Some Good UI Progress and YAP (Yet Another Problem)

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. :)

Slight Hiccup

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

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

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! :)