Jedi Workshop

So, What Happened Here??

lonejedi — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:09:35 +0000

That was a very rough 6-month project at my day job. It consumed virtually all of my spare time and drive. It’s finally passed now and I’m back to a “normal” schedule, so I’m about to restart my whole project. It’s changed in scope, however. Rather than a full-blown, real-time simulation I’m going to open with a board-game conversion. I’m looking through my collection of wargames now for a prime candidate for unofficial conversion.

July’s Update

lonejedi — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 20:51:03 +0000

Sadly, not a surprise that I haven’t had nearly as much time to work on my project as I wouldn’t have liked. Where I have gotten, though, is a working title: Nation Tycoon. I’m not in love with the name, but it’ll cover me until I have something prepared for an initial Apple Store submission (name-squatting is prohibited, so I’m not even allowed to commit to a name until later).

So, just what is this game? My plan is to produce a hybrid-mix somewhere in the spectrum of Tropico, Sim City, Railroad Tycoon and Transport Tycoon. I want the scale to be on the national level (thus the working title), but allowing room for plenty of customization at the city level (though nowhere near the detail of Sim City). It goes without saying that tailoring the user interface to something simple enough to accommodate a touch interface is a primary goal, but I want to keep it open enough that I can do the “easy” port to Mac so that I can eventually get it on the Mac App Store, too. In the longer-term, a port to XBox and Windows would be desirable… but being realistic I would probably postpone that until a second, or even third, version of the game.

Progress… In Secret

lonejedi — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 17:40:35 +0000

The good news… I’ve been making slow-but-steady progress in laying the groundwork for my project.

The bad news… most of my “free time” has come during the work day when I’m (legitimately!) free to make notes and rummage around the internet a little looking for bits and bobs, but not so comfortable posting reports like this (which, somewhat hypocritically, I’m actually doing right now… but only because I’m being overly-generic).

Back to the good news… As long as I can keep up at least a one-post-per-month pace I will feel as though I haven’t completely fallen off, like so many of my blogs tend to. I feel that with the TV and NHL seasons now over (congrats to the Bruins!) I should start seeing more evening “free time” available for both blogging and actually working on my project.

And the best news yet… I’ve gotten my Apple iOS Developer account established and running, so I’m prepared to start building App Store presence for my eventual project(s). I’ve also made a number of decisions about my project – primarily those with specific App Store impacts.

I would like to do in-app purchases, but I’ve decided that would be more prudent for a follow-up project.
Because it keeps my legal paperwork to a minimum while getting started, my first deployment is going to be a free application (which would, of course, also rule out in-app purchases). I would like to position this first project as a “lite” version of my app, then I can expand it to a paid version in a later pass (and at that point can revisit in-app purchases, as well).
I definitely want to have GameCenter integration. I won’t have a multiplayer component (perhaps a third pass?), but I definitely want achievements and I will have the option for leaderboards available (though I will only use those if I come up with a quantifiable “scoring system” for my game project).

So what is this project? Tune in to the next posting to find out the high-level details. That might even happen before the end of next month

Development Tools

lonejedi — Tue, 03 May 2011 20:13:12 +0000

I’m finally comfortable with my development software selection (at least this initial version), so it’s now time to record those selections here. Since it’s possible, if not very likely, that my choices will change along the way I’m going to set up a Page on the site to house my Development Tool selections in a sort-of-wiki style. That will leave me free to add, remove and modify as needed without having to refer back to this Post.

For my first steps, I’ve chosen to go with some basics:

OSX 10.6 “Snow Leopard”
XCode 4
iPhone SDK 4.3.x
TextWrangler
Evernote
Word 2011 for Mac

This will set me up to develop my game for both Mac and iOS right out of the gate, and by running a Windows VM and BootCamp I’m going to keep the door open for a possible Windows port down the line. For now, however, I’m going to keep that as a back-burner option.

I’ve decided that one of the big differences between this and some previous projects (both professional and non) is that I’d like to maintain a robust note system. Keeping track of thoughts when I’m not actively working on the project (especially a project like this in my ever-shrinking “spare time”) is going to be a very important factor in the success of my endeavor. After reviewing my options, I elected to go with Evernote over a close-second MS OneNote primarily because of the slight edge in multi-platform support and much better web interface. This should allow me to have the best access to my “remote brain” from pretty much anywhere there’s electricity… at least access to WiFi or a cell tower.

The rest of my options are pretty standard (for the Mac platform), with the possible choice of Word over Pages, so I’ll save the nitty-gritty on those for the Development Tool Page.

Hardware Complete

lonejedi — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:46:19 +0000

I hadn’t originally planned on spending a month getting all my new hardware set up and configured when I’d expected to be making software decisions within just a few days. But with day-job inconveniences, a week’s vacation, and distracting shiny new toys these are the sorts of things that happen.

As it stands now, I have a 17″ MacBook Pro set up with OSX 10.6 on the main partition and Windows 7 (32-bit) on a BootCamp partition. I also have Windows XP (32-bit) and Windows 7 (64-bit) established as Virtual Machines within OSX. So I’m pretty much prepared for any computing emergency. I also have a 2nd generation iPod Touch, iPhone 3GS and iPad 2 all (nearly) ready to go as my test subjects. I have my XBox standing by, should my project expand its scope that far… which it may very well do.

Due to Stanley Cup Playoff season my evenings are a little busier than normal, so I’m scaling back my expectations a little bit for the next few weeks. Goal number one over the rest of this week will be to return to and complete my software selection. With that task completed it’ll be time to define and declare my project intentions.

A funny thing happened…

lonejedi — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 03:33:22 +0000

It turns out I was mistaken about my next order of business. Although I had plans for my project to be developed for both iPhone/iPod and iPad, I wasn’t expecting my pre-ordered iPad to actually come in for several more weeks (or possibly months). But on a trip to Best Buy at lunch on Tuesday (for other reasons) I decided to swing by the Nerd Herd desk and check to see if my spot in line had advanced at all. Of course, it hadn’t. They hadn’t gotten a single unit of the model I was on the list for in the 2.5 weeks since I’d signed up. But while explaining all of this to me, the Nerd began to lament the long line I was in and he pointed out how troubling it was that they had been getting surplus units of my model, but in white instead of black. They had a whole bunch languishing in their security cage because nobody was buying them. *sigh*

Long story made… uh… still kinda long: I ended up “canceling” my pre-order and casually purchasing a white iPad 2. And so, my last couple of days have been spent loading, configuring, prepping and (most importantly) playing with my new toy. Luckily, this has even included getting a few of my intended tools loaded up for previewing.

But more on those tomorrow… but no promises this time, either.

Day One (again)

lonejedi — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 02:04:15 +0000

Today begins a new journey for this site. I’ve restarted the entire site (complete with theme swap and re-title) to support a new venture.

In my professional life I’ve often found that nearly all of the “quirks” at the end of a project are usually associated with the phrase “where did that start to go wrong,” or “why did I make that choice?” As I am about to begin a new personal project I’ve decided to take advantage of that timing, and provide my long-neglected website a purpose by journaling my development. I’ve got developer tools to help me keep track of the actual project, but the meta-project will now have a home, too. A home that I hope to revisit to reflect upon down-the-road once my new project is ready for deployment.

What that project is, and what my plans around it happen to be, will be the first order of business tomorrow. For today, getting this site prepped and setting up a couple developer tool “cloud accounts” have been my main focus. Since I’ve already had lonejedi.net configured with WordPress for some time now, it’s setup was a simple matter of activating a new theme and then shifting the previous articles to “trashed, but not deleted” status. I also made sure my Evernote account was up-to-date (as well as apps loaded on both my Mac and iPhone) and that I had the WordPress app installed on my iPhone so that I’m sure to have full access to my resources from anywhere.

More details about my tool selection tomorrow…