Control Core

A mix between a dev blog, and journal as I attempt to make this game

[controlcore]

An Update!

This past week hasn't been a whole ton of progress but I got to learn a little more about how android works in particular writing and reading data, working with fragments, and throwing ads in.

The first part of this project , writing and reading data, took me a bit of time for a few reasons. The first was I had to figure out where  the silly filepath to save and load from was, after a fair bit of searching I found the function i needed in context.openFileOutput(). Now that I could read and write I had to decide how I was going to save that a user had certain levels or parts unlocked. To do this  I  came up with a simple file system that says the type of game object it is, then a list of lines that the object could use.  This actually required more backend changes then I had expected as I had to make a level loader, which in turn needed a level factory to produce the levels so I got that setup.I figure I can just repeat the same pattern for other objects like equips as soon as those get coded in. The fruits of my labor didn't produce any grand change but hey now I can show off that I beat a level before so that's something :P

The second microproject of this week was getting a bit of work done on menus. Previously I had been kicking off new activities for each menu activity. This worked but it wasn't ideal as I would need to duplicate the bottom menu overlay. To get my program behaving how I wanted I had to change all of my sub menus to Fragments. Once this was done I was able to switch between sub menus while keeping my overlay bar in place and just have a nice little consistent look for the menus. There is a fair amount of work that needs to be done such as creating a default menu to display status updates to the users but for now I'm using the top level of the garage menu that is going to be coming soon. As a bonus I added in a top overlay currently it just displays my name but I'll likely add a few things here, perhaps some currency display. Its still in the works so it might be a while before this gets used for anything.

The last section of change for this week was adding in some ads as I would hopefully like to make some money off of this game, perhaps enough to buy a pack of crackers or maybe a nice soup. This had me go look up how to integrate with GooglePlayServices and signup with AdMob to display the ads. After following some of the GooglePlay tutorial and realizing it didn't help at all with ads, i scrapped what I wrote went to AdMobs tutorial and got them working fairly quickly.

I'll be talking with my friend Zorro soon about making some art, so next update should have a bit of interesting changes.

~Kownt

[controlcore]

Adding Menus

Well its been a few days since the initial post so I figure its about time for another one. As I graduated and got a terrible cold I haven't been as productive as I would have liked to have been but there was some progress. To begin with the menus in place for selecting a level were terrible little text creatures that looked like this.

I found a handy guide online and started working with the android menus and got them to look something like this. 

I don't think they will be a gradient like this in the final version but its a huge improvement and covers most of what I wanted to get across with each level, namely a placeholder for achievements which will serve to notify the player when they unlock something. All thats left to do on that end is give them the ability to unlock something but for now they can bitterly dream.

With these fancy pants new menus it only made sense to also create a second level instead of using the first level twice. This meant I needed to create a new bullet type as well as revamp a bit of hard coding that was done before when there was only one level. The bullet that I made for this level was a simple homing bullet that would just chase the player forever. With this in place theres now a grand total of two bullets wooo.

While making this bullet I realized there is a  fair bit  of duplicate code with the bullets setup being mostly the same, so in the near future I plan on refactoring these so each bullet has an array of properties that act upon it and make it do fancy things.

As for an idea of next steps I think I'll aim to make some victory and loss screen and to go along with them some notification about what winning has unlocked.

~Kownt

[controlcore]

Starting Out

Hello Everyone,

I've decided today to start posting about a small android game I've been working on sparingly during my free time for the past few months. That project being called Control Core.

I started out with the goal of making a small desktop game that would be a mix of dungeon crawling and bullet hell elements. They are two of my favorite genres. I embarked on this quest mainly to figure out how to program a game, and to get some experience with OpenGL. The project didn't get much further then walking through a 3D maze before my harddrive died and I abandoned the project. Looking back on it now, that likely for the better as I never really had a solid plan of how it would pan out.

                    Check out this amazing grass maze

A few months ago I decided to try the idea of making a bullet hell again but this time I would just do straight 2D and have a focus on customization of the ship. I worked at putting together a small engine that currently supports an ever so slightly customizable ship, and an enemy. The graphics aren't pretty and the pattern isn't super interesting but its a start.

Besides this engine, I have a small collection of Android menus that could use a bit of work. 

Over the next month of so I'm going to try to chug away at this game and see if I can get it to a decent state. Along the way I'll be posting .apks so people can give the current build a try and see it in all its buggy glory. I'm hoping to learn a bit about android development, making music, making art and maybe even a little game design.

My motivation behind this project at the moment is some silly bets I have with my friends. If I can get a nice following I'll get to snatch a GG button from one friend, and if the game blows up then a different friend will win a shoe. With such prizes on the line I had to have some plan.

Over the next few weeks I hope you'll join me as I start to flesh out some menus, add some patterns, get some pieces to make a customizable ship, and if all goes well come up with a versus and co-op functionality to play with friends. Its going to be a long trip for me but I hope I'll learn a lot and have fun along the way :)

~Kownt

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