Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Freedom, Finally!

Finally have some time to spend on myself. Been caught in many things for a while. Working as a teacher assistant was hard and it really got some part of my life away from me. Things I had to do were in a pause state for a long time. Since I started working as a teacher assistant I had plan to finish some unfinished game projects, but I was too busy working in weekends. Now that I have left it, I'm no more bound to those things anymore.
So now, spirits high, *SNIFF SNIFF*. I'm ready to work on my Dino Run game project. Yay.
Learning to do this weekend:
  1. 2D sprite animations
  2. particle effect in Unity
  3. parallax
  4. shaders
Finishing this project and launching my first endless runner would be awesome.
Spirits high, again.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

First Game Ever Published

My first game Windows Phone 8 named "Switch'em" got published in Windows Phone store.

Unique thing about this game is that there is not second way to clear a level. A level can be cleared exactly flipping back the same number of tiles that were flipped while generating that level. Simple and elegant design with no extra fruits or fairy magic in UI makes it more attractive and appealing at first sight. Not copying anything but I recreated the theme of 2048 and #Wordament like games.

Here is the link to this game (Switch'em) http://www.windowsphone.com/en-pk/store/app/switch-em/0efb098c-e49d-49ee-8831-273a32637c8b


IsolatedStorage in Windows Phone

I was trying to fix the bug recently I was talking about in my last post. The problem was that I was actually using app local storage to store some game scores (and stuff). Turns out you cannot write in app local storage (you cannot open a file to write). msappx:// this storage defines the app local storage.
Solution to this problem was IsolatedStorage. As the name suggests there is an isolation in this type of storage in terms of data access (only the app using this storage can manipulate it).

This link http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/working-with-isolated-storage-on-windows-phone-8--cms-22778 helped me getting my problem solved. Thanks +Tuts+ Code.

Maintenance: Why So Cruel?

Last night we were coding, coding and just coding. Slept at 4:30am and repeatedly done the same for next day. After everything was totally fine, the game was running, we deployed on emulator, physical device, tested everything. Nothing was alarming that's why I uploaded the game in Windows Phone store. After the game got published and appeared in app store. I published the link everywhere in social media without first downloading in my phone and checking it first. Here is what I got. A bug. This made me swear I'll never publish an app without setting permissions from app manifest. Huh. Sick mother of debugging it was.