Had to rewrite the KaiOS template. Couple of Reasons. The GameMaker build is disappointingly larger than the Phaser builds and the latest GameMaker (2023.1.0.76) HTML5 build is broken. Although I'm not sure what version broke it since I haven't used it for months. It just won't work load in older versions of Firefox. So instead of waiting for a fix I just rebuilt it in Phaser.
I 'm so happy I did.
It took better part of the day but it's done. It was a quick turn around since I already had the framework. I just had to update the menu system with the new art and flow. Also took out a bunch of unused code that was there for KaiOS touch screen devices that never happened and optimized the rest. It's 35% smaller. I'm very happy with it.
Now I have to get updates out.
Today on reddit I saw this post about Waterfox Classic. I had no idea this app existed.
I can now easily test and debug my games on the MacBook Air M2! I can now confidently move away from my PC.
This after all the setting up of UTM to run Windows for ARM just to debug KaiOS games. 🤣 At least I got UTM to work.
I rarely read the KaiOS reddit forum and I'm so glad I made that visit today!
Photography Game
I call it a "photography game" when it's really a puzzle game with many photographs. I have a tentative title but I'm not 100% sure about it. For now, it's "the photography game" and it's coming along faster than I thought.
Being that this will be a very visual game there's not much eye candy to show yet. Most of the work so far had been building modular code to make future episodes quickly. That takes a lot of time.
I played with some SKShaders for the title just for fun.
Ignore the red block in the gif. It's for debugging the hot zone.
I came up with way to drag and drop menu items and other interactive sprites in xcode. This is making creating levels a breeze in xcode. It also makes things a bit messy since I just plop menu items anywhere during development as you can see in the video. 😂
I have a prototype cursor working that can be controlled with the AppleTV remote as well as a game controller. In this video I'm using pan gestures to move the cursor but that code has already changed.
KaiOS Games
Most of the time was spent setting up a testing environment on the MacBook Air M2. I installed UTM to emulate running Windows for ARM. Then I installed a version of firefox that had the last working version of WebIDE.
I'd perfer not to run an OS emulator but the older versions of Firefox crashes on startup. :(
I ran out of time to see if it can talk to the phone. That's for next week.
Swift Games
Had a crazy productive day on swift game development for my arcade games. By the end of the day I was playing an almost complete game. I'll share images soon.
A heads down day yesterday means I'm mostly burnt out today.
It's mentally tiring for me to move from one programming language to another. Though once I get into the groove of a language things always tend to speed up. Right now I'm jumping from Swift and Obj-C to TypeScript to GML in GameMaker.
I wish I could map vscode shortcuts into xcode.
I'll be playing with the rss feed eleventy plugin and nunjucks front matter over the next couple of weeks to make it work properly. The feed might a bit wonky.
