n3wt0n!

I’ve been reading Anna Anthropy‘s Rise of the Videogame Zinesters
and I just came across what (to me) may be the most important message in the entire book.

Perfection isn't a useful goal; if anything, it keeps amateurs
from getting their feet wet and authors from finishing their works.
- Anna Anthropy. Rise of the Video Game Zinesters. Page 125. 2012 ed.

I cannot agree more. When I met my wife and she was getting to know me, I told her “I make games”. That wasn’t entirely true. What I should have said was “I try to make games” because my struggle for perfection constantly got in the way.

I thought there was one right way to make games, and because I didn’t know the way that I should not even try. I abandoned every game I tried to make.

It wasn’t until the last few years that I finally understood that there is no one right way to make games. That the best way to make games is just do it. Give up on perfection. Expect to make mistakes. Use bubblegum and duct tape to piece your game together and cover it up in attractive gift wrap.

People don’t see your engine (the source of my anxiety, the fear that my coding abilities would be criticised). They only see your game. Don’t try to be perfect, just make something to the best of your ability. You’ll surprise yourself.

I’m currently pushing through what I believe to be the last 10 percent. There’s a quote on the page I linked to:

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

-Tom Cargill

So when I thought I was going to be able to complete all the features and fix all the bugs for an end-of-March release of Squishy Bugs, I was enthusiastically wrong. It’ll be done when it’s done.

Right now I’m toying with the idea of stripping the half-baked features and uploading a new version to show off the new features that are completed. These would include:

• option to turn on/off sound
• option to turn on/off music
• game now features music by ozzed
• if it’s the phone’s first time playing the game the “Start” button does not jump right into a game but instead starts the tutorial
• game now gathers (but currently does nothing with) various metrics (games played, balls throw, bugs squashed, how much time was spent on the settings screen, etc)

The unfinished features are something like:

• WaggSoft account registration (can register/login but error catching needs work)
• metric gathering (Google analytics)
• menus are getting overhauled, using libgdx widgets. Still need to learn how to scale fonts and graphics in these widgets.

And then there is the list of things to even start on. Like, adding more power ups. Adding high scores. Creating the WaggSoft account management page to allow users to change their username and update their email address, etc.

I’m learning so much and I’m going to be so happy when I can say the game is done. This was meant to be a “quick project” to work on while I took a short break from codename Space Fight. At least the skills are transferable. And Space Fight will be better because of it, and the development should be much quicker than it previously was.

Thanks for sticking with me!

The past week (2 Fridays ago and this last Friday) I was looking into text input forms for Squishy Bugs. Initially I thought I’d try using an Android view/layout (I still don’t know if there’s a difference) to get the necessary text field rendering and reading the keyboard. The Eclipse Android layout manager is pretty cool and I had a nice form mocked up in no time, but this left me with a minor issue.

Squishy Bugs is meant to be cross platform. In addition to working on an Android phone or tablet, it also runs as a desktop application. That’s actually how I do my development, running the game as an app on my computer playing it using a mouse. Building the registration form using an Android view does nothing for the desktop version. Back to square one.

It was actually quite easy to find a cross platform solution since there was such a good example built into libgdx itself. You can see the results in the image below.

The location of the form is subject to change, and I’ve still got to figure out if there’s a password field so that the password isn’t displayed in plain text. But it’s a step in the right direction. Next up I suppose would be writing data to the phone to store Squishy Bugs settings, and then sending the login information to the WaggSoft api so your high scores can finally be saved!

Last weekend I managed to squeak out an update to Squishy Bugs. The old url to the Squishy Bugs page on the Android market is no longer valid. I removed that package, which *poof* caused it to disappear from the market.

You can find the new Squishy Bugs market page here. I don’t expect to ever have to change market urls again. And if I do, you can always get the proper url at WaggSoft.com.

With this update I reduced the number of rows of tiles since some players complained that toward the end of the level it seemed to take too long for the bullet to reach the top-most tiles. This allowed me to display the player’s score at the top of the page. Which brings me to the other update.

The scoring system has been revised. Previously you were awarded 1 point for every tile that was falling the moment you squished a tile. 3 tiles falling? Squish a tile for 3 points. Squish another tile for 2 points (since there would only be 2 tiles left falling). And so on. Squishy bugs were worth a 2 point multiplier. No longer! Each tile awards a ridiculous number of points following the same number-of-tiles-falling rule. However, now you lose points for not catching tiles. Each tile that drops off the bottom of the screen will cause you to lose the same number of points as you would have had you managed to squish the tile. This prevents players from exploiting the multiplicative nature of the scoring system.

Also, the groundwork for adding new power ups has been completed. It should be relatively straight forward to add new power ups in the future. So in addition to the bouncy ball power up that’s already present, there will be a “drop similar icons” power up and a “drop similar colors” power up. They will work similar to the way dropping groups works right now, which is that groups of the same color and icon fall together if one of them is hit.

Some update in the future will see the addition of accounts which will tie into a WaggSoft community page. This will allow for global high scores (another feature to add) and potentially allow for the addition of special events.

So I totally forgot to mention that Squishy Bugs is now available on the Android market. It’s free. It’s ad supported but not in an intrusive way. You actually only see the advertisement when you are *not* playing the game. Like when you are viewing the main menu or settings page. That kind of stuff.

It’s an early release. I’m calling it version 0.0.1. It’s going to change a lot by the time it’s done. There are at least 3 powerups I can think of that need to be added to the game. The sound effects will be tweaked. I want to have global high scores, and I’ve already written most of the server code for that.

So if you have an Android device, please check it out. It installs to the SD card by default and it only takes up 1.9MB of data.

Also, if you have any issues to report or want to discuss the game or ask questions then you can do so at the forums. Or reach me over Twitter.