Sunday, December 16, 2012

Jungle Jumper 1.2 Status

Done:


It's going great with the update. I got a bit stuck trying to figure out how to implement a few things so I took a little break for a week or so.

I really got back into it a few days ago and things that I couldn't figure out in hours, I implemented in minutes.

I've now gotten Shared Preferences implemented and working. The book I read on Android game programming used the system of writing a file to external storage and saving the data in there. There were several issues with this. It used the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE access which looks quite scary and I don't want any unnecessary accesses on my games and it also meant that you could just go into the file on your device and change the data manually. Theoretically setting your high-score to whatever you wanted.

I've also gotten Google Analytics implemented. I have wanted this implemented all along to get better numbers on my total install base and get feedback on how much people play the game and how high high-scores they can get. For some reason I got it in my head that this would be really difficult, but it turned out to be a breeze and only took 20 minutes. So far Analytics is only set up with the default statistics being tracked so I'll have to set it up so it can record high-scores as well, I hope this doesn't turn out to be too difficult.

I've also set up an achievements page. At the moment it has 12 achievements and I've set up the game so you can actually achieve them. The plan is to have 24 achievements that you can get and for every time you unlock three you will get a gift like a costume or a bonus you can use in the game.

I've also gotten rid of the WAKE_LOCK access. It was in the game originally because the game example I used as my basis for Jungle Jumper was one of the endless jumping games where you use the accelerometer to steer the character, meaning that you won't touch the screen while you are playing and the screen might fall asleep. In Jungle Jumper you touch the screen to jump constantly so it was completely unnecessary  I'm down to only having the INTERNET and ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE accesses now, which are used for the Admob ads and the Google Analytics.

I've given the menus a pretty big update to make them look better and give better information.

To Do:


There are still a bunch of things to do. I am in the middle of updating some of the jungle graphics and I plan on updating Jorvis himself so he has better animation.

I have to figure the remaining achievements and what all the gifts will be and implement them. Some of them will be new bonuses in the game so that will take quite a bit of work and might mess with other systems.

I have to go through the sounds and rerecord some of them, as a few are really bad.

Wish List:


There are two major things on the wish list that I feel almost certain wont be in the 1.2 update. New music and a global high-score list.

The new music won't get in there because I simple don't know how to compose good music myself yet and I want to make it myself rather than hire it out. I plan to spend quite a bit of energy in the new year leaning to write some simple melodies and synthesize them on the computer.

The global high-score list I could get in quite easily if I implemented some middle-ware, but I really don't want that. There are quite a few free system you can use for this, but that would mean bundling their SDK in my game and having to ad extra accesses. I'm planning on building my own little web-service to deal with these things and have my games connect with it. But I don't have the hosting for it yet and I'm not sure how much work it will be, but it will come eventually.

Conclusion


The update is going great and I'm quite certain I'll have it out before the new year. I'm not getting everything in there that I want, but with 1.2 Jungle Jumper will be very close its final full form I think.


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