Month: July 2014

Categories
amusing games design programming Unity3D

Rift + Sensor = Holodeck: VR nirvana?

Two things arrived in the post today, on the same day. (incidentally, one via FedEx, which was great, and one via UPS, which was dire – and gave my package to a stranger even though I was in the building WAITING for them to arrive).

Here they are, side by side:

IMG_20140731_185311small

Continue reading “Rift + Sensor = Holodeck: VR nirvana?”
Categories
android

Review: good SMS apps for Android

Why do we need this?

In a bizarre move, Google deleted the perfectly good SMS app from Android. Yeah. Hmm. Well, read this TechRadar piece for some thoughts on that.

Sadly, Google’s corporate policy is that the consumer is always wrong: you’re not allowed to simply “use the app I already had, that worked great”. Time for a trip to the Android App Store…

I tried:

Quick review of each

TextSecure

  1. does what it’s supposed to: show all conversations, send texts
  2. uses the “standard” view of SMS that we’re all accustomed to

…Deal breaker

  1. there’s no widget. Without a widget, you can’t get your phone to show “at a glance” new and recent SMS texts on the home screen / dashboard

Evolve SMS

  1. has a widget that works

…Dealbreakers

  1. enormously unpleasant “forced swipe” control system. I’m not sure why. Maybe: “Facebook did it, and it sucked, so Facebook stopped. But we want to be Facebook, so let’s copy their failures!”
  2. the back button is actually broken. This is a core feature of Android, one of the biggest improvements compared to iPhone. And Evolve broke it. (Sad face).
  3. the widget can’t be resized. Fixed size widgets are a real pain – you can’t place them where you want, cant put the things you want on same screen, can’t control the info displayed

HelloSMS

  1. basically works

…Dealbreakers

  1. stupid forced-swipe control (see above)
  2. On first start, requires you to swipe in wrong direction
  3. no widget

Go SMS Pro

  1. has a widget!
  2. basically works, but ugly

…Dealbreakers

  1. The widget WILL NOT DISPLAY incoming/recent texts. Instead it displays ONE text, and you have to hit buttons to “scroll” the widget to next / previous text. Wat?
  2. The app hangs if it’s not your “default SMS app”: you type something, it hangs. No other app had this problem, they all did a popup explaining, including a single-tap “fix this” button.

chompSMS

  1. has a widget
  2. looks really nice

…Dealbreaker

  1. The widget … is simply “an ugly resized version of the app icon” … and it does nothing. Seriously, a developer chose to add this feature, and implemented … nothing. Wat?

Summary / Winners

TextSecure is a perfect recreation of ” an SMS app that just works, the way its supposed to” … Apart from the lack of widget (essential!). It even has Apple iPhone style “free text messages to other users of the app”. If they’d fix that missing widget, it would be worth paying for…

chompSMS is very much like TextSecure, perhaps slightly prettier (personal preference). But the broken widget is just as bad as TextSecure’s, maybe worse. And it lacks the “free SMS” mode and “secure SMS” modes of TextSecure.

Evolve has the only working widget (essential!). But … you’ll frequently exit the app unintentionally when you hit the back button. And it’s unusable unless you like “swipe all the time to control UI instead of using the back button” behaviour.

Final thoughts

The rest … are not winners. I’m using TextSecure for now. When people say “people on Android don’t buy stuff”, partly it’s because the apps are incomplete: most of these apps haven’t been fully developed (how can you have a broken widget? Why did you launch without a widget? etc).

NB: as a developer, I can attest that “adding a widget” is very easy. It’s stressful the first time, and then you read the docs and examples, and realise “wow! this is going to be super quick to implement!”.

Categories
computer games dev-process games design programming Unity3D

World-exploration game, done differently

Inspired by Markus / @notch, and how he got MineCraft going in the early days, I’m live-prototyping a game idea I’ve been thinking about for ages. It’s about exploring a landscape … where cities affect dungeons, and dungeons affect cities.

(this is stress-relief for me, an “evenings and weekends” project. By day, I’m helping Schools teach children to program, but that’s HARD (no investors, lots of costs – at the moment, I get paid nothing))

Play in web browser here (very early prototype!)

Screen Shot 2014-07-25 at 12.31.23

July 2014

Current build focusses on the “City building” interface. Initially, you won’t be building cities, you’ll be building small camps / trading forts, etc. So this lets me play with the interface, the scale, the rendering, etc. Make sure it’s fun.

Create something – but take screenshots! Because there’s no “save” yet. Super-early prototype.

Long term gameplay

  1. Explore a huge landscape in FPS
  2. Any location, “create a camp”, and it switches to the isometric view you see in current demo. Build yourself a home/fort/etc.
  3. Fast-travel between locations, but this triggers “random encounter” events … or run between locations manually.
  4. Turn-based / DungeonMaster style dungeons are randomly generated near to each camp. Explore the dungeons for resources and to level-up.

Unlike e.g. Skyrim … when you find an interesting location, you can’t fast-travel to it. You have to build a camp next to it, and fast-travel to that. But your camp can be overrun/destroyed/stolen while you’re away.

So … you’ll be building (and maintaining) a lot of bases around the world. I want to be sure that base-building is easy and fun, even after you’ve done it lots of times already, before progressing with the rest!

(I’m trying to make it “repeatably fun” by having the landscape HUGELY affect your base design)