It's been a busy few days- productive, but busy!
Tomorrow I go back to the normal job, and back to writing down ideas and to-dos on a notepad on the side. So let's recap what got accomplished, what happened over the last few days, and where I'm going from here.

• A bunch of framework stuff to get the game talking reliably to my server
• A bunch of other framework stuff to get the game to be able to join a Multiplayer session (the 'town')
• An unexpectedly little amount of work to get a player to be able to join a ship and get pulled to that ship's server instance
• The ability for the server to dynamically assign server instances to ships as players join and drop (I'm really pleased with this one)
• 3 different mini game high-functioning-prototypes, 2 of which might make it to a production version. 
• Mini-games can report back to the server for progress / updates
• A whole entire separate project to have an interactable 'world' program (SkyHaven) to make the game world feel alive
• A framework for reporting and communication between SkyHaven and Project Air Bags 
• Updated some art

All in all, I'm pretty pleased with that. I definitely got farther then anticipated and enjoyed almost all of it. 

So what's happened since the last post?

These 12 lines of code, or more specifically, the spot these 12 lines get called from, took me nearly 10 hours to figure out. To be clear, I knew what the lines of code should be, but it seems where they should go was the thorn in my side. Let me know if you want to hear a rant, but it's safe to say there are some pretty nastily worded comments where this function gets called as a reminder to myself. 

The next day, I had a realization:

So I set to work.
15 hours and 1 wiki-page of fictional ship names later, and I present to you...

Right now the ships just move from port to port and periodically update their status to the server- but hey, you can click on them!

It may not look like much, but each of those colored dots is a separate ship, doing it's own ship thing. We have a fleet of merchants, pirates, and 3 different Navys.
But more importantly, this system will allow for world persistence, world-wide AI tweaks, and a whole host of other controls to be built on-top of it.
AND...
It can talk to Project Air Bags!

Finally, I went ahead and imported a draft of the ship that Chris has been working on, and I think it looks amazing!
That was a few hours ago- and it pretty much wraps up what's been going on as I finished out today.

Thanks for checking this out- please reach out if you have thoughts or questions!

You can download a video here (40MB)

This went differently than I thought.

Here's a preliminary map of positions and how they interact with each other.
All plans subject to change or get thrown out the window.

But doing this gives me something to aim at, and a better understanding of the back-end parts that need to be in place for each game.

With that in mind, and after creating this, it seems the next logical steps would be:
- Define and create the mini-game(s?) for the Craftsmen
- Define and create the mini-game for the Captain
- Wire it all up so each game dumps the correct stats into the server, and each other game correctly pulls those stats
- Cross fingers
- Balance, tweak, and tune

The weapons mini-game isn't getting worked on for now- for a couple reasons. 
First, it's a consumption game- it doesn't provide "resources" for other players- only consumes resources.
Second, a number of things about how the game should work need to be decided / prototyped / pondered about before tackling it.

So that leaves 5 tasks... and just over 36 hours. Better get started!

​With all these inter-player options, the next thing I'm tackling will be some kind of flow chart showing what games / stations effect what other games / stations / ship functions, and how.

From there, with only 3 1/2 days left, the next hurdles will be wiring up the above mentioned interplay paths, as well as getting things setup so we can start testing multiple clients and servers.

I'm really looking forward to these parts, and I'll post as I can!

Figured out what the second prototype game is...

Onto the next mini game! 
Right now the options are some kind of repair game, some kind of navigation game, or some kind of weapons game...
There might even be time for two more!

The 1st mini game is finished!
Well... the prototype is finished!
Actually, the prototype needs some work- but it works enough to move on!

The player needs to swap the spheres to try and get long chains of colors to be cleared at once.
Each time a swap is made, the center port shifts and sucks in spheres that match and are adjacent to the color sphere it's pointed at. New spheres flood in from the outside, but only if their path isn't blocked.
If a hex ends up blank, it drops from the game, making the next rounds harder!
​

This is enough functionality to move onto the next mini game.
What will that be? Not sure yet... so check back in to find out!

Yes, there's some minor issues with spheres breaking some laws of physics, but when has that stopped someone claiming success.

​Now, as promised, the bugs.

During the making of this, I of course did the stupid programmer things of not adding the line to make the spheres move, forgetting to uncomment a crucial piece of code, and using ++ when I was supposed to --.
But I think the best bugs are when the game seems to do something completely unexpected, and ​this bug is definitely that.
​Enjoy.

Hello all!
I've been lucky enough to take a week off of work and I've somehow convinced my lovely wife that I should spend all the time working on game development!

Here's the plan:
I'll be on my computer as much as possible over the next 7 days (11/30-12/6) getting as far as I can in coding a game. Eat, poop, code. 
Maybe even sleep.

The game I'll be working on is a re-vamp of Puzzle Pirates, which my good friend Chris pointed me to. The basic idea is that you are a pirate, and you do different tasks on a pirate ship in the form of mini-games. Patching the ship looks like Tetris, pumping the bilge is a match-3 game, and so on. Tasks help the ship move around, and everyone on the ship gets better rewards. When I heard about it, I tried it out on steam (still free to play!) and I immediately wanted to make a game in similar style- where players can jump on, do some tasks (mini-games), collect some rewards, and repeat.

This won't be a one-to-one clone of Puzzle Pirates. I hope to change the setting, create different types of mini-games, and update the mechanics. 

I'm also choosing this game because I've already got a bit of a head start. I've got a pretty good system in place for joining and leaving ships (which I'll do a write up of later if anyone is interested) so the bulk of the work will be more game-play related, and less nuts and bolts getting started.

It's also important to note I'm not trying to finish in a week- but just seeing how far I can get before going back to the day job. The goal is simply to work on this as much as possible, and get as far as I can.

So get ready for programmer art, missing semi-colons, miss-placed brackets, and sleep deprived ramblings. 
​I'll update here and across all other platforms this is posted on as often as is warranted.
I'm also very open to feedback, questions and comments, so please post!

Let the week begin!

Well, that took longer then expected...
But we're happy to announce that High Five Frenzy is out now on the google play store!

As you can tell from the lengthy delay between posts, this took some time to wrap up. As so often happens in the indie development world, a large dose of life happened and work on the game had to wait.

But now it's here and we want to hear your opinions!
So please, download the game, high five some folks, and let us know what you think!

And for those of you waiting for the Apple version, keep an eye here for that announcement!

Happy High-Fiving!
​-The Team

This week I had a chance to let a few other people play High Five Frenzy, and something a bit unexpected happened. I found that I wished I had more game to show them.
With how High Five Frenzy plays right now, you get the idea of the game very quickly and then there isn't much else to do. While this was part of the goal (to quickly be able to share it with friends or to be able to pick up and play while you're waiting in line), it also means that the initial hook has to be amazing or people can get bored very quickly. 
With this in mind, I'm going to spend a bit of time tweaking how the game gets played. These tweaks won't be large, and should be simple to implement (famous last words), but should also greatly improve the game for both first time players and high-fiving veterans.

As always, I'll keep you posted here on the latest developments.

If you would like to try the current demo of the game and you have an Android device, send me a note via contact us and I'll get you a link!

Thanks to everyone for their support, and to the people I keep pestering to try the game out!

-The Team

We're excitedly wrapping things up with High Five Frenzy!
The end is in sight, it's just obscured by a small avalanche of bug fixes and tweaks. 

As we ramp up to launch, we're also looking forward to what comes after this. 
We'll be supporting and adding things to High Five Frenzy, including a surprise feature we're especially excited about, but we'll also be starting on our next project. 
We've narrowed it down to 2 possibilities, and we want to take you on an exciting journey from start to finish with whichever project we move forward with.

So stay tuned, thank you for your support, and get ready to have a High-Fiving adventure!

-The Team