Bit of an update

Been a while since I updated, so here’s what’s been going on at the Beercave lately.

First off, the Beercave has moved. Still getting settled in and unpacked in the new place but I’m back to a point where I can get some work done again.

Playing Gods is coming along nicely. Had a minor hiccup in the early playtesting where it looked like the App Engine server I’d built wasn’t really up to the job. I was having some pretty major stability issues with the Channel API, and some concerns about getting it talking to Unity. Fortunately, while poking around the Unity forums, I ran across SmartFox Server, a server platform designed for building multiplayer online games with a Unity API. Since SmartFox talks python it was a fairly minor job to port all the game logic from the App Enging server across, and I’m now much happier with what I’ve got.

I’m currently working on rebuilding the client in Unity. So far I’ve got a simplified board, player movement and card collection working, and it looks a little bit like this: Photobucket In other news, I picked up this cheap Android tablet (oh man, that’s gonna bring in the spam-bots, ain’t it?) at the start of the month so I’ve been having a bit of a play with writing games for it. I found an Android port of pygame, which came in quite handy. The sound seems to be broken right now, and it’s a bit slow for the kind of hardcore pixel-chucking I want to play with but it makes for a great prototyping tool. I whipped up a simple shooter game in about a week and I’m looking at rebuilding it on top of libGDX once I get my head around bloody Java. Once I’ve got a decent chunk of gameplay in there I’ll chuck it up on the Marketplace and see if I can’t earn a little beer money.

Gun Bastard’s still on semi-hold while I finish up on PG, but I now have the beginnings of a soundtrack courtesy of music Meister and all-round sound bloke, GovernmentYard. I’m starting to get a pretty clear picture of where I want to go with it now, so expect some decent progress once I have a chance to pick it back up again.