Mail sent to [anything]@johanneswarn.com is set to redirect to my in use mail address. Nothing special. It does however also mean that email sent to 💩🐭🐢😀🐝, or any other combination of emoji, @johanneswarn.com is redirected to me. 🎉🎉🎉
Apple’s mail apps aren’t too happy though: “👅@johanneswarn.com” does not appear to be a valid email address. Verify the address and try again.
I’ve had a small Threes clone codenamed “Squared” on my hard-drive for a while. Think Threes with colours instead of numbers, and combined tiles remain the same rather than doubling their number.
It started as a HTML5 prototype: no animation, horrible colours, arrows to move. Just enough for me to evaluate if I liked it or not. I did. Still it was a Threes clone, and it didn’t quite feel right.
A month later I started a iOS version, didn’t come much further than starting it.
Months later I made a proper iOS version: nice enough animations, good colours, swipe controls. Then I left it to sit on my hard-drive. Showed it to some friends a family. My grandmother called and told me my sister had shown it to her and that she wanted me to send it to her¹; a friend is determined to beat my highscore of 1125.
Two days ago I decided: fuck my angst. Added a life meter with accompanying in-app purchase, leaderboards, and some first-time instructions. Yesterday I took some screenshots and submitted it to the app-store. “Squared: A Cleaning Simulator” is no waiting for review.
¹: Forgot my computer when visiting, and beta-distribution felt a bit too complicated.
My December games are all written using SpriteKit, Apple’s 2D game framework. First thing I do is cmd+shift+N to create a new project, and then I select the SpriteKit template. Problem is, it isn’t right for me – there is a bit of cruft. First thing I do, every time, is remove the cruft. Same way, everytime.
I really should do my own template.
The main idea for the RPG was to try and do a touch button, swipe up to item in menu, release interaction. In context: touch “attacks”, swipe up to the kick row, release. Or: touch “items”, swipe up to the potion row, release.
Didn’t manage to get that working, and the battle system is nothing special. Still this kind of RPG battle system is rather addictive.
December third ended with a rather non-game game. Wanted to have a walking square. I finnaly have a walking square, but it isn’t very nice. Oh well.
Still want to play around with tilt controls. Want to try doing camera tricks to give the player an idea of where they’re tilting (and a deadzone to removing noisy small movements and giving the player a safespot).
(I forgot to put the link to the GitHub page for my December games. It’s there now.)
Got this stupid idea to make to make a game for every day of December. So far so good. They’ll probably all be iOS games, exploring control-mechanics. If you have a developer account feel free to download the projects, build and try them out; if you don’t and for some reason really want to try them out – send me an email.
Yesterday became a Tetris Attack clone, and today a space shooter. Both are very rough around the edges, but the controls feel pretty solid.
My feed reader is still not parsing the content of an entry (just showing raw HTML) and there are some random crashed. Still, somehow, I look at it and feel “pretty usable”.
So the capitals and “ä” in my name is causing quite a few problems (neither IRC, mail nor scp works). I emailed ~ford about it without a response, and I don’t want to bother him too much.
Reading ~silver’s kind of blog about “Pumpkin Spice” (and ~joeld’s “Microblogging with RSS”) can’t help but feel “hey, that’s what I’m doing”.
Inspired by ~mathowie I removed a flag from ~delfuego’s shell scripts and added some JavaScript: tilde sorted.
Parsing dates from strings, that may or may not conform to a particular standard, is not particularly fun.
Everything is more or less “working”. Just not in a very pretty way.
Thought I hade “pass the baton” figured out …
Beat ~tristan’s memory game.
Discovered p5.js. Tan curves are interesting. So are offsetting sin and cos curves by 3 and 5. Or offsettng a lot of curves (give it some time). Or just letting things pulse. The source for all four is here.
I’ve been writing a Mac/iOS RSS-reader for a while. It is slowly moving forward. A bit too slowly. Learning Core Data with a bit of frustrartion. It feels like the sort of frustration you have before it clicks and then you can breeze through for a while. I hope it’s that kind of frustration.
Sarkeesian’s end-goal appears to be asking game developers to write better characters for women, portray them well in games, and not go to the well with lazy female story tropes we’ve seen hundreds of times before. My daughter just wants to play games with a character that looks like her.