Rumar development diary: #4
Tuesday, July 21:
It’s been a while since the last diary entry which is mostly because I’ve been working my ass off.
But the hard work is paying off and I made some good progress in the past two weeks.
The initial design has been converted to font- and spritesheets.
The loading screen and all its logic has been implemented and the largest part of the menu screen is done as well.
All the other screens have been added (although they are still blank) and everything has been tested on both iOS and Android.
Little setback: I have to re-create all the spritesheets because upscaling them on iPhone 6 causes a slight blurriness around some sprites… crap!
Had I been an actual designer, I would have created vectors for the sprites, but obviously I didn’t… Lesson learned!
As far as the technical stuff goes, it’s turning out exactly as I had in mind so far!
The idea of re-using all the non-gameplay elements for the first batch of Rumar games is still within reach.
Things like configuration management, assets, menus, level selection and leaderboard are all build into the Rumar framework and the gameplay logic is contained in a separate project and injected into the framework when building the app.
So developing the first game takes a lot of time, but all subsequent games that use this framework can be rolled out very fast.
I spent quite some time on researching CocosSharp to figure out the best approach for certain things.
Luckily there is a lot of info out there on Cocos2D and most of it applies to CocosSharp as well.
The Xamarin forum also proved to be very valuable and they even implemented a feature that I was missing in the upcoming release of CocosSharp. Props to the guys at Xamarin!
Last week was also the (re)start of my paid work at a client where I will work for two days a week until the end of the year.
Even though I would love to work on Rumar Gaming project full-time, it doesn’t pay for any bills so these two days are what keeps me afloat.
So less time can be spend on game development, but I’m easily clocking 40 hours in the 3 days a week that I reserved for this project; getting up at 6am turns out to be no problem when you’re working on something you really want!
Stay tuned for more updates!
