Jp Fallon's dev blog

Lugubrious Violet

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SQUID AIR HOCKEY dev blog #1

From July 2018 to July 2019 I designed, developed, and implemented an Android Game in the Unity Engine (C#.NET) for senior project / capstone of a BSc in Software Engineering.

Nanogames, or Sword Clash (working titles) is an arcade-action fighting game for Android mobile that is Air Hockey - but with Squids. The tentacles are the paddles, food Squids fight over is the puck, the goal is dragging the food back to your beak to eat it before the opponent does.

The minimum viable product completed in June with programmer art includes these features:

Bubble particle effects using Unity’s Shuriken VFX

Online Multiplayer using the Photon Bolt framework

Custom Touch Gestures using Jeff Johnson’s Fingers Plugin

Google Play services including authentication and cloud save

SOLID state machine for handling user input

My Game running on two phones (high-res)

The triangles represent the squids tentacle tips, and are launched like projectiles using swipe and fling gestures. A barrel-roll gesture can be done by making two tight circles on the touch-screen, this lets you break out of grapples, and i-frame through jelly-friends. You can also tap to “juke”. The squids pictured here are fighting over a medium fry from Burger King that was dropped in by a kind seagull.

Game Demo APK HERE

A 34 page technical document detailing the project’s functional requirements, market analysis, design changes, source code, etc. can be found HERE.

Planning to continue developing the game on nights and weekends to hopefully release a playable game on the Google Play Store before 2020.

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Why our dev team chose Android Studio over Qt

In short, it left a bad first impression. The new 5.5 Qt installers did not work ‘out of the box’ on our machines and required three hours of tinkering to get working. An alternative to the tinkering (sifting through poor documentation to support architectures) was to download the old Qt 4.X alongside the latest release which, counting all the Android specific tool sets, was 25GB total. Out of four team members, only I could put up with my favorite framework Qt’s fussing. But let me backup a minute to explain why.

  In Junior Project, our group decided on a Health Improvement Mobile Application. The user self-reports and monitors areas of health they want to track or improve. For example, if I wanted to sleep easier and better, I might track how long I sleep, what I eat and when, how much I exercise, and what my caffeine intake looks like. Then, after the user has entered some data points, the app performs meta-analysis to bring trends to their attention and suggests how to improve these areas of health. There are game-like retention policies and characters that live inside the app to encourage and guide the user - I’ll go into more detail about them in a later post.

  Essentially, we set out to make an app that helps people. So, to me it makes sense to target as many people as possible. Qt is able to target windows phone, iOS, and Android with very little redundant code on developer side. Also, everyone in our group had two or three years of C++ experience and little Java experience which made Qt seem very attractive. I have seen excellent mobile applications such as Chessgames cgplayzone.com (releasing this April on the app store) come out of Qt in only a year of dev time.

  But, Qt left a bad first impression. I tried to explain that in the long run the difficulty and workarounds in Qt would be about the same as Android Studio - especially with most of the team not knowing Java very well. But there is no argument more compelling than this:

Qt Hello World built to Phone - 5 hours

Android Studio Hello World built to Phone - 15 minutes

A week later, as I write this, Qt has fixed most of their streamlined installation issues. But it is too late. The dev team has decided to use Android Studio and develop exclusively to Android phones. Helping less people. We are locked in to Android Studio now for at least a year of development time. Our project is open source and wouldn’t be making much money for Qt, but still, they lost a customer because their product didn’t just ‘work’ out of the box.

Folks, this is why you include batteries.

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I wanted to make a game that helps people be more sympathetic towards each other and less apathetic to the world around them. My solution was Cards for Humans, which is essentially an open Apples to Apples with write-ins. I tried to write easily digestible cards that players can comfortably respond to, while revealing little parts of themselves to each other. Available for purchase Monday the 24th of November! (14.99)

Soon I will post a software version of this card game, for free.

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