New Method For Animation?

New Method For Animation

A while ago, I looked at the Corona SDK website for some tips on implementing some animation into the game and it shouted TEXTURE PACKER. So, I checked out texture packer and went through the process of learning how to use it and guess what? I LEARNED HOW TO USE IT. Soon though, I realized that Texture Packer is not free for Corona Development, and I have no budget so guess what now? SCRATCH EVERYTHING I JUST LEARNED.....FANTASTIC.

Slight setback for a major comeback though, I'm going to find a new way to create animations. Texture Packer is fantastic, it packs all of the images that you want to use into a nice, compressed image sheet and publishes it right into your code. So I thought about how fantastic that was and decided that I'm just going to use the brilliant work of Texture Packer and use the code they published into my code as a template. They can sell software but they don't have rights to code now do they.....?

Whatever method I do find, (haven't found one yet) it won't be as efficient as TP, but my app surely won't exceed the image space restriction for mobile applications.

Device Compatibility

Compatible For Most Devices

List Of Devices

The configuration for Solar Escape can now handle almost all of the above devices and more. This makes me feel much better knowing that I can keep making progress on the game while having the cross-platform issue figured out. 

On A More Tech-y Note

I've done a complete re-haul of the entire code so that it uses the composer library from Corona which makes it easier to switch scenes handle all of the images within scene-switches. My main.lua file has now been reduced to 2 lines of code! Also notice below that the composer will simply switch through the three different scene files. Much cleaner code to work with. I've gone completely away from globals and have been able to effectively use locals within each scene.

 

Now The Fun Part/ Streaming

Now that I've cleaned up the project a bit, I can start doing some new things to the game. I've been streaming my development and I've been able to talk to some people while working on the project and it's awesome. Can't wait to do some more streaming!

Version 1.0 On The Phone!

Android Build Successful!

The Nightmares Are Over

So over the past couple of days, I've been going through a nightmare trying to do an android build for version 1.0. The config.lua file kept giving me compile errors and everything I was trying was not working. I tried uninstalling sublime text 2 and installing sublime text 3, and that didn't work. I finally tried completely starting a new Corona Project and an entire new folder and transferred all of the assets into the new folder. 

Boom! It worked. Used the Corona Simulator to build my Solar Escape project for android! The build gave me a .apk file into my Corona folder. I plugged my Galaxy 5s into my pc with a usb cable, and simply drug the .apk file from my pc folder into my downloads on my phone. Super Simple! (as long as the initial build works) I had to download a file manager app in order to take the .apk file from the downloads on my phone and install it. I don't have a Google Play license so I couldn't actually put version 1.0 onto the marketplace for download. This version is also a debug version so it made the installation a lot quicker. 

How It Felt For Me On the Device

First things first, the app icon on my device is boring and just a blank white nothing. Have to fix that. The title menu and the game itself is not very bright, it's super dim and people might find that boring, or maybe it gives it more of a spacey atmosphere? The title menu is pretty bland still but that can be fixed a little down the road. The quit button has no functionality right now so I need to give it an actually quit function. The start button works properly and transitions into the game properly. The track sounds good but I'll probably want to convert that into an .mp3 file or something other than a .wav, I'll have to do some research. When an asteroid hits the spacecraft, the "gameover" alert works but once the game listener registers another touch, the app crashes so I instead need to have it loop back to the start screen. It would also be good to print the time achieved on or after the "gameover" alert.

Gotta Get Someone Else To Try It Out

As soon as a think the game won't crash all of the time, I should let somebody else try it out so that they can give me some honest feedback. The feedback will let me know how to make the best updates to the game.

Android Build Fails and Event Listeners

What's Next

Build Fails

I need to get version 1.0 debug onto my phone so that I can get a feel of how it plays on the phone. The problem I am running into is when I try to do a build for Android, the compiler gives back an error that says that my config.lua file has no data. Apparently this has something to do with the Sublime Text Editor 2 that can only use the 'run' function instead of the 'build' function. I'm going to try and use Sublime Text 3 and see if I get the same problem. 

Ready To Go With Event Listeners

So I've been watching some tutorials on Corona Sdk about event listeners which I have been struggling with. I need to utilize the Runtime event listener so that I can use time intervals to increase the speed of the rocket (really the speed of the falling rocks) in order to actually make the game difficult. 

SE on the Simulator

SE Progress on the Simulator

A quick post about the progress on the game in Corona SDK

When the game is run, an instructions method pops up in the middle of the screen for a few seconds so that the user actually knows how to play the game! (That's more than necessary). I used transitioning which is built into the corona SDK that allows images to be displayed for a certain time and then fade away.

In addition to the instructions message, I also added a "GAME OVER" message for when the player crashes into an object.

Android Simulator - Nov, 14, 2015

Finally Some Progress in Corona SDK

I've been learning a lot of Lua and the Corona SDK over the past two weeks. I've been able to do test builds while debugging on Corona's Simulator for the Galaxy Device which has helped me out immensely. It's faster to test the game out this way instead of having my phone plugged into a USB. So anyway, after these two painful weeks of fixing never-ending syntax errors....I have a working start screen! It doesn't look great, but it works. 

Things Happening Next

• Fix bugs with the spacecraft moving
• Fix bugs with rocks spawning
• Fix image proportions for all objects
• Learn more Lua

LEARNING LUA

Progress On the Game Itself

So, progress on the game has pretty much come to a grinding halt. I'm currently learning Lua, which is the language for the Corona SDK. In some ways Lua is similar to Python, but it's essentially more object oriented (better for game development!) and makes it much easier to develop games for mobile devices. I may continue doing some prototyping in pygame on the version of the game that I have thus far, because I had planned on making it executable so that I could at least let some people test the game out in order to give me some feedback. LEARNING A NEW LANGUAGE IS A SLOW PROCESS.