Sunday, January 22, 2012

Cloudifying Sedition

Recently, Sedition "0.0.3.0" hit the various Android markets I publish to. It was supposed to be the version that finalized the feature set. Of course, I can leave it alone. I've recently started a new job, and for the first time, I work on web/server/'cloud' based technologies. It is interesting in that I absolutely love learning new things, but it's also tough in that I have so much to learn before I feel I can develop software with the speed and craft that I can with desktop and embedded software.

In the previous version of Sedition, I'd experimented with a high score library called "Score Ninja", a mostly painless way to add a high score system to your game. You go to the Score Ninja website register a game, and get a game id, then download a jar and link your game with that, with a few calls into the library to post or retrieve scores. Users are required to download a scoreninja app from the market which handles all of the communication.

Friday, January 6, 2012

Crufty New Year!

It's been quite a month for me on the personal side. I've switched jobs, hosted my family for Christmas, and spent the week before Christmas in California for training for my new job. I've never written much about my professional life on this blog, but I will say that I'm no longer in the video game industry, and I get to work mostly from home, and I'll get the chance to work in Scala, so it's a good thing!

I really wanted to make a new Sedition release before the end of the year, and I have been putting a lot of work into it in the last month, considering what little time I've had. I even spent a few hours on a layover in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport coding. (A paranoid part of me wondered if someone might look over my shoulder and see me writing code about bombs and explosions and get the wrong impression :) ).

One unexpected snag I ran into was that I decided it was time to update the ADK  and all the 3rd party libraries I was using before the next release. I ran into a few tough-to-figure-out problems. If I had skipped the ADK/3rd party lib updates, I probably would have been able to make a release by now.

Nothing to report on the electronics front, I'm focused on Sedition, and recovering from the verge of burnout from spreading myself too thin last year.

-P