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!
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.
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.
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.
Since I'm working on multiple projects I have to break down my week and work on certain things per day. If I don't do this I get lost and feel like I get nothing done.
In order to do this I have to keep notes on each project. More specifically, when I stop, I need to write down where I left off and what I wanted to focus on what's next.
So far my routine looks a little like this. Of course it'll change based on obligations, appointments, life, and eventual burn out.
I start the week easy. Monday I work on Photography, building my websites, and writing music.
Tuesday I work on rebranding my KaiOS games. Once this project is done I'll use this day for swift game development or making new games for KaiOS if I feel inspired.
Wednesday is all swift game development.
Thursday is photography and working on my new photography based game idea. When the bulk of the game code is complete and the game is nearly done I'll start using half of the day to write music.
Friday is writing, organizing my projects, and then focus on whatever I need that's bugging me. This is just the morning. The rest of the day is to mentally center myself if at all possible.
Reading all that sounds easy but in reality it's not. It take a lot of discipline and fighting off self doubt. I still have to all more time to write music which I've been neglecting. That thought keeps letting me know it's there every time I work on something else.
Rebranding has started.
I finished a template project in GameMaker and started the port of a simple game Dino Run. Took almost no time to re-write the game in GML using the template. Not bad. I just have to add the score sprite and polish it up and it'll be good to go.
The template uses on updated version of the rich HTML5 loading extension I made for GameMaker and also implements KaiAds. You should see a gif at the top of this blog post with the current state of the template.
Don't think I'll port the other KaiOS games to GameMaker though. I'll just give them a re-skin.
Reimagining of my old games has started. I have a certain design ideas in mind but as always I'm plagued with doubt that I have to try and ignore.
This week I took the time to just read and refamiliarize myself with the code I wrote a couple years back. I totally forgot I started using protocols and threading in my games.
I started an Apple TV game that uses photography that I hope to release episodically. I had the navigation nearly complete but after testing I realized that I have to flush out the controls. I'd like the game to be as accessible as I could possibly make it.
I'm focusing on Apple TV to start with because it looks so damn good on a large screen. I will start thinking about adding in iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS support once I flush out the controls.