Skip to content

Tag: game

iOS Project Log 10Tollway Towers Screen art

iOS Project Log 10

Published by Stacie on April 24, 2016

Ok, things are speeding up, Not sure If I mentioned that I finished the tutorial a few weeks back. I’ve since added code that add sounds for each direction swiped. The program also will play those sounds if your hero hits a wall, telling you which way you can go.

Artists are buzzing, send over new concepts and ideas. We’re meeting soon to go over things.

So much left to do, much of which is just up to me to work through, some of which may be prioritized differently day to day and depending on which assets i receive/need/have to make. :

  • Hero
    •  get hero graphics in,
    •  animating properly.
  • Parse Json mazes
    • figure out how to parse image names in with the tmx file (maybe)
    • establish tile grid sizes
  • or Create new sks mazes
  • Menus
    • start menu loading first
      •      get play button going to first game scene
    • pause overlay or scene
    • Credits scene
  • Illusions? may need to revisit this idea this summer
    • crop/mask
    • explore scenekit for enemies.
  • Sound
    • find bandura/mandolin/string sounds/chords for up/down/left/right audio
      • right now i have a computer voice just saying the direction.
    • tweak background music.
    • explore using SKaudio with UDLR sounds to help you know if you are near/far from goal.
    • need hero movement sounds. perhaps some ambient ruins/castle sounds. Things sound stark.
iOS Project Log 7CocoaConf Chicago 2016 Poster

iOS Project Log 7

Published by Stacie on April 10, 2016

CocoaConf!

March 25th–26th, 2016

Not much happened project-wise, due to my attendance at CocoaConf Chicago.

I did meet a lot of fantastic people, and attended some very though provoking sessions on Swift. With time I hope I’ll be able to unwrap all the knowledge that I downloaded straight into my brain.

Some of the sessions I checked out were:

I also joined the Breakpoints Jam and played ukulele. 😀  (you can see me in the back next to the awesome Jean MacDonald.

iOS Project Log 6

iOS Project Log 6

Published by Stacie on March 20, 2016

Design:

Artists are out on Spring Break.

I did find some info on Ukrainian Castles. Hope that can inspire us.

I made some headway on sound design, deciding to focus on folk music.

Found an adorable lullaby about a sassy grey cat – and a YouTube video where I could hear it sung.  The link also had a midi version of the song, which I grabbed.

 

I found some other nice audio options at archive.org

Dream Passes By The Window CC – more info  Folk songs from over the Dniester captured Eugenia Yaroshinsky

Tutorial:

Learned a bit about SKLabelNode

Initially, when I added a lives counter to the child node, I could not seem to make the custom font appear.

This link helped me realize i needed to make sure the custom font was included in the build phase for the bindle.

How to add a true type font to an iOS project

 

 

I’m still having some hero control issues. I kept going over my code, finding little things that seem to help, but not fix my problem. ah, debugging… I ended up using git to help me compare code to the example code.  Seems that I had some variables set as optional vs required, and vice versa.

A friend told me that many of my errors were symptoms of CopyPasta. I’ll have to keep an eye on that type of thing in the future.

Exploring:

So, after all this 7 hours of tutorial, several other hours of debugging and research, I realized that this project would be a good candidate to use the GamePlayKit features for the things I want to do.

2015 WWDC Intro to GameplayKit

GameplayKit DemoBots

At this point, I’m not sure if I’ll be using them or not. Either way, programming the basics by hand will understand a bit of what GameplayKit is offering. I’m trying not to get sidetracked and stuck in a loop of constantly reworking the foundations. I could push that further out on the timeline.

Completion is always of more value than perfection. 

 

My next goal is to start getting things ready/resized to work for iPad sized devices and the level art, as well as making some new maps, add a timer, and change out the sounds.

 

Here is a bonus  A movie called “The Guide”  recently was released at international film contests regarding Kobczars and Stalin.

 

 

 

iOS Project Log 5

iOS Project Log 5

Published by Stacie on March 14, 2016

Lots of things happened this week.

Design

The artists are buzzing about with some on the general look and feel and our heroine design is also in the works.

We’re trying to use inVision for collaboration, but it’s new to all of us, so we’re learning all together. I copied lots of my mood board images over to an Invision Mood Board… it doesn’t work like Pinterest, but does some things that pinterest does not. My favorite invision feature for mood boards?  It grabs a color palette from each image!

Here is a character sketch of our Hero by E.M. Isn’t she cute!

herogirl

and some colors from N.P.

TTcolors

 

I made a couple sketches to explain the concept, ie that the hero is basically rock climbing up a tower.

TTsketch1-sla
Crossing a bridge over flames.

 

 

 

 

 

TTsketch2-sla
More tower wall, with a dragon in a cavern underneath

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I dashed off a brief wireframe for a common starting point. wireframe1.png

Research – Banduras, Kobzari

Since a lot of our inspiration is coming from traditional Ukrainian costumes, I searched for traditional Ukrainian instruments and came across a beautiful stringed instrument called the Bandura.

<a data-pin-do=”embedPin” data-pin-terse=”true” href=”https://www.pinterest.com/pin/407786941234575814/”></a>

<a data-pin-do=”embedPin” href=”https://www.pinterest.com/pin/214132157252118086/”></a>

This of course led me to wikipedia

Wikipedia: Bandura

Which led me to an amazing new fact:

Musicians who play the bandura are referred to as bandurists. Some traditional bandura players, often blind, were referred to as kobzars.

What?! This meant I hopped straight to the entry on the Kobzars

Wikipedia: Kobzars

In Ukraine, kobzars organized themselves into regional guilds or brotherhoods, known as tsekhs. They developed a system of rigorous apprenticeships (usually three years in length) before undergoing the first set of open examinations in order to become a kobzar.

Wikipedia: Preservation of Kobzar music

and this interesting list of recordings off off wax cylinders of actual Kobzar music! The recordings are rough, and the most popular ones are the roughest. Wax cylinder recordings degrade with each listen.

Tutorial

I’m 3/4 of the way through the maze games tutorial from CartoonSmart. I can load the maze and enemies from a json file, created by using Tiled. It’s a bit of a slog here in the middle, but I’ll push forward.

iOS Project Log 4

iOS Project Log 4

Published by Stacie on February 27, 2016

Sound Maze Game Progress

Climb the tower, pass the tollways using your ears and your wits, but don’t believe your eyes!

Design

My project now has TWO artists! /kermitarms.  That means our project is fully staffed and we can forge on!

The theme and design of the game is taking shape, at least in my mind. 😉 I’ve shifted from thinking this will be a top down game, it will be a face on perspective.  Our protagonist will traverse a tower that looks safe, but is only an illusion, needing to use the audio clues to know which ways are safe/possible to climb.

To help inspire and communicate my vision I’ve created a mood board with visual themes/ideas.

Follow Stacie’s board Tollways Tower on Pinterest.

 

Research – Accessibility

Bought a book on accessible games, published in multiple formats by National Braille Press.  It lists many accessible games that I’ve run across in my research, as well as a few I have not.

I was a bit disappointed the content focused more on quick suggestions of which games to play than what makes each one ideal. There is still plenty of hints and tips to glean regarding control schemas. Most of the games are also listed on http://www.applevis.com with reviews, but it’s nice to have an organized selection in one place.

I will need to explore the VoiceOver options as I stitch things together. Is it as easy as adding alt text for web? or does it require a few more settings. There’s a standard, I just need to follow it.

Tutorial

Am halfway through the mazes tutorial on CartoonSmart. Spent some time learning how to make nodes and add attributes that allow them affect other nodes or physics.

Learned how to create a maze using the SKS builder and how to parse JSON levels created with a cool new(to me) tool Tiled.

I had to do some debugging before jumping into the 3rd section, somehow I’d lost my hero ship, and while the map was displaying fine, and all the gestures were working as desired, I could no longer see the ship itself moving around the map!

That took some slow review of the code to fix, but I’m happy it’s working again!  It’s the foundation of my sound maze, the basics I’ll start from before adding the pieces and graphics, and other variations.

More to come, I imagine I’ll be setting up some wireframes with my team in Invision over the next few days, and they are working on some character designs for our heroine, and some general look and feel for our app.