More UI updates and Alpha 3 status

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!

Alpha 2 Love

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.

A Week?

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. :)

Simple Tasks Gone Awry

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!

Travel Update

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.