, which entails a TON. I need to get user accounts set up, figure out how to deal with people who change phones but want to keep their information, creating friend lists, getting multiple games working, and, of course, manage the basics of having a server-based game as opposed to a device-based one. Definitely a big challenge, especially the back-end piece. Still, I'm hoping that I'll be able to get it done in time for Christmas - that's my big goal. Hopefully before Thanksgiving - that would be awesome.
So, now that Alpha 3 is out the door, I guess I better get working on Alpha 4!

More UI updates and Alpha 3 status

2010-09-21T09:53:00.000-06:00

I've been working on the UI layouts for the Easy and Medium difficulty levels. So far it's been going pretty well with the change in direction, so I've got some ideas I need to get feedback on, so if you have an opinion, please share!

The latest version is showing the green and blue boxes around correct answers (green is correct placement). I'm trying to see whether the colors/placement/layout/style seem usable or if it's somewhat unpleasant. I'd like it to be a little more stylized eventually - probably rounded corners and they wouldn't necessarily abut one another - but for Alpha 3 it may be "good enough" to get feedback about the difficulty level game play. The good thing is that things have gone really well with this update. The only thing remaining for functionality is saving/loading and loading old games. The upgrade path has to be supported. I've also considered allowing games of more and less than 5 letters as that's all hooked up on the back-end already. And I'm considering allowing multiple games now, just no more than one game with a particular word length (no more than one 5 letter word game, for instance). Those would be some small updates but might make Alpha 3 a little bigger release.
I was just checking on my list of things that I wanted to do for Alpha 3 and I do have a little bit of work left. What I had on my list to accomplish was the following:

Online Leaderboard
Player data tracking for game play

Interestingly, I didn't do either of those, but the need to get difficulty levels was more compelling this time around. I may dump those for Alpha 3 just to finish this up and get it out to testers. I'm really curious how the game play works with the easy and medium difficulty levels. It may be cleaner as well because I'm going to be doing a LOT of back-end work with Alpha 4. That next big thing is two-player gaming, so that should be interesting. A LOT of things to do there; could easily take a couple of months to get everything working. It will be a huge amount of work to get all of the different elements integrated, but I do hope that I'll be finished with it by around November. I'd like to get it submitted to Apple around Halloween if possible so I can try to get it out to reviewers before Thanksgiving and out in time for the Christmas season. I don't think sales would be heavily impacted by the holidays, but folks who get a gift card for Christmas might drop $0.99 on my game.
So, if you have any feedback on the UI, please let me know. I think I like it "enough" for the time being to not really worry about it. I'm trying to get this all wrapped up by the weekend so I can get it released and then out to testers. Then it's all two-player games. Wowser!

Potential change for Alpha 3 UI

2010-09-18T14:39:00.000-06:00

Original Jotto (tm)
sheet

I've been considering the conundrum I've made for myself with this text coloring issue. I've not be able to get the text to display as I wanted without having to almost completely draw it by hand (and make using the Cocoa Touch classes worthless). I did, however, have something of an epiphany while deciding what to do. What I considered is this - what if the word the player picked was EERIE. Would a blue "I" be that terribly visible to a player? It would like very much like this: EERIE (the I is bolded in that word). In other words, yes, the word EERIE looks good when it's laid out in regular text, but for the game, it might make more sense to instead display the letters independently in boxes/labels, rather than try to just change the colors of individual letters. Stumbling upon this epiphany was kind of interesting. I had been, just to get the bloody thing done, considering doing some "lights" under the letters to show which were correct/right position, etc. But then it dawned on me that it's not a fixed font - it's proportional. Which meant that some letters, like W, would be very obviously green or blue, but that others, like I and J, would be much harder to see with colors.

Detail of the Jotto (tm) sheet

I had been thinking of NOT doing this but in retrospect it's what the original game does as well (as shown to the left). And yes, that was lifted from Wiki. Using the boxes (which will need to be dynamic, based on the number of letters in the game) will change the look of the game a little bit, but I think it will make it a lot cleaner in terms of what the player is viewing and should help simplify the display issues I was seeing. I just kind of wish that I had thought of this sooner.
On an amusing aside, before the advent of real word processors, my mom and I used to play this game a lot. Unfortunately, we ended up going through a lot of sheets and had an issue where we couldn't play without making sheets of our own. The places where we would normally buy the game didn't carry it anymore (it had sort of petered out in popularity by then), so we were kind of out of luck. There's only so much time you want to spend making tally sheets versus actually playing the game. My grandmother lives in New York (on Long Island) and there was actually a distributor of Jotto there on Long Island.

The notice at the bottom of the sheet

I recall the two of us driving there to get what felt like boxes and boxes of sheets. I then took those back with me to Laramie where we probably played a full box in the first two weeks I was home. Ahhh, good times.
I'm hoping this new direction will make things a lot easier moving forward. It should simplify the work that needs to be done and only slightly complicates the code (need to figure out which labels I'll be using for the different length words). Beyond that, though, I'm actually thinking I might be able to get this puppy done by Wednesday if things continue going as well as they have. Which they won't, so we're likely looking at Halloween. Here's hoping!

headdesk

2010-09-17T22:18:00.000-06:00

I've been working on OttoJotts all night and now I'm starting to get a headache from something I'm trying to do. The plan I had was to change the color of the letters in the word a person guessed to show them which letters were correct (blue) and which were correct and in the correct position (green). The problem is that there doesn't appear to be an easy way to change the color of a single letter without making a single UILabel object (which I don't want to do) - it would separate the letter and make it look pretty funky.
There is a type called NSAttributedString and NSMutableAttributedString which seem to satisfy my needs, but what I need (apparently) isn't available on iOS 4. And while I can create these objects, I can't seem to modify them easily. Or even difficultly. The problem seems to lie in a constant called NSForegroundColorAttributeName (jeez, Apple) that's not declared anywhere but AppKit. Unfortunately, AppKit is not an iPhone/iOS framework - just Mac OS X. So while I can create these things, I can't seem to manipulate them and change colors like I want. *headdesk*
I've got the code working for the new game play for the difficulty levels - that came together surprisingly quickly. I still need to do a little work on serializing (saving/restoring) the data, but for now, within the bounds of a single instantiation of the game, it seems to be working beautifully. I've got a lot more testing on it to make sure it's solid, but so far it's looking good.
Now all I need is to get it to display properly. *headdesk*

I keep distracting myself...

2010-09-16T21:13:00.000-06:00

I've found that when I'm working on things that occasionally I'll focus on things that aren't terribly important rather than getting something working. For instance, I've been working on Alpha 3 and making some good progress - got the entire create new game system reworked and it's acting well. Now I need to start looking at changing the game logic and display to work with the Easy, Medium, and Nightmare modes. And what I did I most recently find myself doing? Taking a snapshot and working on the background for the main game screen.
I mean, the background does need to be completed, but honestly - it can wait until I'm closer to being completed with the game play. It's hard, though, because I know that it needs to be done, it's something I can work on in my mental background, and I'm playing with the colors and layout anyway due to the Easy and Medium play. Still, though - like reading quickly - I sometimes have to remind myself to re-focus on what's important.

The clunky main game
interface screen

It's a little harder with independent projects because I'm not tracking it as closely as I would a project at work. The background IS ugly as compared to the rest of the app now because it's all clunky (as shown to the right). I did ask if the interface seemed non-intuitive and such and got back (from one person) that it seemed fine. I'm hoping that if I can make it a little prettier, use some better images, etc., that I can make it clearer what's being used for what. I need to just make sure that it's not becoming a "high priority" item for me, but rather staying in the background. I know that I'll get it done before I put out Alpha 3 and I'm actually making faster progress than I expected. Still have a couple of changes to make to the data flow to support the additional checks for letters - which ones are right and which ones are in the right position. Sort of brings in some skills I haven't done with Xcode and objective-C, so it'll be a good learning experience. I just hope that I can get it sorted out quickly and back to doing what doesn't matter.
What kinds of things do you do when you're developing to keep yourself focused on the major tasks and not get sidetracked by the "cool" things you still have to do?

Ex Mediis Aevīs, Scientia

2010-09-14T10:40:00.004-06:00

Hey all. Just a quick note to check out my medieval blog as well. It's called Ex Mediis Aevīs, Scientia and it's located at http://exmediisaevis.blogspot.com. I hope you'll find it an interesting and amusing trip through the middle ages!

Alpha 3 Update (redux)

2010-09-14T07:56:00.004-06:00

Things are progressing well on the Alpha 3 front. I've redesigned the create game logic now, so it's a little cleaner in terms of creating single player games (the two player games are targeted for next release). Overall I'm pretty happy - spent about 3 hours and redesigned how games are created, including difficulty level. I've got a weird bug where it's not cleaning up completed games, but in retrospect I need to think about whether I should even do that as I plan on having those available after you finish. At the same time, that might be all server-based, so I'll punt for now and worry about it later.
I've got the levels sorted out for the game (the screen shot to the right shows the difficulty levels available). I still need to get the UI changes in place for the new difficulty levels, but I don't think it will take too long to get that sorted out. Nightmare is easy as it's just a simplification of what I've already got. It's Medium and Easy that are going to require the most revision. I did find out how to do what I want to do with them, which is good. I'm planning on having Easy show you the correctly placed matching letters in green and correct letters but in the wrong position in blue. Everything else will be black. Medium will just show you which letters are correct (in blue), not whether they're placed correctly. Hard will be the game the way it is now and Nightmare will be hella-hard (pun intended).
I'm hoping to make some good progress this week and maybe even have the new version available by next week. That would be just awesome if I can pull it off. Then, perhaps, it's time to spend a couple of months making Alpha 4 with two player games. OooOOooo. Ahhhhhh. Ohhhhhh. (For those of you who went to the Colorado Renaissance Festival when Dextre Tripp was there, it all makes sense; for everyone else, just nod your head.)

Alpha 3 Update

2010-09-11T09:20:00.005-06:00

It's been over a month since I sent out Alpha 2 and the main comment back from testers was: this game is really hard! I've decided I need to focus for Alpha 3 on adding in game difficulty. It's something I wasn't really planning on doing quite yet (it was going to be after this next release), but I think that in order to get the most feedback and to make the game approachable I need to get difficulty levels sorted out.
There are two main changes I need to make to get it working. The first is that I need to redesign the "create new game" functionality. It's kind of clunky right now design-wise, so I'm going to delve into that and get it cleaned up and segmented a little better than it is. The second is that I need to change the main game screen UI to support the easier levels.
The current UI looks like the image on the right. It's obviously very basic (and not terribly helpful), but the idea is that you find out how many letters from your word are in the computer's word. For TOMBS, none of those letters are in the computer's word. FIRED and GLYPH both share one letter, but that letter may or may not be in the right place. (In case you're wondering, the "Debug" button in the corner will show you the word in case you get stuck - but just in the Alpha games.)
I'm envisioning 4 different levels of game play. The first - Easy - will show you which letters are correct and in the right place and also which letters are correct but not in the correct position. Medium will display which letters are correct, just not whether they're in the right position. Hard will be the standard game - you only see how many letters in your word are correct, but not which ones. And Nightmare (because I do love me some Quake and Doom) will only let you know when you place the right letter in the right position (but won't show which letter). Yeah - nightmare indeed.
This is going to require quite a bit of redesign to the UITableViewCell to display this additional information. Plus, the whole background for the game board is very bland and uninteresting right now - just white with controls on it. I think it makes sense to beautify it a bit so it's not so jarringly different from the rest of the screens. So Alpha 3 will be a significant release. I just hope that I can get it working in relatively short order. I guess I better get cracking on it...

Alpha 2 Love

2010-08-07T15:45:00.002-06:00

It's official. On Thursday evening I sent out OttoJotts Alpha 2 to testers. I've picked up 3 more testers since Alpha 1, which I'm hoping will help when I start getting into needing to test multiplayer. The Alpha 2 has a LOT of stuff in it, including:

Statistics for game play, including games played, won, and average guesses per game
New help file - this is a huge improvement and MUCH better than Alpha 1's
New background images - basic changes, but look pretty good; not final, though
Server-based word lists (the entire word list is on the server now)
Persistence between launches. Less of an issue with multitasking in iOS 4, but a major pain in anything previously
Automatically scrolls to the bottom of the guesses list on load - something that should have been done for Alpha 1
Upgrade to iOS 4 support - this was far more involved than I expected it to be
Numerous UI improvements and tweaks - just a lot of pet peeves and usability tweaks to make it easier to use and understand (I hope)

So quite a lot, but the lion's share of the time was spent in migrating from iOS 3.1.3 support to iOS 4, primarily because some things just didn't work as expected in iOS 4. Part of that arose from needing to refactor a bunch of stuff and reworking some of the child/parent messaging, but overall things seem pretty stable with Alpha 2 (on my devices), so I'm happy for the nonce. I'm hoping to get some feedback on the build while I start work on Alpha 3 (almost completely multiplayer stuff). It's coming together - slower than I expected, but I think it's going to end up being pretty good when I'm done.
Back to the salt mines.

Quick Departure

2010-08-03T10:01:00.003-06:00

I'm going to take a few paragraphs here to discuss another topic outside the typical vein of the blog. That issue is Net Neutrality.
As a netizen for lo these many years (almost 25 now), the thought of a free (as in liberty) and open internet has been something that seemed completely inherent in the 'net. That someone would come along and consider restricting access was bound to crop up, but the thought is anathema to the openness of the 'net.
I look at the issue from two perspectives - as a consumer and as a small business owner - and this latter perspective is where I have the primary concerns. As a consumer, I already (over)pay for access to the internet and it seems reasonable, based on other costs, that I should. I already pay for electricity, gas, and water - internet access seems like another service being provided and the provider deserves to be compensated for that access. I can even choose how much I want to pay for the bandwidth I choose to consume - again, all reasonable. I would, however, be concerned with a "prioritized traffic" provider. I should be able to access all of the legal content I want to access when I want to access it, provided that I'm paying for that right.
As a business owner, though, I have serious concerns. The crux of the net neutrality debate is centered around businesses providing content. Services like BitTorrent were just a symptom of what the industry as a whole was experiencing - a lot of people using a lot of bandwidth. That BitTorrent could be used to break the law was, I'm certain, an impetus for internet providers. They saw this as an opportunity to "tax" business owners to get access to their services. As an ISP, the thought of all of the potential funding just below the surface would be irresistible. And it makes sense. "As a user of our network," they'd reason, "you should be required to pay commensurate with the amount of traffic you're pushing over our network." This is, however, just over the concept of "reasonable". Why? Business owners are already paying for access to the internet from their hosting services. And there are, literally, thousands of ISPs - should businesses have to pay every since ISP to prioritize their traffic? I can only assume the ISP answer to that question would be a resounding "yes!"
The biggest concern for me is the following scenario. Assume that the providers are able to prioritize their traffic based on who pays them. As a company that's not Google or Microsoft or Apple, I'm at a significant competitive disadvantage if I can't pay to get my traffic prioritized. The average person using the web will not wait more than a few seconds for a web page to display before they pick a different page (i.e, not mine). If there's a delay in displaying my information because my traffic isn't prioritized highly because I couldn't afford to pay every telco that wants to provide internet access, I lose customers or, at the very least, customer satisfaction suffers.
One of the arguments against net neutrality is that if companies haven't done it yet, there's no reason for them to do so in the future. There are a few points to be debated here, but the three that ring most true for me are: a) companies haven't really been able to do this yet, so there's been no real test of this concept, b) companies have a terrible history of doing things in people's best interest (look at the labor revolution of the late 19th century for a great example - and then go thank a union worker), and c) they're already looking at it. Comcast began to packet filter BitTorrent traffic - determined via empirical tests. And it's not that far of a leap from selectively filtering traffic to charging for that traffic. This also causes problems for consumers who now need to determine whether their provider will allow them to access the content they want to view.
So you may be asking where I stand on the whole issue (if you haven't already jumped to a conclusion). Actually, I prefer that we take a "wait and see" attitude, but we need to provide an organization - it can be the FCC, but I'd prefer an elected body rather than appointed - to oversee and insure that things don't get out of hand. We should be proactive rather than reactive to the potential direction this issue could move. Time and again we've seen that as things progress without direct confrontation about it, people become willing to accept the status quo, not status quo ante. I don't believe we need regulation, but we do need the ability to quickly address any complaints.

Continuing Hurdles

2010-07-19T19:49:00.003-06:00

As I've posted previously, there are some things I really appreciate about Microsoft's approach to supporting its developers (at least back in the day when I was writing Windows code). Primary among them is that Microsoft gives you the source code to their framework, the Foundation Classes. You get to see everything that the framework does, all the way down to the Win32 calls. And even then you can see the disassembly if need be. Apple has taken the opposite approach - they hide everything. I was talking with my mom tonight and I likened it to a server in a restaurant. You tell her your order - "I'd like to put a button in this location with this text" - and then she runs off, makes your order, and delivers it to you, but you never get to see how the secret sauce is made or if the cook spit in your food. Well, right now I'm feeling like Apple's spitting in my food.
I had been working diligently on getting my Alpha 2 completed. iOS 4 had just been released and I figured I'd get A2 out and then upgrade to the new Xcode version that supported iOS4. Then I got my new phone - iPhone 4, yay! (except for the antenna problem - boo!) - but it had iOS4. *sigh* So while I could install my iOS 3.1.3 version of software on my iOS4 phone, I couldn't debug it. And wouldn't you know, I experienced a crash. So I figured - well, maybe I'll just upgrade, recompile for iOS 4 and things will magically work! Okay, I didn't really think that, but I figured I was really close and this upgrade was: a) ultimately necessary, and b) worth the investment. So I bit the bullet and upgraded. And compiled. And fixed some problems.
But then I tried to run it. And found that now it crashes, but in a very unusual way - the stack is getting blown somewhere. Not that I changed anything that would cause that - it's just the combination of the code I had written for 3.1.3 apparently had a bug or there was a feature of the compiler that made it play nice. And this is where the first paragraph comes into play. The crash is happening deep inside Apple's code and I can't figure out where it's crashing.
Because of the crash, I've been unable to actually locate the place where the stack goes "kaboom". I've run into this a couple of times in the past on Windows - unallocated memory in release mode that overwrote the call stack pointers - but this is in debug mode, which should be a lot nicer and friendlier. But because I can't quite figure out where in the framework code it's crashing (because I don't have the source code), I'm stuck now doing another task that I'd postponed until after Alpha 2 and redesigning part of the code to help identify the general area that's causing the problem.
So, while I'm actually pretty close on having everything complete, I'm spending more time refactoring something that I'd planned to do later and am being forced to do now. I guess I should be looking at the glass as half-full as I now don't have to do this in the future, but at the same time my general timeline for Alpha 2 has gone out the window.
So because of a bug that I couldn't track down on the new OS I had to do two additional tasks that I'd planned on doing later. This has actually been the general story of my experience with iPhone development. Of course, Apple does tend to schedule all of their upgrades around the June timeframe (because of WWDC), so maybe I should just stop starting apps in April. And then maybe I'll feel like Apple's not spitting in my food.

Surprising Progress

2010-06-21T14:45:00.002-06:00

So I got some sleep Friday night after posting up about how crappy I felt. Saturday wasn't bad - I could breathe (mostly) and I had some level of mental alertness. We had an errand to run involving a road trip to Laramie (about 2.5 hours away "by way of the regular highway" (article here and lyrics here). We saw a flyer at Cathy's gymnastics for a dog looking for a new forever home. We called up Susie's mom who agreed to take the dog provided Susie thought it would be a good match. We met the dog (his name is Tank) on Wednesday, thought it would work, and picked him up Friday. Saturday was the hand-off to the mother-in-law in Laramie, so we packed everything up and headed off north. Had a pretty relaxing trip back Saturday night and I crashed pretty hard that night.
By Sunday I was feeling a LOT better, despite being awakened way too early by Cathy (she doesn't quite understand the whole "daddy gets to do what he wants to on Father's Day"). Still, I felt much better Sunday and decided to finish up Dragon Age: Origins (which I did). It was a somewhat hollow victory, though, so I went back a few saves to play a different path through the game. I'll be curious to see what's different about the two paths.
The good thing was by not working on OttoJotts at all on Sunday I was that much more excited about doing it today. I went home for lunch and got some good work in on the game. Makes me wish I didn't need to go back because things were working well. I've got a few screens added at the beginning of the game to allow players to create games. I've done a little bit with the multiplayer stuff, but that's actually not an Alpha 2 item but more like Alpha 4. Still, the basics are there for it. The single player selection is coming together pretty well.
I also touched base with a UI designer to see if she'd be interested and what she'll charge for doing the UI for it. Right now it's pretty cheesy, but it's functional. I'd like this to actually be good (maybe even compete with Words with Friends kind of good) and I know enough about my limitations to know that won't happen if I do it. :)
I've also touched based with Greystripe, a in-game advertiser that does the ads for Words with Friends, and will be looking at incorporating that into the game. That's a later addition as well. Maybe Alpha 3 as Alpha 4 is looking pretty full with the multiplayer games being added.
So, I'm pretty happy with things despite losing an entire weekend (well, one day by choice). I think Alpha 2 release might be this weekend if things keep going well, even if I run into a few bumps on the road. I did realize this weekend that I've been working on this (very) part-time since 29 April. That's kind of scary, actually, but things are progressing. It's just an important personal milestone to get this done and out in the wild. Once that happens, I feel like I can really claim to be an independent game developer. :)

Illness = No Work

2010-06-18T10:55:00.004-06:00

So since my production of Patience I've been feeling "not too well". I had some kind of bronchitis thing going on the first week of production, but got on antibiotics and felt awesomely better by the end of the run. Then it came back. Right now I'm finding it hard to breathe while I sit at the computer. And that's after taking Mucinex DM.
One of things I try to avoid doing while ill is coding. I found pretty early on that my thought processes don't operate at peak efficiency and that I end up having to refactor some of the code I write while under the weather. It's not as bad as a CUI (coding under the influence), but it's a close second.
This illness has delayed my work on OttoJotts, but things are progressing. I've got scrolling working properly and added some information about which guess has been posted. I still have several things to finish for this alpha - primarily statistics tracking. I'm doing it locally for alpha 2 and will store it in the DB for alpha 3+. Alpha 3 may incorporate multiplayer or I may punt on that until Alpha 4 - still deciding how much work needs to be done for the current tasks associated with 3.
Overall, I'm just hoping that I'll be getting better and then able to focus on getting the alpha work done. And then get it out to my testers. Or so I hope.

Alpha 1 Released!

2010-06-01T14:51:00.002-06:00

I went home over lunch (the spousal unit is "not well") and decided to take another stab at the installation. I cleaned everything, rebuilt, and sent it back to her email address. When I unzipped everything and dragged it onto her iTunes it seemed MUCH happier - my icon showed up in her Apps list, which was nice. When I click "Sync" it all installed happily and life was looking much brighter. When I ran it on her iPhone and it actually WORKED, that was great (and it connected to the website to get the word list), life was FAN-FREAKING-TASTIC!
I've packaged everything up and sent it out to my alpha testers who will hopefully be able to install it and test it. And I hope they'll be able to read the help screen. In the interest of just getting the alpha out the door I opted to punt on the scrolling help image. It's a placeholder anyway and I couldn't see continuing to hold up the alpha to make it work when it wasn't going to be in the final project anyway. The existing solution is less-than-optimal, but it's also temporary.
In the meantime, my game is now out in the wild. A momentous day for Otto Von. W00t indeed.

Alpha 1 Updates

2010-06-01T11:12:00.004-06:00

Well, it was a busy weekend for the Empire Lyric Players, which meant it was a busy weekend for me (because I'm president of the group). Rehearsal Friday til 10:something-way-too-late, Saturday off (I played a TON of Dragon Age: Origins - definitely needed the break to stave off the pending mental collapse), then move-in on Sunday, which went much faster than I expected. We arrived at noon to help unload and they were finishing getting everything off the trailer into the theatre. WOW. I don't think move-in has ever gone that smoothly or had as many participants (practically the entire cast was there). Then errands on Memorial Day and first rehearsal in the theatre. Hard to believe our show goes up in 2 more days!
But wait - wasn't this a post about Alpha 1 Updates? Why yes, you're right - it is! Thanks for the reminder. So where IS Alpha 1? The short answer is "coming soon". The longer answer is a bit more complicated. I was having any number of problems getting my app debugged. It was working fine in the simulator, but as soon as I installed it on my iPhone it would crash on launch. No warning - just "no longer running". I couldn't attach a debug process, the console log (thank you Xcode Organizer!) showed nothing untoward, NSLog messages showed nothing... I was at a complete loss. I restored my phone to just 3.1.3 and then re-synched with iTunes. Still no love. Then, magically, it started working.
For anyone who's been a developer for any period of time, the "magically disappearing bug" is a frightening thing. Why did it go away? When will it resurface (because without fail it will)? I still can't find anything wrong, though, so it's hard to say it wasn't not some kind of configuration problem, but I'm not happy. I thought I would try to install it on Susie's phone as well to see if it surfaced there (I turned mine into a development device so I could see what was happening, but it didn't help). When trying to install on Susie's phone I got the strangest error:
The application "OttoJotts" was not installed on the iPhone "Susie's iPhone" because an unknown error occurred (0xE8008001).
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Why would iTunes not know what the error is? Oh, au contraire, mon frere, but iTunes DOES know what it is. What error 0xE8008001 is telling you is that you have an unsigned application that iTunes won't let you install on an iPhone. In other words, iTunes thinks the application is not a valid App Store or Ad Hoc distribution. Of course the question now is why doesn't iTunes think it's a valid ad hoc distribution? As to that, I'm uncertain at present. I need to dig into why it doesn't seem to think that I'm building an application with the right provisioning certificates. The error I was getting before from her iTunes was that there weren't any valid provisioning profiles for the application, which seemed odd as it was the exact one I was including in the build settings. She's running her iTunes on Windows and I'm on Mac, so that's always a joy, but still I've done it previously without too much trouble. Definitely more digging necessary, but here's the kicker - this is HELL WEEK.
What is Hell Week? In performance parlance, it's the week before a show opens. Every night is a rehearsal and generally you're still working a regular 9-5 (-ish) schedule that week, so you're up at the butt-crack of dawn to get to work, work a full day, then go to the theatre and spend another 5-6 hours at rehearsal. Then back home to bed all to do it again the next day. Good thing the show opens on Thursday. We have a JDBC movie night on Friday and I might end up crashed on the field at Invesco/Mile High. :)
Over the next couple of days I need to figure out what's up with the provisioning profiles and see why this isn't working as I thought. Maybe in a couple of days I'll actually have the Alpha done and out to testers. When I do, I'll make sure to let everyone know via this blog.

Understanding at last?

2010-05-27T13:16:00.005-06:00

So, I was looking at the iPhone Developer Center trying to figure out from the tech notes why symbolicatecrash, which I was reading would be working just fine, was not working just fine. What I believe it is now, though, is that my SDK version is 3.1.2 and my iPhone OS version is 3.1.3. *sigh* Just shows to go you that as a developer you should always stay up-to-date on the latest SDKs when they're released. Now I need to see if there's a way for me to download the old 3.1.3 SDK. Why, you ask? Because of the iPhone SDK 3.2.
The new SDK requires Snow Leopard which I haven't installed yet (I just ordered it). In the interim, I'm just kind of shooting in the dark with what's happening. Given what I've been reading, it seems like that's the issue, which would be nice. If so, it would at least mean that I'm not a complete idiot. :) The worst part is that even if I do get it to symbolicate, I need to find out why it's failing.
Overall it's been a pretty frustrating experience, but at least it looks like things are turning around and this does seem like the most likely answer to the problems I've been experiencing. And it's also not been abundantly clear from the blogs I've been reading what this issue is.
So, there we go. At least for now. *sigh*
Update: I found a link to the old 3.1.3 SDK which I'm downloading now while I wait for Snow Leopard to arrive. I'll at least be able to do iPad development once I get Snow Leopard, but it's not been a big item on my to-do list, so I've delayed. Apparently one version too long. Wish me luck!

Alpha 1 Troubles Continue

2010-05-27T11:29:00.002-06:00

I've been trying a variety of different methods to characterize what's happening with my application, but, to date, they've been unsuccessful. I was looking at some crash logs from my phone, but I've been unsuccessful in getting symbolic information for the crash logs. I've been looking online for a solution, but no luck. What I know is that it's not crashing in my code directly - rather, it's buried pretty deep in some core Apple code (which is never terribly helpful). I've been trying to undo the changes I had done to see if that resolves the problem, but, again, no love. I did add some logging to my app and it all seems very happy - my code loads fully and THEN I have a crash.
This is probably the most difficult kind of issue to resolve. First, you don't have anything but the crash logs. Using symbolicatecrash is not an ideal solution to resolving problems. I may need to turn my phone into a dev device and see if I can debug from there. I actually still have several avenues of attack, but they're more alleys than avenues or boulevards. :)
Will keep you updated.

Alpha 1 of New Game Delays (sigh)

2010-05-25T15:27:00.004-06:00

Well, the first alpha of the new game is just about complete. Most things have gone as well as I'd hoped, although one section of the game was causing a few more fits and starts than it should have had I just bothered to think about it. I chalk it up to my progressing illness which resulted in being practically incapacitated yesterday and unable to breathe. I have asthma and am not unfamiliar with breathing problems, but this was closing in on how I felt when I was hospitalized with pneumonia and some exotic secondary infection modern medical science was unable to identify (gotta love those). Regardless, I resolved the issue moved on with life.
I then got to the final two things I needed to do before I could begin looking at an Alpha - a basic help screen and, you know, actually getting it ON a device. :) I got a basic help screen image typed up and figured I'd just add a UIImageView object with that as the image to a UIScrollView and voila - it'd all just work. But, no. Nothing on the iPhone seems truly simple and this was no exception. I began working through my primary reference book but it was silent on scrolling. Crap. So I began surfing the web hoping to find something - a few ideas, but nothing that actually did what I expected it to do. As of this morning, no change - help is still not scrolling. *sigh* I may need to create a completely separate application to test the theory and then make sure I've dotted all of the i's and crossed the t's in my app to enable everything.
The second part, which I decided to do after punting on the help, was to get it installing on the device. I had already done that with a previous version and figured this wouldn't be a problem. I built it, installed it, sync'd my iPhone, ran it - and it crashed. CRAP! Oh, wait! Glimmer of hope - I was referencing a local file (I was developing sans network at one point and changed the code). Change the code, reinstall, sync iPhone, run app - crash. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? This was working fine in the simulator... and still does. Okay... Wait - there's some kind of crash log available. Quick search on the web and I find what I need - where it is and what it looks like. And it looks like a symbolic dump of a Windows app with the same level of detail (i.e., none). Wait - what's this "symbolicatecrash" script? It enables you to turn your crash logs into something with actual symbols? Cool. I'll at least know where the crash is. Except that it didn't work. I poked around a little today and think I might have an idea why it's not working as expected, but again - it's delaying Alpha 1. I did try adding some additional checks this morning quickly to see if I could get around what I thought the bug was, but it did nothing. Great...
So, Alpha 1 is practically in the bag. Unfortunately, there are still 2 bugs holding up release to the wild. Okay, it's more of a caged environment, but still. Hoping it will be done in the short term. I would hate to have ANOTHER application for the iPhone that gets stuck in "Alpha Hell".

Malamanteau, or Why I Hate Wikipedia (Sometimes)

2010-05-18T15:27:00.003-06:00

Note: this is not about development, but just a general rant. Read at your own risk.
So you may not have heard all the hubbub over at Wikipedia about the word malamanteau. When I read xkcd that morning, I saw a great rejoinder to the tendency I've seen over at Wikipedia - describing something in terms so esoteric that you need to read the entries for the terms to understand the term they're describing. And if you had trouble following that, welcome to my world.
What is a malamanteau? It's a neologism (a newly created word) that is a combination of a malapropism (using the wrong word for something - alliterate instead of illiterate) and a portmanteau (combining two words to create new one). So a malamanteau is actually a portmanteau as well. Regardless, it was a word invented by Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, and his comic was genius. So much so that someone went to Wiki and made the page. And that's where the trouble started.
See, Wikipedia has an identity crisis. Is it "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit"? Or is an encyclopedia that has editors and administrators who maintain a level of "respectable enough"? Unfortunately, the entire malamanteau issue has reopened the old wounds (which I'm sure are reopened constantly on other articles). What started as a little bit of fanboy fun turned into a much-larger-than-it-needed-to-be discussion about Wikipedia. If it's more of a "editors and admins" kind of thing, why do they allow tons of information about, say, Pokemon and Lord of the Rings? If it's the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, where is the line drawn between cruft and actual content?
Should the word malamanteau have its own article? Certainly not - it was a joke and, unless we begin to adopt this word into regular usage, not notable enough to engender a regular article. (Note that I will be using this word as often as I can.) But it was the edit- and flame-war that it initiated that was notable. It brought to the fore this division. It brought out the personal attacks ("idiotic fanboys" "WikiNazis"). It became an "us" versus "them" issue, despite that Wikipedia is supposed to be ours.
Is Wikipedia an encyclopedia? Don't people wish. You may not know, but I was a history graduate student for a while. Talk about a discipline requiring, well, discipline about sources. Wiki may have dreams that, when it's grown up a bit, it might be able to claim that. It is a good starting point for doing actual research, but it is not a reliable source in and of itself. Schools have banned it as a resource. No respectable college or grad student would dare place it on any kind of paper/essay/exegesis. Well, having been a TA, I know that they do, but trust me - there is a penalty to pay for that. There is, unfortunately, absolutely no way it can be edited consistently or accurately to make it a true encyclopedia. Too many things slip under the radar - errors, fanboy posts, etc. Too many biases by contributors and administrators are brought to the fore (look at the global warming article discussion - or the Naomi Oreskes article). The authors and editors are not professional copy-editors and researchers (in general). Nor do they have the time to do the job that would need to be done.
So what use does Wikipedia serve? Again, it's a starting point. There are tons of inaccuracies and I don't bother editing anymore because finding a relevant reference is usually too much trouble. But let me tell you - if I ever need information about Pikachu, Wiki is the place to go.

Proto Update

2010-05-18T10:41:00.005-06:00

Hola. It's been a good few weeks. I've had less time to work on the proto than I hoped, which isn't completely unexpected. Life's been busy with rehearsals for Patience (opening the first week of June). Lots of work to do and being president of the board means that I get to pick up the odd jobs that need to be done. Plus, I've taken on a task to create shoulder boards for all of the Dragoons. It's not a lot of work, but it is work that needs to be completed this week, preferably before tomorrow (Wed).
As it stands with the prototype, I'm just finishing up the Alpha 1 right now. I've run into code signing issues (why does this have to be so complicated?) that are preventing me from being able to install it on my iPhone. I think I just need to recreate all of my provisioning profiles so I can leverage them across multiple projects.
When I first created my certificates and such it was just for the Samantha Alpha. Now, though, I've learned that I will likely need to have base certs for some things and individual provisioning certs for each application and alpha. Which is good to know, but not something I considered last year.
Anyway, the app is coming along nicely. I've got 5 alpha milestones laid out which should get me to a single beta and then to product. Definitely took on a bit of a life of its own, but I think it'll be fun and worthwhile. I don't think it will bring in any kind of money, but if I get $50 out of it, I'll be happy. :)
So, I'll try to keep updating as this comes closer to release. If you're interested in participating, definitely let me know!

Prototyping new game

2010-04-30T16:45:00.002-06:00

So I've taken a bit of a hiatus from Daimyo, but just briefly. I'm working on the prototype to a new game that I'll reveal when it's done. I'm going back to Objective-C for iPhone work and, honestly, it's been a bit of time since I worked on anything about it. Good thing is that things are coming back a little faster than I thought it might. I need to get back to some of my reference books, though, because I want to do something that's not really "standard" now (of course). Overall, though, it's coming along nicely as a prototype. I didn't actually think I'd be able to knock this out as quickly as it's been going.
Also had fun checking out an interview with Natalia and Keith at Imangi studios. Ready Set DC did a profile on them and it was quite nice to read about some folks I've been following on Twitter because, well, they're awesome but also the kind of people I could see hanging out with on a Friday. :) The link to the article is here.
So, things are progressing well with the prototype and Daimyo is after that. I think that the weekend may see the completion of the proto, which gives me a week or so to actually knock out the product and get it in people's hands. Then it's off to make the pay version (the proto is of the lite version) and then, maybe, get it up on the App Store.
So, there ya go.

OMG but time does fly...

2010-02-21T22:24:00.004-07:00

Well, it has been a very eventful 7 months... First, my gig at Examiner took up MUCH more time than I thought it would. I guess the first day should have been a preview of what was to come - I came into the office at 9 AM and left at 9 PM. For a while there releases were taking a VERY long time - up until midnight a few times - but since December they've been very reasonable, mostly taking place during the workday where possible. I guess that's one thing I can look at postively. :)
On the down side, we've had a lot of shakeups in the group. First, we bought a company called NowPublic in October. Their management team became our management team. This isn't usually a terribly bad thing, but let me put it this way. NowPublic was a $10 million company. Examiner is a $100 million company. The NP management style is still a little on the nascent side and, honestly, with my having come from organizations like HP - they don't have a management style. They hire contractors and delegate tasks, but there's no employee development, no interest in the employee - because they're contractors. Unfortunately they inherited a team of 12 developers who are employees (well, for now). *sigh* Beyond that, my manager, the VP of Technology, was let go a couple of weeks ago. It was a bit of a blow to morale for the group because all of them had been hired by her and she was one of the original employees of the company - nearly a founder. Morale's been pretty crappy since her departure.
In the meantime, I am once again looking at making the Otto Von thing viable. I've put the iPhone apps on hold (temporarily) while I explore a couple of other ideas. I've published a game on Facebook called Secret Agent - East vs West. It's a spy game set in 1985 using Social Game Studios framework. Yes, you did read that correctly. I actually FINALLY published a game! It's been slow to get adoption, but I haven't really been advertising it strongly. I'm thinking that my work on the other game currently under development will be stronger and more viable. It's a feudal-era Japanese game called Daimyo. The goal is to try to conquer the different regions of Japan and become Shogun. It's coming along nicely, but once again I'm running into personal skill limitations. *sigh* A continuing theme. I've posted up a request for some help from both a UI Designer and a Web Developer on gamedev.net (link posted here). If you happen to know of anyone, please let me know. I'm looking to share profits on this - just need to get some people who can do a little of everything.
Anyway, it's all starting to come together. Slowly, albeit, but hopefully it will be picking up momentum in the short-term. I hope I can look back at this post and the 7 month gap and think - "wow, that's when it all turned around". *fingers crossed*

Rough Few Weeks

2009-08-04T14:48:00.003-06:00

I've been working on trying to get the Alpha 1 ready for release to my test team, but several things have blocked me. First was that I was in the process of interviewing for a project manager position with Examiner.com. The position sounded very exciting and challenging, so I thought I'd pursue it. I ended up spending quite a bit of time preparing and interviewing it - longer than I expected - but it was a good choice and I start tomorrow. Yay me.

The second thing is that I ran across some unfinished functionality in the app when I plugged in quests, mana pool regeneration, and leveling up. MP regeneration went as quickly as I expected, which was nice. Quests took a while longer because even though I was able to write the back-end code quickly and had it working where I could test it thoroughly, integrating it took far longer than I expected. Part of it was the UI, which didn't work the way I'd hoped, and the other part was that I ran into some memory issues.

The third and most major of the entire blockage has been my MacBook. I bought a MacBook in November to do iPhone development and it was working fine until just recently. I began seeing major slowdowns - to the point where it was unusable - and had trouble copying files and building properly. I was a bit concerned when I couldn't even boot it up one day. I took it into the store and they think it's a bad HDD so they've ordered a replacement. In the meantime I hit Best Buy and bought a MyBook external HDD (1 TB). I managed to back up everything manually - although I can't actually do a Time Machine backup. :( Regardless, when they replace the drive I can get things working quickly again, I hope.

So, I hope to have things ready this weekend. We'll see how that goes, of course. More to come!

Happy Moon Landing Anniversary

2009-07-20T23:27:00.003-06:00

Just a quick note to commemorate the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon 40 years ago today. I was but 15 days old when they landed and there is photographic evidence of me watching the landing (live in color from the moon on our black-and-white TV set :).

Twelve men walked on another celestial body. Let's hope that we'll soon be doing it again. Congratulations not only to those twelve men (and the six that flew above them in command modules), but the thousands that designed, built, and maintained the ships that flew them to them and safely back again.

A Week?

2009-07-19T20:02:00.003-06:00

It's been a week since I last posted an entry? Wow, time flies when you're behind the 8-ball. *sigh* It's been a rough week, but productive. Just not finding completion. The light is getting brighter, but I'm still surrounded by darkness. I have a deadline to get something out the door by Tuesday night. I hope that I can get questing done and perhaps get a stab at leveling by then. I believe that questing is close, but I haven't been able to finish it off yet. It's once again the integration with the iPhone code that's going awry. Plus I keep finding that I need to go back and re-factor a little more than I expected. It's good, in its way, but it's slowing progress.

One the alpha front, I do have several people signed up for testing. It's going to look reasonable for an alpha 1. There are obviously a lot more I want to do, but for an alpha it's a start. I do have several backgrounds in. Not exactly what I wanted stylistically, but they'll work as placeholders. I'm trying to write generic code since I expect to re-use some of it for a future endeavor, but that's also slowing progress. I know that one of the tenets of agile development is not to over-engineer things, but I find that it's not so much over-engineering as planning for the future development of the project. Since I know what still needs to be done and know that the game won't be released without those features, it makes it more of a necessity than one would normally expect.

Otherwise, things are progressing well but slowly. Inventory had a few gaps I needed to patch up before I could move on. I'd really hoped to have had more done (like the whole thing) by now, especially since Harry Potter 6 is out in the theatre (saw it last night). Still, if I can get something working in the not-too-distant future people may still be interested enough. And when the DVD comes out for Christmas (as is likely) I'll be well-positioned there, I hope.

That's the short of it. Questing is coming together and hopefully will be done soon. Then leveling. And then it's on to bigger, better things. And a LOT of testing. :)

CodeSigning Hell

2009-07-12T18:36:00.002-06:00

The best advice I can give to anyone who wants to develop iPhone applications is: When you get an error, READ THE ENTIRE ERROR MESSAGE VERY CAREFULLY. Here endeth the lesson.

I had decided to update my code signing certificates for the alpha that will be starting in the not-too-distant future. I also wanted to try to get it building for distribution on OS 2.2 devices because one of my testers is on an iPod Touch that costs $10 to upgrade to 3.0. Eventually I will need to move completely to 3.0 to get the in-app purchasing I require, but for now, compatibility is a good thing.

I made some new certs, read the instructions carefully on the Apple Dev Portal and things were going along smoothly. I had a bit of a hitch when I forgot to copy in the distribution and developer certificates to Xcode, but that wasn't too heinous. Then I tried building for 2.2. Error. And something that seemed completely odd. CodeSigning was complaining that I hadn't provided a certificate for 'Distribution' for SDK 'Device - OS 2.2'. Um, sure. Not terribly helpful. Can I build OS 3 builds? Yes - no problem. OS 2.2? No. I checked the build settings - yup, there's my certificate, it's setup for all iPhone Devices... What's your damage, Xcode? Okay, fine. You win. I'll ADD a special exception for OS 2.2. Bzzzt! Still not happy. What the HELL, man? C'mon, give me SOMETHING.

*sigh* After beating my head against it for a while, I went back and looked at the steps. Yes, I did that. And that. And thanks for the warning about making sure I did that - I did. Okay, let's Google it. I have to completely reset my Xcode to make it happy? I'm not sure that's the right answer.

Okay, one last time. Let's close Xcode, reopen, and try building it again. Nope. As expected, the same error. But wait. What does that error really say? Seriously? What configuration am I editing in the properties? DEBUG?!?! And it needs to be DISTRIBUTION?!?!?! *sigh* *facepalm*

So, let's make sure we're editing the configuration for Distribution and attach the certificate for all iPhone devices. Okay, Xcode, let's see if that makes you happy. And it does. And had I bothered to read the error message and double-check to make sure that I was actually editing the correct properties, life would have been better. But, thankfully, now it is.

Here endeth the lesson.

Good Progress

2009-07-10T19:26:00.002-06:00

After resolving my problems with the modal view this morning (MUCH faster than expected), I spent a lot of the day working on integrating my server back-end with the app. Things have been working well there, but I've got a little left to get sorted out. I've written a lot of server code recently, but thankfully I had some code base to work off of, so it hasn't all been new code. As things stand now, I'm hoping to get questing started tomorrow. Once I get quests in I think we can start looking at doing an alpha. :) There should be enough stuff that people can start playing with it. There are still quite a few gaping holes, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm thinking that if I continue on with the rate of progress I've been making I should be able to stick a fork in this thing by the end of the month. A lot behind when I wanted to get it done, but about in line with how long iPhone apps take to develop and test.

Anyway, it's been a long week but I've managed to get some things accomplished. Now I'm into the more mundane database work that I know pretty well, so things may start to pick up a bit. That's my hope. And my hope, certainly, springs eternal. :)

Finally Working

2009-07-10T09:18:00.003-06:00

The rabbit holes I went down were for naught. I found a much easier way to do what I wanted to do - presentModalViewController. I had been trying to hide the tab bar and swap the views and a whole lot of other rigamarole trying to get a very simple concept working. And one that I had seen other applications use before.

Regardless, it's all done and working now. I need to add a page with some verbiage about the game and the types of magic and such, but the main flow is in, working, and looking reasonably good. It just took a different Google search to find the answers I was looking for. :)

*sigh* I guess a good night's sleep really did help rejuvenate and restore.

Differences Between Windows and Mac Development

2009-07-09T21:18:00.003-06:00

Well, after beating my head against a problem for like 6 hours today, I have finally gotten back to where I was... 6 hours ago. *sigh* Okay, it's not that bad. I do have some other work that happened in that 6 hours that's still around, but I made one change in the program and Bam! I felt like Elzar cranked my head up a notch with a spice weasel.

I was creating the character creation screens which are shown only if it's your first time running the game. I need to make it so that it's modal - meaning you can't avoid it - so I needed to do it before you had access to the tab bar. And things were going along well. I had a root view controller that was handling both character creation screens. I got my locations displaying for people to select where they wanted to start... It was going along great. And then... BAM! Spice weasel.

I had added the root controller's view to the main window as a subview. This seemed reasonable and rational and worked wonderfully. But I couldn't seem to remove it and add the tab bar. The tab bar simply refused to display. So I went down a whole clutch of rabbit holes trying to figure out a way to get the tab bar to display AND have the character creation pages come up. And then I managed to get so far down the rabbit hole I got stuck and couldn't find the way out. I hit up a friend of mine who's on Facebook - Don Metzler. He owns his own consulting business and we've known each other for almost a decade now. He's a Mac programmer AND a Windows guy, so he's familiar with the benefits and detriments of both platforms. He and I went looking at the code and tried to get it back to where it was semi-working. And, thanks to the chat, we got it back there. Yay.

What this pointed out to me, though, was one of the things that I really have to laud (that's approve) Microsoft for doing. They make all of the MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) available as source code. So when you're deep in the bowels of a combo box you can figure out why your particular hook isn't getting called, you have the proverbial snowball's chance to figure out why. With Apple, on the other hand, there's a sort of mystique to the internals. You don't get to know what happens in there and some things happen so automagically you can't possibly figure out how to replicate it.

Case in point: when you attach a tab bar controller to a MainWindow.xib file, there's some special magic that happens inside Apple's foundation code that hooks everything up. You get all of your view controllers laid out, the tab bar looks good, and things happen without having to write any extra code. If you try to replicate that, though, things kinda go south quickly. I found a few people online trying to do what I was doing (albeit slightly differently), but they ran into the same frustration I did. Had I access to the source, I could have replicated it and avoided the spice weasel. Instead? BAM! Spice weasel.

I've finally gotten back to where I was 6 hours ago in terms of the main game play. I need to spend tomorrow morning going through trying to hook up the character generation screens but at least they're done - I just need to get them to display and that will hopefully not involve a spice weasel and my eyes. :)

Gotta Love It

2009-07-07T23:24:00.004-06:00

When my brain doesn't work, it doesn't work BIG. Here's the problem I've been having. I have inventory UITableViewCells that show information about a particular item. I wanted to reuse the cells in both the store and the player inventory (I know - how very C++ of me). Anyway, I used overkill to get it done with one cell. I had some trouble getting the item type images (wand, spellbook, etc.) to load on the fly in the cell, so I decided to just use the big ol' mallet and created several different UIImageView objects - one for each type. Then, when the cell was displayed, I was going to just remove the ones that weren't needed from the superview and it would all be happy. (For the un-Cocoa-initiated out there, I made several overlapping images and then hid the ones I didn't want seen). This worked fantastically the first time I tried it and I celebrated exuberantly. Until I scrolled down and scrolled back up. And my images were gone! WTH man?! I mean, c'mon - it JUST WORKED.

So I was trying to find some other less-desirable way of doing it. Not that the way I came up with was in any way, shape or form a good solution, but enough of that. So I was thinking - okay, maybe I can create a different cell for each type of item. But that means that I'll need that many different UITableViewCell classes. And my re-use of cells gets a little nasty. And then it dawned on me - re-use. Because we're using a simple object pool for the items displayed (a small collection of objects that are created when needed and stick around and are re-usable), each of my cells after the initial creation are going to be the same cells. What I had been doing was checking the type of the inventory item and then removing all of the OTHER images from the cell - but I wasn't putting back the one that was needed. So when I created a cell with a wand, say, it would show a wand. If that cell was then used for a spellbook, the wand image would get removed. And then if I needed the wand image back it wouldn't be available - it had been removed.

Eureka! So, now it's back to what I had before with a few minor modifications. I just hope that Xcode has a pretty substantial undo operation list... :) Overall, though, it is more than a little hacky at the moment and I need to clean it up and hopefully make it better before I release this puppy. And yes, that's a reminder to myself. ;)

Progress and Pakled-ness

2009-07-03T07:48:00.003-06:00

One of the pitfalls of technology is that you kind of get used to things working automagically. You don't have to do anything particularly difficult or, in many cases, that require much thought to do some pretty amazing things. A perfect example of this is my recent experience trying to get my application to install via iTunes 8 on Windows.

When developing an app, you need to create what are called "ad hoc distributions" - builds that are not loaded from the App Store and people just just drop them on iTunes and then magically appear on their iPhone or iPod Touch. There are two things required to make this happen. One is a provisioning file that tells iTunes that your device is allowed to load this program and the other is the program itself (which is a directory containing all of your files). It's a simplistic but effective way of distributing applications.

There are two quirks to this process. The first that I ran across was something I had known but forgotten - Mac ZIP files are different from Windows ZIP files. They have extra files that make uncompressing them normally impossible. You have to actually uncompress them by hand (the curtain begins to reveal the real Wizard of Oz). But that's no big deal - I'll just have to repackage them for Windows distributions. The second is that the provisioning files can't just be "dropped onto iTunes" on Windows. Drag and drop on Windows is a relatively hand-crafted experience and files ending in ".mobileprovisioning" don't make the cut for "drop targets". :) What this means is that you can't drop the provisioning files onto iTunes, you need to add them to the Library manually. (Perhaps you can drop them onto the Library itself, but File | Add to Library worked better for me). And now we can see the short man behind the curtain.

So while I was spooked that Windows and iTunes 8 weren't going to work, they do. Because I'm an idiot sometimes who doesn't try more than a few paths to get something working. Because I've become dependent upon the magic working. And I've become more than a little Pakled sometimes.

Regardless of all of that, I do now have things working from Windows and I can stop messing around with iTunes on my Mac (which was taking for-freaking-ever to add songs to the library). And with alpha only 4 days away, I have LOTS to do - especially since I'm taking the 4th off to go to Elitch's with the family and fireworks with my parents. Cogito ergo sum. And I'm a little scared by that. :)

Simple Tasks Gone Awry

2009-07-01T08:15:00.003-06:00

I've been working a little bit on what I thought would be a couple of simple things, but apparently not. I created a very simple splash screen to display while my app is downloading the XML files (and before the game is actually playable). I read in a few places that all I needed to do was create a file called default.png (or Default.png depending on who wrote it) and it would work automagically. Apparently not quite.

My second task to to try to get the game running on my iPhone. Because, you know, that's like where it's actually going to be played. :) So I followed Apple's directions on how to create an "ad hoc" release (as opposed to an App Store release). I installed it on Windows and sync'd my phone. And was told that it couldn't install Wizards. *sigh* Some poking around leads me to believe that it's a problem with iTunes 8, of all things, and that until Apple fixes iTunes I'm pretty much SOL. :(

The third thing has been going much better, though, which was creating the images for inventory items. That seems to be relatively complete now (LOTS of trolling the web for images). I'm not sure that I'm providing enough inventory items, but it seems like it's coming together. At least ONE thing is going as anticipated. :)

Lots more to do, but I want to get the splash screen done (I found a tutorial to try out) and then I need to start looking at character creation. Then I think it's time to build the DBs online and start pulling data from the net. And then the fun stuff - combat!

Some Good UI Progress and YAP (Yet Another Problem)

2009-06-30T09:44:00.006-06:00

I went through and modified the befuddlement icon yesterday a little bit to make it a bit more compatible with the cool parchment background I found on DeviantArt. I've got a shout-out to the author - Sinnedaria - in my credits page. It's nothing fancy, but it's more effort than I was willing to put into making something and since she offered it for free (with a request for credit) I thought "why the hell not?" :)

I've updated the UI with the parchment background and with the new icons as shown to the left.

I think it looks a lot better now with the parchment background and with the blue for the befuddlement icon. And as you can see in this picture I've updated the UI to remove the "Learn" button for those spells you're not allowed to learn yet (based on your affinity level). I'm still not sure about the text color on the top (or in the cells themselves). I've been debating several different colors for things. I'm a fan of subtle coloring (probably from my time at Anark when Danc designed the Anark Studio 1.0 product. It had a lot of subtle hues and cool colors (blues/whites) that I really liked. The parchment background is going to be a little interesting to work with from a coloring perspective, but I'll find something I like.

I did, however, run into a little snag last night. I've been using my Windows machine to sync my iPhone (because I use Outlook and such). I've found a way to allow it to sync to multiple machines, but it's not completely functional and what I've ended up with is that whenever I try to sync to my MacBook it erases my music and videos. *sigh* Even with "Manually manage" turned on. Regardless, I thought I'd try distributing the Wizards app to my phone finally to play with it on an actual device. But I ended up with a weird issue that kept it from working correctly. When I checked the forums I saw that there was a known issue (according to the posters, not Apple) about iTunes 8 and Windows ad hoc deployments. If this is truly the case, this is going to be a major problem for me. Not everyone I know (in fact, very few) who's going to be in the Alpha program have Macs. Which means that I need to find another way to deliver the ad hocs - or wait until Apple fixes the problem. Which really sucks. I'm hoping that an alternative delivery mechanism will work, but haven't yet tested it. *sigh*

So, lots going on and making some good progress - on UI things, which I have to admit I hadn't planned to work on yet. Still, it's been gratifying to see some things working properly and more like how I'd envisioned them. Lots more to do and I still need to get working on the server to, you know, actually make the game work. :)

New Icon for Misc/Befuddlement/Hindrance?

2009-06-29T18:11:00.006-06:00

I think that I might have found an icon that represents what I'm talking about. :) Here's the icon:

And here's the icon in situ:

The icon is from a free site and then modified very slightly. :)

What are your thoughts? Does this seem to resolve the quirkiness of this type of spell?

Slight Hiccup

2009-06-29T17:07:00.003-06:00

I've been working on finishing up the look on the spellbook and the one thing that's hit me is that I wanted to have an icon for each of the spell types. There are currently 3 types: offensive, defensive, and miscellaneous. Offensive spells damage directly to your opponent. Defensive spells reduce offensive damage from your opponent. And miscellaneous spells reduce the number of casting points available to your opponent. They're like distractions - dancing lights, quicksand, etc. - that prevent your opponent from being able to use all of their casting points. The trouble is that I'm in a bit of quandary. I was trying to come up with an icon that would represent these miscellaneous/distractive spells. Or should I just lump them in with the defensive spells? For the icon at the moment I'm using just a question mark, but it seems both lame and ineffective at communicating what they are.

In this particular case, should "Dancing Lights" be a defensive spell or should I keep searching for a separate icon? If I remove the category there are some somewhat drastic consequences that I need to address, so I think I'd ideally like to find a way to iconify this concept.

Any thoughts?

Bigger and Better Things

2009-06-29T13:11:00.003-06:00

Well, the annoyance that was bugging me yesterday with custom cells has been resolved. I realized that I'd skipped a step or two when trying to create the custom cell for my table view. I decided that starting over was far easier than trying to fix what I had, so I just punted and made a new one - and it resolved the issue. Perhaps following the directions this time was a key to my success. :)

I'm just trying to finish up the look and feel of the spellbook list now. I'd like to get a few icons sorted out and then I need to disable/grey-out those items that can't be learned. It's gotta happen eventually, so I may as well do it now before moving onto other things. And that's the big news, I think, which is going to be setting up the back-end server. I'm already downloading all of the main content - spells, monsters, location, and wand data - from the server, but this will begin the process of actually setting up quests, earning money, getting items, and duels. There's still much to do - in game purchasing, push notification, etc. - that I'm going to be a very tired person the next couple of weeks. I really needed to already be IN beta right now and I haven't even started my Alpha. At least to capitalize on the HP buzz that's going to be happening in July. :( I'll just do the best I can to finish it as quickly as possible.

Now, if I can just figure out how to distribute Ad-Hocs, I'd be a happy camper... :)

Busy Day

2009-06-28T20:51:00.002-06:00

So we had one of Cathy's friends - Ashley - over for a sleepover last night. Cathy had a bit of meltdown today about Ashley drinking the last of the Horizon chocolate milks. *sigh* Beyond that, it was a good sleepover.

On the game front I got a LOT accomplished today. I started the day with about 75 spells in my list. I started working around lunch time and this afternoon hit 160 spells (32 spells in each of the affinities). I wasn't looking forward to copying/pasting them into XML as it would be an arduous task, but I found a quick way to do - OpenOffice did all the work for me! I just had to make sure that everything came in Oxygen XML Author correctly - and it did. So it ended up being a much easier process than I expected, which is a great thing.

Since then I've been working on the UI for the spellbook. It's been a bit more difficult as custom cells in UITableViews aren't working the way I keep thinking they should. I've got a bug I'm working on right now (which is why I'm blogging :) that is causing me a bit of difficulty. The cell isn't loading properly from the NIB, which I can't figure out. I'm hoping I can figure out before I go to bed tonight. It's getting late, so I need to get cracking on it.

I'm feeling SO much better about things as I've managed to get tons of things accomplished in the past couple of days - and after a week when I accomplished little. Whew! :)

UIPickerView Woes

2009-06-27T18:26:00.005-06:00

I've been working on finishing up wands. I think the costs are done and coded, but I'm having some trouble with the text size on the picker view itself. I've got the following look right now:

Obviously, the issue is that you can't read the wand core. And the material (the left picker) is just the right size to display the longest material names. I've tried to find ways to alter the font size on that, but there's a method that I've seen spoken about -

pickerView:viewForRow:component:view - that theoretically would fix it, but I end up with blank UILabels being displayed. It's actually quite off-putting tha

t it's not working. I wish that the font size were easier to set on these things, but apparently all I can really do is change the width of the picker easily. In this particular case, that does very little for me.

I'm still beating up on it and don't plan to sleep until it's resolved. Hopefully that'll be soon. :) Then I can start working on other things.

Update: So I found out the problem I was having was that I didn't create a frame. :( I fixed that and now I get the following image:

Obviously this looks much better and may require some tweaking, it's definitely better than what I had. :) And I've ordered the wand cores alphabetically which should help make things easier to find. Yay.

Alpha Testers

2009-06-24T12:33:00.003-06:00

I'm at the stage now, I think, where I need to start lining up my alpha testers. I've posted to Facebook, Twitter, and now here for a call for testers. I'd like about 20 people for the alpha. Most of the testing will be checking things like the store, going on quests, and traveling around. Later we'll start looking at adding more for beta and then maybe actually get some cool things happening.
If you are interested in participating in the alpha and subsequent beta, please contact me at bdevoe at ottovon dot com for more information. I'll need some information about your phone so you can get started. It's a relatively painless process - I do have a bit to learn about it, though, so I hope you're willing to indulge my cluelessness for a little bit.
Thanks!

Travel Mostly Complete :)

2009-06-17T16:36:00.002-06:00

So I finished all of the US cities, but there are still three countries' worth of cities to do - the UK, Canada and Mexico. I'm having trouble finding a good Mercator projection of North America or of Canada with enough detail to let me match it to US cities. And same thing with Mexico. I haven't even tried the UK yet, but I did get the US done, so I'm going to punt for the time being on the others. It was a LOT of work and I have something even if it's not completely what I want to have done before final release. I'll add bugs (first ones!) to document that I still need to add some places in Europe and finish Canada, Mexico, and the UK.

On the plus side, I did get a good mapping done of the US cities. I ended up missing some state capitals (how that happened I'll never know), but I did have them plus some other one cities in the mix. It's a bit sparse in areas, but it should still work.

I've kind of decided that for the magic school I'm going to simply disallow travel for players who are under 5th level. This will keep them in the same location and prevent it from being a major problem. I'm also going to remove them from duel lists (and remove 5th and higher from their duel lists) when playing. They'll still be able to chat with other people in the area and go on quests, but they won't be able to duel anyone who's not still in school. :) I was only thinking about it because of the whole travel thing. I'm thinking I'm going to do the pruning of player lists on the device rather than limit the select statement on the server side. The fewer restrictions I can place on the server selects the better. :)

So, I'm calling travel complete with some bugs to fix. *sigh* I just need to get a few hours some time in the next few days to finalize those linkages and fix the UK which is like 30 cities. I just can't bring myself to do that right now. :)

Onward and upward, then!

Travel Progress

2009-06-17T08:58:00.004-06:00

I did get everything on the app side working with traveling - finally! I can move around and things worked as expected. Except that I found major problems with the data file. *sigh* What I had originally done was to find the latitude and longitude of all of the cities in my list and then I went through to calculate the differences between it and other cities nearby to determine the cardinal directions. What I found though is that while I did pretty well in many cases I was WAY off in others. So I found a Mercator projection map of the US (which is what I'm going to start with for now) and I'm going through all of the US cities (I have about 75) and get them corrected. There are a couple of places where it'll seem a little weird, but is correct. For instance, you might be able to go southeast from a city, but the northwest from that city doesn't lead you back where you were but to a different city. So from a directional map perspective it might seem odd, but it works out. :)

My task today is to finish fixing the data file. And mowing the lawn. And cutting the suckers in the backyard (which is becoming like a fairy forest for lack of care). If I can get the data file fixed then I can move onto wands and spells. And while there is definitely a programmatic method for fixing this, I'm actually finding it a good mental exercise to do it by hand. Not so good for the carpal tunnel, though. :(

Also - here's a photo of the travel pane with some locations in it. If you're interested. :)

Success

2009-06-16T12:22:00.003-06:00

Well, it took both more and less time to fix the problem than I expected. :) I had thought that I would resolve it quickly last night and when I couldn't, I thought it would take longer than it did this morning to rectify. So things are moving along well. There seem to be some errors in transcription for the XML document. An example would be that it seems possible to move West from Providence to Concord, NH. Um - not quite. :) So I need to get some testers hitting the various destinations and seeing whether the list matches the one I generated and then whether the list I generated is logical and accurate. So there's a validation of the generated list and a verification of matching real life. Just need some testers (that would be a general call for anyone willing to participate, by the way :).

I've got a defect tracking system up and running for the project. I've decided on CodeTrack versus Bugzilla as BZ was a bit difficult to setup, surprisingly. CodeTrack was a breeze and provides more capabilities than I need. I will need to refresh myself on Apache authentication and authorization, though. It's one of those things that I don't do frequently enough to bother storing in long-term memory. :)

So, I'm feeling good about how things are going, but I'm really concerned about the deadline at this point. Still need artwork, still need a database, still need to write the server-side scripts to access and modify the database, etc. Just so much left to do and the clock is ticking loudly. C'est la vie, or so they say.

Debugging

2009-06-16T09:01:00.003-06:00

It's been an interesting few hours. What I can say definitively is that I miss the debugging capabilities of Visual Studio. While Xcode is free and has some wonderful capabilities, the debugging utilities seem to be a bit behind the Windows dev tools.

One of the nice things is that I do have a copy of the manual for GDB (the debugger that Xcode uses). My printed copy is, however, from 1992. :) Still, it's been helpful in finding out where my code's crashing (Xcode doesn't seem to want to associate actual source code with a failure). That said, I'm still no closer to resolving the navigation issues I'm experiencing. Hopefully today I'll be able to get that completed and move onto the next story.

The good news for me is that Cathy is at summer camp today with Franklin Friends. It's a great program and fantastic price ($29/day) compared to some of the Waldorf options ($40/day and not a full day at that). There are some benefits for that extra $11, but the drive alone (45 minutes) makes it just untenable. I'm happy with Franklin Friends and it's good for Cathy to play with kids in the neighborhood given that she doesn't go to school in it. :) What this means in the end, though, is that for two days a week I get a full day to work on work.

Anyway, back to trying to figure out why I'm apparently releasing something I shouldn't be releasing. Wish me luck.

Travel Update

2009-06-15T21:43:00.003-06:00

So it's been a reasonably productive day ending on something of a sour note. I've put the destinations for the game (North America and the UK) into an XML file that I'm able to pull from the website and parse properly. But now I've run into an issue where I'm getting a crash when I try to move from the main location. When I first had things working it was going about five spaces away before I'd get a crash. I thought it might have been a problem with no releasing some objects properly, so I've done that and now it crashes on the first move. Obviously the releases weren't the issue. It's unfortunately too late now for me to think clearly and get anything resolved properly, so I'm going to sleep on it and see what I can find out tomorrow morning.

Artwork is still not being done and I need to get that moving forward. I've talked with a couple of people who might be interested and able to do the work, but I need to finalize that and get them cracking on it. Things are in a place now where they could probably do at least half of the artwork right now and the rest in the not-too-distant future. *sigh*

Overall, I'm happy with the progress being made. I'm a little behind where I'd hoped to be, but honestly things are going faster than I expected they would. Toss in two weeks where very little was possible (due to Princess Ida), and the progress is actually amazing. :) Perhaps things will be clearer in the morning. There's still SOOOOO much to overall, though, that even if I had everything done right now I'd be hard-pressed to get the game released by the end of the month. Right now the best I can hope is that I can get it into an alpha/very-early-beta by the end of the month. That means that I won't likely be right there when Harry Potter opens, but that I might be within a week of the release, and that would be pretty cool.

Weird Happenings

2009-06-13T10:27:00.004-06:00

I decided that given the necessity of being able to purchase items inside my application to avoid the cracker/cheater influence that I should upgrade the app to run inside iPhone OS version 3. I ended up having something very strange happen that I can't explain, though, and need to figure out what's happening with it. Here's the issue.

I've created an affinities page that displays how much mastery a player has over a particular element (fire, air, water, earth, void). It should display as shown below.

Instead, what's happening is that it's shifting up what appears to be 20 pixels. I'm wondering if hiding the status bar is somehow impacting the layout of the image in the XIB. It seems weird that this would be something that would be impacted by changing the target from 2.2.1 to 3.0, but it definitely is. Here's what it looks like now.

I'm sure there's some rational explanation for WHY this is happening, but it's a bit surprising (and a little frustrating) that something so simple is now more difficult. *sigh*

I'm actually trying to work on travel today, but stumbled upon this last night when my brain was getting addled from lack of sleep. I thought initially that I'd done something weird like setting the background image location manually in my view controller, but going back to 2.2.1 fixed the problem. If I can just get this sorted out this morning I'll feel loads better about moving forward with travel today.

In the meantime, I'm going to work on travel to get that finalized. I want it off my plate for the time being and then I can deal with why this is shifting up ~20 pixels. :( Wish me luck!

Quick Note

2009-06-10T20:13:00.003-06:00

I've officially published the previously-private posts about Samantha/Wizards. They should be viewable, although you may need to scroll back through my blog to read them. Most were written in March, so that's probably a good place to look if you're interested. :)

Wowsers

2009-06-10T19:47:00.003-06:00

So today was pretty much going to be shot, but I never realized how shot it would be until I now reflect on it. First thing is that today was Cathy's last day as a Kindergardener! YAY! She is officially a first grader starting in August. Whew. :) The graduation was sweet and precious and memorable. Good thing I was able to capture it with pictures and video. She was "knighted" into first grade and her first teacher, Mrs. Reinhart, was there to see the last of the students she shepherded in pre-K move on to first grade. It was bittersweet at times, but it was a great time.

We then went to lunch with the family of one of Cathy's best friends at La Fiesta. GREAT food - I highly recommend it. Everything was very fresh and it was quite filling. We ended up bringing home some of the chip dip...

After that was a visit to Dr. Edvin Manniko, an optometrist. When Waldorf looked at her readiness for first grade they noted that she seemed to be having some trouble with focusing her eyes on near objects. The good doctor confirmed that she was far-sighted, so we need to get her some glasses. They also recommended some therapy to help her eyes focus better and more consistently. There's a possibility that she'll be able to do without the glasses if the therapy goes well. It seems that I may have experienced a little of this myself growing up but managed to get through it. Apparently only 12% of farsighted people get through college without corrective lenses. I might be part of that class of individuals. Then again, maybe I just like being special. :)

On the way home from the doctor I got soooooo incredibly sleeeeeeeeeppppppy that I almost had trouble driving. We made it by early evening, but I was so wiped I practically passed out once we got in the house. And then I very quickly forgot that I was supposed to go help teach Taekwondo this evening. Whoops. :( So I called to apologize, but that doesn't make up for spacing it so badly. Yes, it was a long day, but still I'm disappointed in myself. :(

Now it's about 20:00 and I'm exhausted but mentally still focusing okay. I'm going to finish up the profile summary changes and get those checked into git. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I did finally get some SCM (software configuration management) going and am running git to track revisions. I have to say - it is damn fast. I'm very happy that one of my former co-workers at HID found it. Otherwise I'd be stuck with Subversion or CVS or something crappy. :) We used Mercurial at Maptek, but I knew that git was a bit more favorable over Mercurial from my HID days. And Linus Torvalds uses it, so that seems like a good endorsement to me. :)

Anyway, Cathy will be starting at Franklin Friends next week. Just a couple of days a week as we can't afford to send her full time. I just think it will be very difficult to get a lot done when I don't just want to sit Cathy down in front of a TV all day but I also can't afford to spend all day playing with her and getting nothing done on Samantha/Wizards. :( It's a bit of a conundrum, but I hope that her friend Ashley will spend a lot of time over here playing with her so I can get things done. *sigh* We'll see, I guess. Best laid plans and all that. With Franklin Friends I at least have two days a week where I'll have the house to myself, so to speak. :)

More to come later, I suppose. Hopefully the next few days will be very productive and I can get spells and inventories worked out. Hasta for now.

Purchasing Update

2009-06-09T16:52:00.002-06:00

It's been an interesting day. I had planned on hammering out all of the travel elements but instead got sucked down a rabbit hole doing what I thought would be a quick modification to my code base. But NOOOO. Instead, I've been beating my head against what ought to be a very simple thing - getting a subview to display. I'm not sure what the problem is yet but I've been trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong. I have a tab control with a view controller that manages the main profile page. From there I can go to a spellbook or to the affinities page. I want to display the profile summary on each of these pages, so I made a subview called ProfileDetailViewController that I'm creating in ProfileViewController::viewDidLoad. I tried to addSubview to no effect so then I tried to insertSubview with an atIndex:0. No love there either. The interesting thing (and this is where I think it may be some kind of race/initialization issue) is that when I tried to create the strings to display the data it kept returning "Invalid".

HOWEVER, I just solved it. I had an epiphany while I was out an about this afternoon getting Cathy (her last day of school is tomorrow) and tried something that worked correctly and perfectly. I still need to do some things to make it completely functional and spread across the multiple view controllers, but I'm much happier now. :)

On the purchasing side of things, I've been looking at the Store Kit API that Apple just published. I believe that this is all in OS 3.0 so I'll need to wait for that to come out (which should be next week, theoretically). That should provide the opportunity to do what I want to do, so I'll be a much happier camper there as well. :)

So what started off as something of a bust of a day has now ended up quite nicely. I'll finish the profile summary tonight after Taekwondo and feel even more accomplished.

Samantha Update

2009-06-08T20:56:00.002-06:00

Well, while WWDC happens (I've been reading tweets by Owen and crew), I'm here working on Samantha. I've completed the first of the stories, which was the tabbed interface. At least as well as I can, since I'm having a little trouble figuring out where to put a couple of things. :) I think that will be sorted out this week finally.

I've been working on traveling, which has been interesting. The big thing has been creating a list of destinations to which people can travel. I've completed that (yesterday) and then completed an XML file that contains the connections between those locations. It's a bit of a web rather than a grid, say, but it should be interesting. I will have to have some alpha testers verify that they can get to all of the locations properly. Since locations also determine who players can duel and chat with, it's something of a major story. AND it's getting close to done. I need to write the XML reader still, but that's on tomorrow's agenda.

I must say that I'm actually pleased by the progress so far. The ERD has a great start (I spent about a day going through it) and the UI is coming together. With the mechanics of travel worked out (I put in some bogus data to test it thoroughly) and the list of locations for 1.0 set, I think I'm doing pretty well. Not enough to be completely done by the end of the month, but things are definitely moving forward faster than I'd expected. Perhaps if I catch a few more breaks here in the next week or so, I'll end up with a reasonable alpha in about 2 weeks.

I've heard through the grapevine that approvals are taking longer, so things are getting a bit scary where timing is concerned. Looks like I won't be out right at July 15 but if I can get it close, then life will be a good thing, I hope.

Still no solution for the microtransactions, but I've been punting on that for the sake of game progress lately. I will need to get that resolved soon so this doesn't become a major issue (and put the kibosh on my plans for world domination, erm, making money :).

I'll post up some more later as things start to gel in other areas. Otherwise, assume I'm busting my ass trying to make the end-of-month deadline. :)

Conundrum

2009-06-02T10:02:00.003-06:00

I've been thinking about something that I need to make sure I address. The trouble is that I don't have as much information about deployed App Store apps as I need. Here's the conundrum.
I Wizards/Mages/Samantha players can purchase items that will "buff" their characters. In particular, they can purchase artifacts and mana gems (mana gems replenish a portion or all of your mana pool). Of course players can use up their mana gems (one use per gem), so they may want to purchase more. But how best to handle that? I could, when a player purchases the mana gem pack, provide some local data about the transaction completing. Then I need to worry about jailbroken phones where they can remove that transaction data. So then what? What options exist for ensuring that players are only allowed one use for the purchased app?
This is where I'm hoping that someone else may have some ideas about dealing with this. I believe that addmired (makers of iMob, iKnights, iVampires, and Girl Wars) has managed to address this. I don't believe that I get notification of purchases so I can't trigger off that somehow. Honestly, I'm at a bit of a loss and I'm having trouble finding out how others have addressed the problem (if they have).
Something else that I need to think about is that I don't want to have 500 different expansion packs available for the game. I may have a couple of "artifact" packs that allow you to pay different amounts to get different types of artifacts. For example, you can but the $1.99 artifact pack that gives you some low-power artifacts. Or you can buy the $4.99 pack that gives you some more powerful artifacts. I think it would be a choice of which artifact from the list you want to get, but since you could buy the pack more than once (and thereby acquire more than one artifact from the list), I still need to address it.
Hopefully someone has some ideas I can explore or knows of a blog where someone posted up this issue and their resolution. Thanks!

Goings On - Plus Info on Samantha

2009-05-29T11:58:00.003-06:00

I've been working a lot on Project Samantha over the past week and have made quite a bit of progress, thankfully. I solved the problem I was having last week - it was actually a very easy solution once I did it correctly. :) I had been doing things somewhat improperly but re-examined how I was doing things and realized I was not thinking it through properly.

I've got almost all of the UI elements working now and, especially, have the tab elements structured properly and navigation is functioning. I have character data that I need to access and begin displaying on the screen now, so I needed to have some way of having some global data that could be accessed from numerous screens. I despised the idea of doing this via a global variable (I actually shuddered at the thought :), but wondered whether I could/should do this via the application delegate (or other pseudo-global class). I was looking online for a good solution to this when I was reminded of one of my favorite design patterns - the singleton. I found a great post that talked about an extremely easy way of doing this in Objective-C. Thankfully the author, Matt Gallagher, provided a quick template for doing it.

So, now I have a character data singleton. I can access it from whatever view needs to know what it contains. And I've been reading about table view and table view cells so I can really finish up my first user story and move onto the next one. I'm really hoping that over the next few weeks I'll be able to bring my idea to life.

On the job front, I have been applying for jobs and doing what I can to put the best foot forward, but I am really looking at trying to make Otto Von work. If I can get things done and tested by the end of June (a VERY tight schedule if it's even possible) I can make the deadline I've set for myself. The reason for the tight schedule? Project Samantha's motif. What is that motif? Well, here's the full disclosure.

Samantha is a multi-player wizard game. The player takes on the role of a wizard in our world and engages in quests for artifacts, experience, and money; duels with other players for experience; and joins or forms covens/guilds for group protection and to participate in monthly 'grand artifact quests'. Obviously there's SO much more to this game than just that, but that's probably the ten second synopsis.

Why Samantha? Samantha Stephens, of course. Not that I don't like the Nicole Kidman version (because I lurve Nicole), but it HAS to be Elizabeth Montgomery. :) Regardless, it was pretty much because of Bewitched that I chose the project name.

So, that's what's up in a nutshell. Lots happening and I'm praying (and could use yours) that I can get this working and out before Harry Potter opens in July. Oh - yeah. The timing. I figure if people come out of the movie and check their iPhones for a wizard game, it would be best if mine were right there for them to download. Since the game will be free with micro-transactions for in-game items, I can hopefully get a lot of downloads and people will be encouraged to purchase some of these items.

We'll see. I'm doing what I can to make this end-of-June deadline and hope that things will work to my benefit. Fortune favors the bold, so let's be bold.

Brief Update

2009-05-21T11:27:00.002-06:00

As I've posted up elsewhere (LinkedIn and Facebook, in particular), my regular job is ending tomorrow. I'm looking at this with somewhat mixed emotions. On one hand, it's an opportunity to really jump the corporate ship and strike out on my own. On the other, we have a LOT of bills coming up (including Cathy's tuition for Waldorf) that having a regular paycheck would be, um, nice. :) I am looking to see if I can find more a management role in another company. If I can do that, I'll be happy for a while. I talked with Susie this morning and decided that if I don't get something at least in the works by the middle of June that I'll start looking at regular engineer jobs. There seem to be a lot of them, but I've found that I find it hard to work on code at home when I've been working on code for 8 hours at work. Regardless, it will be a tight few months for us (and over the summer - of course).
In the meantime, I've been working on Samantha. It's starting to come together but I keep stumbling into very stupid and easily avoidable troubles. Right now I have a weird issue where I've got a tab view (player profile). The player clicks a button and it goes to another view (detailed info). That shows up properly, but when I click the "back" button I created on the page it crashes with an "invalid selector". *sigh* I get the feeling that if I could just focus on this for a few weeks that I would make leaps-and-bounds improvements. AND I'd remember how to avoid these stupid little things. We'll see, I guess.
Well, this was supposed to be brief, so I'll end it here. Wish me luck in getting something else or making amazing headway in my Otto Von efforts.

It is done

2009-04-28T16:37:00.003-06:00

I am officially now an iPhone developer. I got my activation code about an hour ago, logged in, typed in the sequence carefully, double-checking every letter as I entered them, and took a deep breath before clicking the "Submit" button.
I held my breath for what seemed an eternity.
Welcome to the iPhone Developer Program appeared on my screen. My breath left my body slowly as the euphoria slowly spread throughout me.
It. Is. Done.

Victory is Mine!

2009-04-28T13:16:00.003-06:00

Well, almost, but the Stewie quote was too good to pass up. I FINALLY got the approval completed with Apple! I finally gave up and called them. I spoke to a very nice gentleman and we got everything squared away. He did say "I don't know why you haven't been processed", which led me to believe that something got horked after the last phone call from them. But he completed the processing and I got my email from Apple and then I sent them money for my enrollment. I need to wait for it to get processed and have my account updated, but that should happen in 24 hours (so the website claims). My Dev Center now reads "Activation Required" which is a very good thing. Change is good. :)
Samantha is coming along slowly. I've been working a little bit at it over the past few days, but nothing has been completed yet. I've been tweaking some UI elements lately (which is completely pointless at this stage and I need to stop doing it). I'm going to try to spend my time over the next several days getting all of the page flows working correctly. THEN I'll start working on the content. I've added the basis for character data and that's been going well.
Anyway, it's been a banner day. Thankfully this hell has mostly completed and I should be finished with this thing soon.

Time flies...

2009-04-22T21:44:00.003-06:00

Wow. Has it really been almost 2 weeks since my last post? I wish I could say that more has happened, but I can't. It's been a rough couple of weeks personally - just lots going on with health issues (Susie sprained her ankle and I got the crud from hell). We had Taekwondo testing (we're all purple belts now - yay!). We had a birthday party and I had to make up work on a Sunday...

Last Saturday (the 18th) I actually took the day off. We had plans to do a lot that day but we got about a foot of snow and decided that we could really use just *one* day to relax and recuperate. I wish it had been more recuperative, but you get what you get.

I've been working on the UI still for Samantha over the past few weeks. It's slowly coming together, but I'm getting bogged down in some details that I didn't want to deal with quite yet. It's been slower than I hoped (or can afford, I fear). I may have to bust a move this weekend or next to get it going. I mean, next week is MAY for goodness sakes. Damn, but time does fly. I still have at LEAST 6 weeks of solid work left before I can call the game a game. I just wish I could devote full-time periods to getting this done. I'm now helping teach some TKD classes (once week and two more times per month), so it's not a huge burden, but it does wear me out mentally and physically. I just need to get some focus on and get this stuff hammered out. The fact that I STILL haven't heard from Apple about the Dev Program is just beginning to piss me off now.

I sent them ANOTHER email tonight asking them what's going with my enrollment. I mean, it's been almost a month since I got a call saying I'd been approved. WTH man? Like I said - it's a VERY good thing that I'm not sitting on a completed app at this point. I've got some small stuff I'm going to test out (just some sample apps and stuff) just to see how the process works, but if I'm not getting my enrollment completed, I can't do any beta stuff, which makes it hard to see how the process works. Grrr. I'm planning on calling on Monday if I don't get anything between now and then. This is starting to go from ridiculous to downright mean-spirited.

Anyway, I've got an early morning and a late night tomorrow (more TKD), so I'll end it here. Hasta til later.

IGDA Leadership Forum

2009-04-11T21:39:00.002-06:00

I got an email a couple of days ago from the IGDA (Int'l Game Developers Association) about their upcoming Leadership Forum in Nov. They were looking for proposals for sessions, so I thought I'd send in a submission about agile and game development. By the time the session rolls around, I should have two games under my belt and about 10 years of experience with iterative development. :)

I would have to pay my way out to San Fran, but it might be worth it. I think I have enough United miles to make the flight for free, which would mean that I'd just need to pay for the hotel. That would be a reasonable thing for the benefits of speaking at that event.

I got a confirmation that they received my submission and they'd get back to me in about a month. I'll post up as I find out more. It's not quite as prestigious as, say, GDC, but it's a great start and should open doors to other venues. I spoke to several speakers that made the rounds at the VCDC conferences several years ago and they all advised me to get into it. So I'm only 9 years late to the party... :) With this one perhaps I'll have the opportunity to speak at others and get more and more people as enamored with iterative development as I am. :) That would be cool.

Have a great Easter!

Tired of Waiting

2009-04-10T09:04:00.002-06:00

I finally got tired of waiting and found a way to contact Apple about my enrollment status. They've made some upgrades to the site over the past couple of months and added some things, apparently. :) Anyway, I've sent in a request to find out what's up as it's now been 15 days since I got the phone call about my approval (and almost 4 weeks since my submission). Wow - this is a bit surprising that it's taking this long. I'm guessing that the email I was supposed to receive from Apple got lost in the ether somewhere.

I'm hoping that we can get this sorted out. It's a good thing I didn't try to do this after I had completed the game - I'd be pulling my hair out. :) Since I'm still in development, it's not a HUGE problem, but I do have a lot to learn about submitting through the App Store and getting beta users hooked up.

So, hopefully more news later.

Post-Script

2009-04-08T16:04:00.002-06:00

STILL no word on the Developer Program. I got the call almost 2 weeks ago and still no information about next steps. Unfortunately, what I've been unable to find is any way to contact them about my account. You submit a request and then they get back to you when they feel like it. I guess it's a bit like getting a green card - don't ask or you go to the back of the queue. :(
Anyway, perhaps by posting I'll have some kind of answer by tomorrow. :) *fingers crossed*

Beginning Gameplay Issues

2009-04-08T15:41:00.004-06:00

I was checking out Owen's blog about Dapple and he posted up recently about some feedback he's been getting about the game. In particular, it seems like it's too difficult for some people to grok instantly and they get turned off and don't buy the game. One common thread in the comments was that many games that have been successful (especially the PopCap games) has been that they introduce new concepts slowly. For instance, in Chuzzle, players need to get three Chuzzles co-located so they can be 'captured' (or whatever). Later in the game, they introduce a "lock" Chuzzle that locks both the row and column it's in - you can't move either. This concept is carried through a couple of levels before they introduce other concepts - "rainbow" Chuzzles that count as any color and "bomb" Chuzzles. I've only seen the game played, but it seemed like an interesting little twist on the standard "click two gems to exchange them" paradigm established in Bejeweled.
For Samantha, though, I need to find a way to do this same thing - introduce concepts slowly. How do you do that while allowing players to advance and explore the world? What I'm planning on doing is having a "school" where the player spends the first 4 levels free from harassment by other players. They're able to play around and there's no significant consequence (they won't die). After they complete their "training", though, and are moved out into the real world, it will become a bit more chaotic. I want to try to make that transition as smooth as possible and, in my mind, that's where I will either hook or lose the players. They might be interested when they're in school - when they leave is when they'll love the world we've created or hate it and quit.
Do I think that the school will help the player learning curve? I do. Do I have concerns about the chasm they need to jump from school to the "real" world? You betcha.
I'll post some more later when I think I've found ways to address this. I'm hoping that alpha/beta testing will provide some good feedback about this, but I think that if I can be cognizant of the potential issue I can work to minimize its impact and, as a result, have happier players.

Samantha Changes

2009-04-06T15:05:00.002-06:00

So I've been having some really good and constructive conversations with Susie about Samantha as of late. We've been exploring some ideas and decided to make some changes to what I had envisaged for a couple of systems (I think her recommendations are better than my original ideas) and some things we've decided to postpone until later versions. I have to say that I'm pretty stoked about the whole thing - I'm beginning to see the game take shape and I'm liking the way it's coming together.
I'm still in the middle of iteration 1. Things are slowly coming together. I've added in the gemstones that I needed, although I don't like the graphics. A player couldn't possibly tell what they are, but they're different from one level to the next, so that's interesting. And the background graphic for that portion of the character profile is coming together. I did find that the 4th tab element is just wasted space, but Susie (again) pointed out a missing element, so there we go - the 4th tab becomes News. :)
The main concern I have is over the cluttered nature of one of the tabs. There are too many things going on there. I may need to break it out into a couple of tabs to make it manageable. The background image might be too distracting and difficult to interpret. The whole point is to make it easy for a player to know what to click - currently that wouldn't be very feasible.
Anyway, Cathy's up in Laramie this week with the Grandma, so I hope that in between working 4 10's that I can get some extra work done on this. It would be great to end the week with the Rockies opener and the end of Iteration 1. :)

Busy weekend = no real work

2009-04-05T08:39:00.002-06:00

I worked a little bit on the view management yesterday for Samantha. I had been playing around with Gimp to try to get some background images for my locations, but decided to put that on hold. What I'm thinking I'm going to do for a short-term solution is mock up the locations in Sims 2 and then use those images until I can either get someone to make some images for it or do them myself later. I'm no graphic artist, so ideally I'd have someone else who is make them. :)
The wiki is progressing nicely. I've got a lot of game concepts captured in there and it's coming together nicely. There are many things still to document, but I've managed to document a lot of things that have been rattling around in my head taking up CPU cycles. Now that they're out, I'm able to re-focus on things that need to get done.
The weekend has been busy, though. I went over to my see my lodge brother and get taxes done EARLY on Saturday and then had to bust a move down to Cathy's ballet class. From there I headed over for Taekwondo leadership class and then back home after lunch. I was exhausted from a few days of no sleep and ended up crashing Sat afternoon. I desperately needed the sleep. Cathy was very sweet and brought me a bowl of Raisin Bran for an afternoon snack. :) Today we've got ELPs rehearsal and then a drive to Laramie - Cathy's spending the first week of her spring break in Laramie with her grandma.
I'm hoping I'll have some time this week to work on Samantha and get this first user story done and off my plate. There are several other user stories that need to be done and I'm rapidly running out of time if I'm going to make my "end of June" deadline.

Wiki Madness too!

2009-04-02T15:00:00.002-06:00

One of the things that I'm loving about the wiki is that I'm able to post up ideas as I have them without having to have a notebook around or anything. I can just head over, type up some concepts/capture some ideas and then close it out. There is so much that will take time to flesh out that it's nice to be able to take a few minutes when my schedule permits to add to it. And because I can add a hyperlink in articles I write to non-existent articles I can quickly find the articles/concepts that I haven't yet documented. It's really helping me figure out what still needs to be worked on and what's mostly complete. And, whatever I work on now becomes the basis for the wiki for players of the game. I have to say that I think it was perhaps the best idea I've had in a while. :)
Now that I'm done preening, it's back to work. ;)

User Story Madness

2009-04-02T11:44:00.002-06:00

I've been adding tons of user stories to my wiki, defining the game systems. There are still some systems I need to really flesh out, but I'm hoping I can get some good basic flow established and then test the hell out of it when I get to Alpha. It's been interesting so far, but things are definitely beginning to come together. I've got a bunch of things sorted out philosophically and progress is definitely being made. Yay. I've only got 9 stories, but they are 9 very fleshed-out stories. :)
I've also defined all of the player level titles. As player progress through the levels, their titles change and their abilities expand. They can create in-game items, which is pretty cool, I think, and they get more and more responsibility. Players can also form groups ('guilds' in EQ and WoW parlance) that are fully connected (each player is connected to each other player in the group) and they're limited in size. Other games (iMob, etc) don't have this kind of fully connected group concept, so I think it will distance us from those kinds of games. Being part of one of these groups also helps with combat (it increases the amount of energy you have available to use in combat), which makes it a little more interesting as well.
I'm starting to get combat fully fleshed-out. It's been a long time coming as I've played with a variety of options, tweaking things here and there to see what kind of impact it has. It's been very interesting seeing how small modifications cascade into unusable systems. I've got a basic idea of things now, so it's just a question of getting things into a more finalized form and coding them up in the game.
Speaking of the game, I got the basic tab control flow started last night. I have an idea for navigation where the user is presented with a picture of the topic. For instance, there's a "Profile" tab. When you click it you'd see a picture of a book, let's say, and various hotspots on the book would take you to detailed screens. So you might see a picture of a backpack, let's say, and clicking it would show you your inventory. I like it a lot better than the traditional "click the item in the table view" choices - it just seems a little more organic. The problem I think I'm going to face is that there might be a lot of choices in these main tab areas that could clutter the screen too much.
Finally, I need to sort out money. I've decided to include money only in-game - people can buy/sell items in the game and they get/spend money. I've been debating whether I should use just a standard "Gold Pieces" system or if I should do something with "Pounds/Shillings/Denarii" system (which I think is cool, but it's also confusing to some people). I was looking on Wiki and found an article that described the various Roman currencies and I think, given some of the other thoughts I've had about the back story of the game, that I'll use that. So it would be 1 gold aureus (pl. aurea) = 25 silver denarii (sing. denarius) = 100 bronze sestertii (sing. sestertius). That's pretty reasonable and not nearly as confusing as Pounds/Shillings/Denarii. :) I need to add that now. :)
So, lots of things moving forward. I've really been feeling productive, both on the design side and on the development side. Things are coming together with game systems and user stories and I've been making progress getting things working in the code. I just can't wait to actually get some things implemented and tested out on real iPhones.

And now for something completely different...

2009-04-02T09:56:00.002-06:00

So this post has absolutely nothing to do with Otto Von, but it's good personal news. Cathy has decided to join the cheerleading squad, so she will be with the Junior Broncos Cheerleaders this year. Yay! They do 3 home games, so she'll get a chance to actually be on field either during the pre-game or at half-time.
I once played a half-time show when I was in marching band for the New England Patriots. It was really cool being on the field and playing for a crowd of tens of thousands. :) I think Cathy will have a blast!
Anyway, that's all for that now. :)

Progress on Samantha

2009-04-01T10:48:00.003-06:00

I've been working over the weekend on Trivia primarily, getting things working with XML. I had a good chat with my mom and given the lack of questions that I have and the upcoming deadline for Samantha, I decided to put the Trivia game back on the back-burner and focus on Samantha. I've got a wiki up on my website where I'm putting the user stories. It's interesting working with the wiki instead of my older standby, but I think the wiki is a little better. I get to see modifications over time, I can categorize both by "user story" and by "iteration"... It's not what I'd recommend for organizations looking to integrate agile processes into their development teams, but if you've got a team (read: me) that's as familiar with agile as I am, then it's a reasonable shortcut. Besides, I've been using the wiki for a variety of other things (creating the back story, etc).
So far I've only got about 5 stories in the wiki, but I think I've got a handle on the other stories I need to add. I've done a lot of ruminating on the game and I think I've got the systems down. There's a LOT of back story left to fill in as well as tables and TABLES of things to create (combat stuff, etc). The cool thing is that I've been working on the tab control for navigation and I have an awesome image for one of the tabs. It came out SO nice - I was amazed. I've still got 3 other tabs to get looking similarly excellent, but it was just so cool to see that come out as well as it did. I'll start posting pictures when I get closer to having it together.
In other news, still no word back from Apple on the developer program. It's only Wed and there was a weekend involved, but I had hoped that I would hear something back sooner. I guess even Apple moves at the speed of bureaucracy. :) The website still shows "need company documents" as well. I'm just in a holding pattern right now - when it changes, I'll post.
One major piece of personal news. A few months ago we were talking to my best friend Dan about his daughter and the Denver Broncos Junior Cheerleaders. I thought that since he was a big Broncos fan that it might be cool if his daughter Amy tried to get into the program. I thought they had agreed it would be cool, so I signed Cathy up. Only to find out later that they hadn't signed up Amy. Okay. But now - Cathy's able to join! She's been excited about the prospect of being a cheerleader, so now we need to find out if she's still interested even if Amy's not doing it. We'll see, but it's kind of a big deal for us. We're not huge Broncos fans (I think the last game I went to or really even watched was in 2005), but Cathy's a big cheerleader fan. I'm trying not to post too much about personal stuff in this dev blog, but occasionally exciting things like that will slip in. :)
I guess that's it for now. Tonight we're getting more snow - 2" to 6" - but it's not the amount that's an issue, it's when - rush hour. Yay, joy. :( Oh well. And more snow on Saturday. Maybe I'll get stuck at home and work loads and tons on Samantha. :) Of course, I'm going to need Beta testers... Need to start exploring the options there...

Gettin' 'er done!

2009-03-29T10:04:00.002-06:00

After I completed the basic game play last night on trivia with the canned data I started working on getting it to work with 'live-like' data from the website. It's been a little slower than I hoped, but I've been getting the XML parsing integrated pretty well into the application. By the time I'm done, I'll have likely doubled the app size. :) This morning's going to be spent trying to get it to download the XML from the web and then get the parsing started. I've got plans for the afternoon, so I won't likely get back to this until tonight at the earliest.
I'm just liking how things are starting to come together and seeing hourly progress has been a wonderful change from the hours of beating my head against the wall. :)

Trivia Update

2009-03-28T17:29:00.003-06:00

It's been a pretty good few days. I've finished the basic game play for trivia. I had previously done some background graphics and those worked beautifully in the game. There are still some things to do:

Icons for all of the categories (for buttons)
Question parsing in the application
Question creation on server
Database storage for game persistence on iPhone
More questions than I can even possibly imagine

I have been considering using XML as the format for the questions. I like it for a variety of reasons, but the problem is that its a very verbose format. Data transfer is always a concern with iPhone apps and the smaller the format and the more compression I can do, the less I need to worry about killing someone's phone while they play. I may still use XML as the full format but compress it before I send it.

As for the rest of it, the major part of the work that I need to do is get the server to start serving the pages. I'm going to be getting a basic XML file set up on the website so I can at least see it serve the file and then parse it on the app side. Then I can add a small interface one both sides to compress/decompress the data.

On the dev program front, I still haven't received the email or seen the website update yet. I'm hoping that soon things will be sorted out and updated.

Storm update

2009-03-27T07:30:00.003-06:00

This has nothing to do with development, but I went out this morning to get the final storm totals here at the house. In places I've only got about 5" of snow, but on the lawn (which is actually where it counts) it's 11.5". That's good news for my lawn, which has been languishing in the unseasonably warm and dry weather we've been having.
School's closed again today, so I'm working from home. Cathy's also running a fever, so it sort of didn't matter whether school was closed or not. Not sure what's going on with her, as she hasn't really "seemed" sick over the past day, but she definitely ran a fever this morning (101.3).
That's all for now. Still not update on the Apple website about my approval nor any email from them. I'll post when I hear.

Fantastic news!

2009-03-26T15:00:00.003-06:00

As I sit at home working on real work (and the occasional OVP work), I received a phone call from England (the +44 country code was a dead giveaway :). Anyway, I thought it might have been our friend Verona Chard (who is amazing), but it was APPLE! They called to confirm that my enrollment in the Developer Program had been verified and that everything was moving forward. They're sending an email with some more information about the program, but I did finally get notice that I'm officially in the program.

Yay. And yay again.

[Updated: 15:29] On the weather front, it's been very reasonable around the house. We've got about 5" of snow here, which is supposedly 9" less than we got at the old house. It's still snowing at a good clip, but the forecast is only calling for another 1-3", which is not all that much. I had been expecting more than a foot and 8" is manageable.

Making Progress

2009-03-25T19:23:00.005-06:00

Well, it's been a pretty good couple of days. Pretty productive, actually. Here's what's been going on with development.

With Trivia, I've been getting the view flow working the way I want, which has been great. I've been adding in some functionality as I go just to make sure that it works properly and it has been. Like I said before, this is a big "Yay" moment as I have been making good progress. All I can say is that I'm pretty stoked as I get moving with this stuff. It's been a long time coming, but as all developers can tell you, when you finally get something working and things start clicking it's hard to stop. :)

As for Samantha, I've been making some good progress on the game systems. I'm working on combat right now and trying to figure out how much some of the actions cost - it's been interesting seeing how tweaking elements change the dynamics. For instance, I increased the damage caused by an action by one point of damage and it completely altered how combat worked. I've been able to make some good progress on it, but there's a lot more to do still. I think I'm going to be able to start finalizing the systems in the next week and then start coding it up.

I think given the progress that I'm making on trivia, though, that I'll try to finish the coding for that by the end of next week and then it's just TONS and TONS and TONS of data entry trying to get the trivia questions in the database. I also need to make two versions of the game. One thing that I've seen again and again in the blogs I'm reading is that having a trial/lite version of the game, especially if it's free, really does a lot for sales. Owen at Streaming Colour is seeing about 2-3% conversion rate on lite-to-full version, which is just amazing (many companies are happy with 0.1% or 1/30th of what he's seeing). He has put his game on sale (it originally went for $4.99 and now it's being priced at $2.99). I think the $4.99 price was a mistake and the $2.99 price is a good price point. He's got a good game, but $4.99 was a bit of a put-off.

For Trivia, I'm thinking of pricing it at around $1.99 for the full version (lite will obviously be free). The lite version will also be locked so that it only asks for Kids questions (as opposed to the full version which will offer 7 more categories and a Miscellaneous category). I'm hoping that $1.99 is going to be competitive with other games in the market (when last I looked it was). I'm also hoping that the model I'm using where the questions are served from a central database will make it more interesting for people as the number of questions can be expanded. That, plus the online leader board that I'm going to do will separate it from several of the other offerings out there. So long as I can make the quality of the questions better, that may help differentiate. It's definitely not what I'm looking at for a huge cash cow long-term - it's a good way of getting Otto Von's name out there and generating some buzz for the other games (I hope). :)

We're supposed to get a major snow storm tonight (8+ inches), so I'm probably just going to hunker down and work on stuff as much as possible. We'll see how good conditions are in the morning as to whether I go in to work, but I'm actually planning on not going in right now and if I do, I will definitely be leaving early. And Susie's still planning on coming back Friday afternoon from her business trip, so it's a busy week and weekend.

On the Apple developer program front, still nothing. I emailed them on Monday and faxed the documents again, but still no word other than "Requested documents must be received". :( I'll post up more when I hear more from them.

That's it for now. Centennial, Colorado signing off. :)

Dev Program Update

2009-03-23T19:10:00.003-06:00

So I got home from work this afternoon and had an email in my in box from Apple about the iPhone Developer Program.

In reviewing your enrollment status, we noticed that we are waiting for documentation from you in order to complete the identity verification for your iPhone Developer Program enrollment request. To proceed with your enrollment, fax the requested documentation to blah, blah, blah...
If you have already faxed the requested documentation, please contact us.

Yeah... So I sent them an email saying that I've already sent it to them three times - once last week and twice today (the first fax was at "normal" resolution - 200x100 dpi - so I sent it again at "fine" - 200x200). I just hope they received it, they process it, and we move on it. There are a couple of things I still need to work on for doing beta programs and such, so there are things I can be learning about once it's processed.
So anyway, now I get to wait - some more.

Combat Systems

2009-03-23T12:23:00.007-06:00

Originally written 23 March 2009.

For Samantha, I have a lot of different possible ways to implement combat. I've been debating the different systems now for a while as mentioned in a previous post - casting points and mana pool. What seems to be evolving right now is a combination of the two, but with some modifications.
The first is that Susie liked the idea of keeping the casting points, but not in the same way that I had originally considered it. One idea now is that a player would have CP and whatever they didn't use in a single round would carry over to the next round. An example would be if you have 10 CP per turn and cast something that costs 6, the next turn you'll have 14. If you only use 5 of that, you'd carry over 9 to the next turn and so on. OR, it could only carry over what you don't spend up to 10 CP (in the example above only 5 would carry over to the third round). That's a lot more convoluted, though. It's certainly possible that if you're not casting a lot that you could really leave yourself open to some major damage (which would still deduct from your MP), but you might have a LOT of CP to cast some pretty major spells. I need to ruminate on it further to decide what to do.
I'm still pretty enamored of the idea of your MP being both your energy reserve and your health. I think it really adds something to the game. So I don't think that will change. As for how much MP someone has and how much the coven's MP comes into play remain to be seen. The CP concept just limits the number of things that can be done in a turn (as opposed to just arbitrarily limiting it to 1 or something). It also figures into the Affinities concept.
In the game there are going to be 5 different affinities - Fire, Water, Earth, Air, and Void. Each of them is represented by an arm or segment of a pentacle/pentagrams. Upon each arm is a gemstone holder. As players advance in levels, they can choose to improve their affinity with a particular element. For each gemstone (and the levels get progressively further apart), the casting point cost of a spell is reduced (to a minimum of 1). An example of this would be the following. Say a spell normally costs 5 CP to cast. If you have 3 gemstones of affinity in the spell's element, the cost would be reduced to 2 CP. If you gained two more gemstones of affinity, the cost would be 1 and stay there indefinitely.
One final thing about combat is that players can use items during combat. It will cost some number of CP to use an item, but some of the artifacts are things like mana gems that will restore some or all of your MP. That could be a huge boost in a long battle. Plus, those are likely to be for sale in groups of 10 or something through the App Store.
I'm still working through some of the logistics of the whole CP/MP thing, but I think I'm starting to come to some decisions on the systems and will be able to document the whole thing in the not-too-distant future. At least, that's what I hope. :)

The Waiting Kills You

2009-03-23T10:56:00.002-06:00

As I mentioned in a post last Monday, I had finally gotten some kind of feedback from Apple about my application to the iPhone Developer Program. I had a status message of "Company Documents Needed". I sent in the requisite paperwork. And then I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And the weekend came and went and still I was... waiting.
So this morning, one week after I sent in the documents originally, I decided that maybe the fax got lost or I was too quick to submit them or the fax wasn't legible or something! I decided to re-fax it again today. So now I sit around and
wait.

Small Victory

2009-03-21T22:24:00.004-06:00

I've been working on some things for the Empire Lyric Players (making rehearsal CDs if you must know), so I haven't been working on Project Samantha. I have, however, been working on making a couple of things work with Trivia. I got several new books* on iPhone development and one of the books finally had an example that did what I'm trying to do with the game.

One thing about the trivia game is that while it's similar to pretty much any other trivia game out there, trivia games are, by their implementation, anathema to iPhone user interface guidelines. There's no navigating back, there's no lists... It just doesn't fit the paradigm. Of course, since most books about developing for a platform (and conference sessions) tend to encourage the existing paradigms, doing something weird like trivia doesn't flow from the general texts. Until now, that is. :)

This book that I picked up, Beginning iPhone Development, is quite nice and has an example about multi-view applications that was just what I needed to move forward. There were some things that I wasn't doing correctly (and didn't realize weren't being done automagically) that doomed every previous effort to failure. With this new-found wisdom, however, I was actually able to get some of the flow working correctly. There is still a LOT to do to actually make the game into a workable system, but this was one of those A-HA! moments that gave me an insight into how the paradigm works. I was also able to extend some functionality without any trouble, which shows that I'm actually absorbing some of the Objective-C.

So, overall, a big YAY today as I got moving a little closer to understanding. And as I mentioned earlier, Samantha will actually follow more of the standard paradigm so it should be easier than trivia - amazingly.

* If you're interested, here's the list of books I've picked up so far:

Development Processes

2009-03-19T13:51:00.004-06:00

One of the things I wanted to post about was the process that I'm going to be using with Otto Von. I have always been a big proponent of agile methodologies, so I plan on implementing that kind of process with my company. You can read my posts over on my software development blog for more information about the whys and such, but I think that it tends to provide the best mechanism for making gradual yet complete improvements to a code base. It's easy, especially as an independent developer, to get lost if you try to work from a full feature list - you'll get some things partially done before you start working on something cooler. And in the end you'll end up with only part of the software done and that part is less than satisfactory.
There are some things that need to be sorted out in advance. For example, in Project Samantha I'm considering a lot of the game play design - how do things work together? what kinds of values will I use for various attributes? what kind of role does random chance play? But these are all parts of a user story about it. In the trivia game, for instance, I can plan the timing of the answer period and the number of points independently of how many questions make up a game. Or what format the question data takes. So those separately are user stories, but the vision and the interface of the various subsystems needs to be laid out a little more in-depth before I begin.
The main problem with 'agile development' is the tendency toward cowboy coding. In this case, I use it pejoratively to denote the "just get started" mentality - without vision, the coding ends up being no better than a prototype. And that's not the plan - I need a high-quality, high-value game at the end of this. That, or become a joke with the App Store crowd.
I've found some templates for game design that I've been using for some other project ideas I had. I'm going to be putting Samantha in that template so I can start play-testing the systems as well as capture some of the "cool" ideas I've come up with. :) That, and it should provide some kind of hint about how much work this is actually going to be. I may need to delay some things for an update (like things for higher-level players in Samantha). I may need to just dump some ideas outright (too much to handle). I won't really be able to make those calls and figure out what's really going to be in the "release plan" until I have the subsystems described.
Normally the user story would be very high-level and it acts as a token for a conversation to be had between the developer and the customer/designer. In this case, since I'm both, I'm planning on capturing the "conversation" in the story itself (or in the design docs). Ideally I would be either the designer or the developer, but it's a one-man show, so some accommodations needs to be made. :)
I'll post things up as progress is made about how well the process works/doesn't work and what kinds of adjustments I think need to be made to my base process. In the future, when I'm making money hand-over-fist and can afford to hire actual developers I'll be able to look back at this as the early definition and trial by fire of the process. Yeah, about that...

Quick post

2009-03-18T22:23:00.002-06:00

I just checked the Apple iPhone Dev Center and it says that my application is in the following state:
Company documents needed
. Requested documents must be received to proceed with enrollment
I've sent them in (Monday), but I'm guessing that this is the standard message they post until they've actually processed the documents.
Regardless, I think things are still moving forward. Better than the "If you've already applied, we're processing your application" message it used to have. :)

Wiki?

2009-03-18T17:21:00.002-06:00

I've added a Wiki to the Otto Von site for the products that will be coming out. I'm going to be putting things up there about game play and systems as well as general help files. Project Samantha in particular may be a very complex game on some levels, so rather than embed tons of help files, I'm likely just going to add some brief help and a provide a link to the Wiki so people can look up things there. I can't imagine there will be too much help needed for the trivia game, but Samantha has the potential for some dizzyingly complicated components.
Anyway, the link's above if you're interested. There's some regular Otto Von stuff (like articles about the company) up there right now and more will follow later.

Radical Concept

2009-03-18T13:34:00.002-06:00

Originally written 18 March 2009.

So I was reading through Daniel Cook's blog at Lost Garden about paintbox games. Danc is one of my former coworkers from Anark and one of the most brilliant individuals I've ever had the opportunity to know. He has an incredible talent of being able to synthesize global concepts from a number of disparate ones - like taking quantum mechanics, audio, global financial markets, and user interface design and coming up with a way of examining Nintendo. He boggles my mind, actually.
One of the things he said really made me sit up and take notice. In a blog from 2006 of all things, I found the following in his description of paintbox games: "The player can build or assemble something new and unique to the world." This got me thinking about Project Samantha, of course. One of the things that I have been working on lately is the list of artifacts that are available in the game. This began as the basic list of "mana gems" and moved into "affinity stones" and then into "creature body parts" (being like a Red Dragon's Claw). One thing that I liked from the origianl AD&D was the whole idea of people creating various artifacts (Machine of Lum the Mad). I began creating a list of mythical people from the game's past (including some obvious ones like Eisus (Susie spelled backwards) and some other that are names of characters I made for D&D). But it got me to wondering, though - why not allow players to create their own artifacts?
By allowing people to create their own artifacts including some easy ones like mana gems and using creature parts from guardians they kill to really difficult ones, players would be able to impact the future of the game directly. One thing that I want to do with the Trivia game is set it up so that players can submit questions and they'll get credit for it when the question is displayed (like, "Who won the MLB MVP trophy in 2009? - Provided by Joe Blow"). But in Samantha, players can create artifacts that will bear their name (the "Diadem of Joe Blow"). I need to figure out exactly how that's going to work in practice, but I think the idea is SOOOOOO completely compelling that I have to find a way to make it happen.
Anyway, that's just some thinking while I work on game systems. Yet another system to design and implement. Yay. :)

Resources

2009-03-17T14:20:00.001-06:00

I've been really inspired by one of the iPhone developers who's been blogging about his experiences. His name is Owen and runs Streaming Colour Studios (his blog is located here). It's been a fascinating read and he's been brutally honest about his successes in selling iPhone applications. I found him through Slashdot and have been following him ever since, including going back and reading his earlier posts.
I've been inspired to talk about the business side of things because of his blog. I think a lot of people expect that developing for the iPhone will mean success like Ethan Nicholas' success (or Steve Demeter's). Thankfully I'm a lot more pragmatic than that. I'm hoping I might be able to get an extra sushi dinner each month from this. :) Not that I'd mind that success - hell, it would be awesome to be successful enough to do this full-time. As I mentioned, that's a long-term goal.
I've been piggybacking a bit on Owen's blog (and his links to other blogs) to see how other developers coping with things like price points, lite versions, etc. What kind of success are they seeing (or not seeing)? What kinds of strategies are they employing to try to maximize their sales? What kind of "sweet spots" in terms of pricing are they seeing?
I've been thinking about it especially as regards Project Samantha. How am I going to monetize the game? Will I have a free version and a paid version? A free version that can be upgraded in situ to a full version? What kind of security implications does that have? Do I keep the game free and offer paid add-ons (like iMob has done with respect points)? If there's a free vs. paid version, what restrictions do I place on the free version?
I'll post up more on what I decide to do when I finally decide to do it. I'm leaning in one particular direction and will make it clearer when I have a chance to really assess the benefits. In the meantime, Owen's blog has been fascinating. I also stumbled upon Snappy Touch's blog. He's working on a game idea that's similar to one that Susie and I thought of back in November - still in development. But he made a quick and dirty app called Tea Time! that gave him some insights into how the App Store and Apple's approval process worked. Again, fascinating reading.
As I come across more blogs and resources that I can recommend, I will add them here. Until then, enjoy these two very readable blogs.

Project Samantha

2009-03-17T12:54:00.000-06:00

Just to whet some appetites about Project Samantha, I wanted to sort of lay out what I have in mind in broad strokes and leave the actual descriptions about what I'm working on until after I've got the game in beta. I expect to have a lot of posts about specific decisions and directions taken in the game in those posts, including how play testing affected the final incarnation.
Generally speaking, I'm envisioning Samantha as a multiplayer game with some single-player aspects to it. Actually, it's mostly single-player, but the multiplayer aspects are more around socialization and networking. Having played some games with networking components, I have some strong opinions about how those aspects will work in Samantha. It will be significantly streamlined and should be faster than some other apps in the market.
The main concerns I have are the graphics and the sounds and music. These are certainly areas where I am less than adept (not that I'm really that adept at anything else) :), so I have worries that the app will get dinged by reviewers and players for these areas. I hope that Susie can help out with the sounds and music. She has offered to do something for the music and I hope we can get some good sound effects as well, but these are definitely the areas I'm most concerned about. I'll likely get something reasonable for graphics, but I'm just not a digital artist by any stretch.
I think I have enough people who will sign up to help on the beta, though. I was very concerned about the potential bandwidth problems for two reasons. The first is that I have limited bandwidth on my site (I can increase it, but it does cost). The second is that more network traffic means less battery life on the device. While I think that a lot of people are beginning to play games while plugged in, it certainly wasn't the original design goal for the iPhone. The more I can compress the transactions, the less bandwidth I use and the less I chew up the player's battery. Besides, there's something interesting about trying to compress things down more and more and more. I know one of my friends, Cooper, gets a thrill out of it. And let's face it - if we could all be more like Cooper, we'd all have much better software in the world. :)
I am trying to see if I can get this project done by the end of June, which gives me about 3 months. I'd like it approved by Apple and available for download by then, which actually means that I'm going to try to finish up by the middle of June at the least. Aggressive, especially doing things that I don't have all that much experience in developing. Yeah... About that...
Anyway, that's the goal. As I mentioned, when I hit Beta phase (which I hope to be mid-May), I'll make public all of the other posts I've got here about Samantha. And then maybe the name will make sense.

Yay!

2009-03-16T15:45:00.000-06:00

There's been a little bit of good news on the Apple Developer Program front. The program is what Apple uses to identify iPhone developers and how those developers distribute applications to testers and customers. It costs a little bit of scratch ($99 for standard developers) to enroll, but it's the price of admission for developing for the iPhone. Yes, the Android is cheaper (i.e., free last I checked), but it still has a while before it catches up with the iPhone in distribution.
Anyway, I signed up originally for iPhone development through my wife's Apple account (since she had an account from when I bought her an iPod a couple of years ago) instead of creating a new one under my email address. It just seemed pointless to create another one. Unfortunately, what happened was that any communications from Apple came to her email. Since she wasn't looking for them as something to keep, they ended up in the digital circular file. :(
That changed, though, when I decided yesterday to just create my own. I submitted for the Apple Developer Program again under my account. Amazingly, today I got a request for some information from Apple about my company. They wanted some kind of documentation stating that Otto Von is a real company. Since it is, that was easy and I faxed back the proof.
It's a small victory, but it's something. I had been concerned that my application had been lost in the shuffle or that Apple was just really 4 weeks behind on approvals. I'm glad that I was mistaken and things were quick to get moving. Again, yay!

Trivia Game Update

2009-03-16T10:11:00.000-06:00

So you might be asking yourself why I've posted up about things like the logo and not at all about the trivia game that I said I was working on creating. The reason is that the trivia game is somewhat stalled while I read through several different books about iPhone development. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been trying to do some things that are not completely supported as iPhone paradigms.
The basic flow of the program is simple - one view moves to another. The thing is that it doesn't use the navigation toolbar (the bar at the top of the view that lets you navigate backwards ("pop" the views)) since that doesn't make sense. But just displaying a view and navigating to another view that doesn't provide direct navigation back isn't something readily supported.
There's a paradigm shift between MFC's doc/view architecture and the iPhone's "kinda" MVC (model-view-controller) model that's just not sinking in quickly for me. That or I understand it but can't seem to get the code to do what I want (which actually may be more likely). As a result, I've been spending a lot of brain share on the other game (which is actually a bit more iPhone paradigm-friendly) I'm developing.
The other major hurdle to the trivia game is, of course, the questions. It's not that I can't think of any - let's get real. :) What's troublesome is the data entry. I'd like to have thousands of questions (if not tens of thousands) and that's a LOT of data entry. Given Taekwondo three times a week, ballet for Cathy two days a week, and ELPs rehearsals two days a week, there's just not a lot of time to do tedious typing. Plus, this second game, which I am posting about but those posts are private right now, has the potential to really make a HUGE splash and actually generate some good revenue. That's my hope at least. Then I can hire Jason Hayes to write the music for it (his music is completely made of awesome). :)
Anyway, I wanted to sort of clarify what was going on there since this is theoretically a blog about development. I will likely start making some of the 2nd game posts (codenamed "Samantha") public since I'll be talking about how I'm making the game, not what the game is or the context or anything. It should be general enough to start making those available for review. :)
Of course if you have any questions, feel free to comment. I hope that it will prove interesting for some people at least.

Otto Von Logo Redux

2009-03-13T09:29:00.001-06:00

So I spent some time playing with some clipart that I got from a heraldry site and created a new logo for Otto Von. It was interesting exploring Gimp again - I hadn't used it since I purchased a copy of Jasc's Paint Shop Pro a few years ago. Still, it was a good experience and I've updated the website with the new logo and made some additional changes to announce and explore the new direction.
One thing that may not be evident for some people who've known me for a while is that originally I had planned on having two companies - Otto Von Productions, which worked on business software, and Snowy Range Software, which made games. The reason was that I saw OVP as the catalyst that drove Snowy Range - without the income generated from business software sales, Snowy Range wouldn't happen. I've since modified my position such that I think that OVP really can work just on game software since the investment is pretty minimal (less than $2k on software and hardware) for mobile device game development and it's also what I originally wanted to do (write games).
So, there's a new logo on the site. There's a motto for the coat of arms - Cave Canem. I hope it precurses some great things to come. :)

Otto Von Logo

2009-03-11T14:18:00.000-06:00

Just a quick note about Otto Von and logo. As you'll notice, there isn't one. I have an idea for one but need to find the time to make it work. I think the idea I have is kind of cute but I need to figure out how to get it to work.
Once upon a time I was in graduate school for a degree in Early Modern British History. I had to take 3 semesters of classical Latin and saw, at one point, a great photograph of a mosaic in Pompeii. A picture of a dog on a chain with the words "Cave Canem" beneath - Beware of Dog. Since Otto Von Productions is named for my late Schnauzer Otto (he passed away this December), I thought a logo of a coat of arms with him on the shield with the words "Cave Canem" as the motto would be ideal. I just need to get some time to figure out how to do it, but if I can then it will emblazon all of our titles. :)
Cave canem has been adopted by several other groups, but there don't seem to be any in the game-o-sphere, so I think I'm fine there. I may also modify it slightly to be Beware of Otto or something, but for now that's the idea.

Second Game

2009-03-11T13:47:00.002-06:00

Originally written 11 March 2009.

So if this works, this should just be a draft until I actually post it when I'm done. I don't want to give away too much to potential competitors, especially folks with more experience developing iPhone apps than I have who can beat me to the punch.
The game idea is a multiplayer Wizard game where players take on the role of a Wizard/Witch/Warlock (why do all of those begin with 'W'?) where they battle other Wizards and fantasy creatures. They can form covens/guilds and fight other covens for control of magical sites around the world (e.g., Stonehenge). They can acquire mystical artifacts to make themselves more powerful. And they can participate in determining the fate of the world (good, balanced, or evil).
There are so many concepts that I've been documenting and exploring regarding this game. I've been playing iMob a lot and seen what they've done. I like some of it, dislike parts of it, and generally thing that it could have been a better game if they'd thought through things a little more. For instance, they have missions that make no sense to run - the XP gain is so crappy the mission is pointless. And they mistakenly attached monetary gain to the missions and thought it would be sufficient motivation.
Anyway, I've been trying to adapt the things I've learned/synthesized over the years of playing games and talking with brilliant people I know (like Danc and Cooper) to get a good feel for what a "fun" game would be like and, perhaps, make a little money at it. The entire goal of Otto Von has been to free Susie from having to work at Lockheed. If I can supplant her income with something else then she can quit. And if I can make even more at it, then I certainly wouldn't mind being a game developer full-time. :)
I'll start by talking about the combat system decision I just made today. I had been considering two different ways of managing combat in the game. The first method was to have casting points, which were similar to movement points from some RPGs. The idea being that you'd have a certain number of CP each 'round' of combat and that each spell would cost a certain number of CP. For higher-level players, this would mean that low-level spells were cheap and you could cast a lot of them each round (since it had become kind of 'automatic' to cast them). But it would also mean that some spells could take a lot of time (more than 1 turn's worth of CP). For example, if you wanted to cast a Fireball, it might cost 8 points. Problem was that you only got 5 points a turn. Fine - you begin an incantation in one turn (and spend all 5 points) and then next turn your spell completes (using 3 of your 5 from that turn). This would almost certainly require some kind of health system though - energy/health/mana - didn't matter what it was called, but it did require tracking damage.
The second approach was to use a kind of Mana Pool system where each player had a certain amount of MP available to them and could use it to cast spells during a duel/encounter. The MP would regenerate slowly over time (well, not too slowly). The "cool" idea I had about this was that damage would also deplete your MP. One thing Susie and I had talked about was having some kind of "magical tie" to the world and I liked the idea that as you cast spells you were "killing yourself" a little at a time. Another concept that this supported was that we wanted covens to play into individual duels somehow and in this scenario your individual MP is bolstered by a certain percentage of the total coven MP. Bigger coven = bigger benefit. The benefit here was that there wasn't a separate health system - everything was covered in one stat.
One thing we want to do is make dying a very damaging thing, but also relatively rare. In iMob I've died 38 times. But it doesn't really mean anything - I don't lose all of my money, I don't lose my stuff - it's just a random stat. In our game we wanted to make it so that dying meant something major - you lose your stuff and your money (more on money in a later post). You end up in Limbo until your coven can resurrect you.
What we've decided on is the Mana Pool format. I loved the single stat and especially liked that each spell you cast causes you personal harm somehow. It makes the game a little more exciting, I think, and it adds a real consequence. Yes, you could cast that fireball but you might end up dead if the other player hits you hard enough. Maybe you should cast that Shield spell after all... :)
There are still some details to sort out regarding the actual system but I'll be working on that over the next couple of days so we can start to play around with it and see what it looks like. If it plays well, we'll use it as is, otherwise we can tweak.
Anyway - that's it for now. I'll store this for now and post it publicly later.

First Game

2009-03-11T09:18:00.000-06:00

The first game that I've been working on developing is a trivia-style game. Because it's not like anyone else has had that idea for the iPhone yet. (That would be sarcasm). There are currently at least 5-10 games for the iPhone that are trivia-based games with one using the same style of game-play that I'm exploring.
For those that know me, they know that trivia is one of those games that I love - I mean truly love. I know a lot of information about things that have no practical relevance and I delight in knowing it. Like knowing that the plastic end of a shoelace is called an aglet. Yeah, sad, I know.
When I left iTi in November Susie (my wife) and I began talking about things that I could do and the one thing that made the most sense was to write games for the iPhone. We were getting new phones at the end of November and it just made sense to work on iPhone games since it's such a hot market. It's also a tough market. I heard that there are now over 25,000 apps in the App Store. A lot of them are free, but a significant portion cost something. And Apple apparently keeps 30% of the sales, meaning that on a $4.99 game, the developer's only getting $3.49. No wonder Apple likes the App Store. :)
Anyway, Susie and I came up with a list of like 15 game ideas. A couple of days later it dawned on me that I should do something that I know well - like trivia! So I began working on a trivia game. And ran into my first roadblocks.
As I mentioned in my first post, I've been developing software professionally for over 15 years and writing code for almost 28 years now (scary, huh?). Most of that development work has been in Windows using Microsoft Foundation Classes (what MS pushed for years before they came out with .NET and C#). Developing for Mac is a bit different and some of the things that I'm used to doing in Windows aren't available or are done in a way that's just different enough that my brain can't seem to grok it. In particular, I ran into issues with views and view controllers. I'm actually still having some trouble with them and have sort of put development on the back burner.
The main features of my game are that it will have a server back-end that will provide the questions. The main benefit that I see with this approach long-term is that if the back-end works properly then I can expand it to be practically any other platform - Windows, Mac, Android, etc. If you're at all familiar with NTN trivia, this would be a mobile version of that. Online leader boards, etc.
I've also flirted with several different ideas for how to monetize the whole enterprise. One idea is that I provide the game for free (which gives me a much broader exposure) but then put ads in the app (using AdMob) and/or on the online leaderboard (using Google AdWords or similar). This would be a good passive revenue stream and be completely independent of Apple's limits on payments (I have read that they don't issue any payments unless you surpass $250 sales in one region).
Another idea for generating revenue is to have a free version that doesn't store your scores online or track your progress, but lets you play a few games before needing to restart the application. The issue I see with that is that it could likely be cracked very easily and then people would be able to have unlimited play (without the leaderboard).
In all situations, security and insuring that the player has a legal copy is one thing that will need to be addressed. It's also something I need to learn how to do effectively on the iPhone. I read a post by the author of Dapple where he said that the first sale of his program was to a cracker who posted it up on a warez site within 5 hours. Ouch.
As for the trivia game, I've started building the question database and hope to be able to find solutions to the navigation issues I've been experiencing. The issue I'm running into is that while the game flow system I have in mind is simplistic, it's not fully supported by the iPhone paradigms, so I have to find ways to make it work within Apple's constructs. Once that flow problem is resolved, I should be able to integrate everything else relatively easily (there is plenty of sample code that does what I want to do). Then I just need to make sure the application is secure and get it published. :)
More to come later.

So, who IS this Bill guy?

2009-03-11T09:10:00.001-06:00

I decided that I should do something more descriptive than the obligatory "description" that's posted on my blog user page about who I am, what I've done, and what I'm doing. So, without further ado, here we go.
I'm a software developer and manager who's been doing this professionally for almost 16 years. I've been writing software since I was 12 on a mainframe at the University of Wyoming and later in 9th grade using my Commodore 64. :) My first job was at HP and I loved the company - some of the people, not so much. Regardless, it was a great exposure to how enterprises develop and release consumer electronics. I worked on TWAIN, which allowed image editing software packages (like PhotoShop) import images from scanners directly (i.e., no saving the file and opening it - you just "Acquired" the image from the scanner software and BAM! there it was in your editor). I was a major contributor to the 1.6 version of the standard and learned a LOT about corporate/business politics there. I worked at HP for 6 years and was a manager of a software quality team for a year before I left in July 99.
I left to join a small startup in Boulder called Anark. I was a lead engineer there and led two versions of the authoring tool Anark Studio. The company was funded from VC money and while I was there we had two rounds of funding (I believe). In the end, I worked there for just over 3 years and was laid off in Aug 2002 due to budget cuts (high burn rate on the VC money, I imagine). It was also a month before I was supposed to get issued new stock options - you can draw your own conclusions on timing. I also worked with Danc and others to create a new agile development process for the company. That comes into play later.
I was unemployed for about a year following that, doing some part-time work and consulting for a game development company called Saint Studios (it's apparently not around anymore). I helped them define a development process (pretty much the same one I helped create at Anark). I also led the development team in determining whether to make, buy, or re-use 3D game engines. I had a new job before the decision was finalized, but I believe they decided to make. Could be why they're not around.
In January during my year off my daughter Cathy was born. It was great, but VERY different, to be a stay-at-home dad for her first 8 months. I'm not cut out to do nothing all day but care for a small child - Susie (my wife) was a God-send during the period. I love my daughter deeply, but there were times when I hard a hard time. It's tough and I have a lot of respect for parents who can do it.
I moved to Echostar (DISH Network) in Aug of 2003. I was hired to lead the OpenTV development team - they write the E* applications on set-top boxes. In what was likely an indication of things to come, I never interviewed with or even met the team that I was going to manage and on my first day of work my boss was sick and not present. Yeah, it was a precursor no doubt. I worked at E* for about a year and did what I could to change how the team developed software. I was happy to say that by my departure we had released 3x more projects than they had in the previous 3 years combined. Given that it was only 1, it wasn't hard, but it still showed that the team was capable of doing more. And we even lost 2 engineers to attrition while I was there.
I departed E* in Sep 04 and quickly found a new job that started in Nov at HID Global. It was HID Corp then and I was hired to be the manager for the VertX development team. It was a completely different industry than any I'd been in before - physical security. Fascinating stuff and I had to pick it up quickly. Needless to say, I started seeing what could be done to improve software processes and pretty soon afterwards began proposing some changes. Then something weird happened - my manager changed his mind about my role and hired someone else to manage the team. It was a bit off-putting and wasn't the first time he'd done so, or so I was told. Very disappointing. I got assigned to work on a national standards effort for the Security Industry Association. Talk about the blind leading the sighted. I had to pretty quickly come up to speed on security and then be able to speak authoritatively about it with industry veterans. Thankfully the people at SIA (especially Monica, the director of standards) and the people I worked with on committees (especially Hunter Knight from ICS, Per Hanssen from Salient Systems, and Rob Zivney from Hirsch) were incredibly helpful and provided much-needed insights. I did that through June of 08 when I (and most of my team and management chain) were laid off.
I was then recruited heavily for a job in Boulder (I was living in south Denver by this point) with imaging Technology international and I decided to go ahead and do it. I was leading a software team developing for custom industrial ink jet printer systems. I loved the VP that I was going to report to and I saw his vision and agreed 110% with it. He and I were working closely on trying to implement his vision. Unfortunately, he left in Sept of 08 and his vision departed with him. By November management and I had determined that there really wasn't a place for me in the new organization, so I was let go. There's more on that in my SW development blog.
I was out of work for about 8 weeks when I stumbled into my latest role at Maptek. Maptek provides software to help plan and develop mining sites (like open pit mines). It's once again an industry that I know nothing about, so the learning curve is pretty steep. It's been interesting work, though, so I'm hopeful that it will lead to something good. I'm currently a contractor, but it's a 3 month contract. The expectation is that I'll be hired on full-time once the contract expires in April - we'll see, I guess.
As for Otto Von, it's one of those things that I've been working on in a variety of forms since 1997. I did officially incorporate in 2001 and it's an official C corporation. I am the President and CEO, but since I'm the only employee it's a bit of a misleading statement. I'm also the VP of Engineering, Lead Developer, and regular SW Engineer. :) So, yeah. I've laid out my hopes and dreams for OVP in previous posts, so check those for what I hope to gain from it. Mostly what it comes down to is that there are games that I want to play that no one's writing, so I guess it's up to me. I'd rather have a whole team of developers that I can guide in creating those games, but since I've had trouble getting commitments to making that happen, I'll just do it myself. And besides it won't hurt to have all the money to myself - all $1.99 of it. :)
So that's all for now, I guess.

What This Blog's About

2009-03-11T06:57:00.001-06:00

So here is the ubiquitous first post about what this blog will cover. I own a company called Otto Von Productions, Inc. based in Centennial, Colorado (south Denver). I've changed the business over to author entertainment software for mobile devices (read "games for iPhone" :). I'm working through the maze that is Apple's Developer Program and will occasionally post up some info about that as well as posts about the games I'm writing, what the thoughts are about them, etc. so people can see the development process writ small.
I will likely keep posts about development projects in the works more private until the games are completed and submitted to Apple, but then I'll open them up for everyone to read through. I hope that it will provide some kind of help to developers of mobile software as other blogs have been to me.
Thanks for reading!