Musings from the bottom of the sea

Learning Japanese on your iPhone

2010-01-06T17:05:00.002+09:00

I have found 3 programmers are useful for learning Japanese on my iPhone. The first two are dictionaries based Jim Breens jmdic and KANJIDIC2. I am not sure about the third. For s straight Japanese to English Dictionary "Japanese" is what I use it also includes some JLPT level divide flash card practice. The second dictionary is Shinkanji. Its strength is it accepts handwritten input for Kanji you don't know the pronunciation of, also it good for browsing from Kanji to Kanji by radicals. Both show stroke orders and lets you keep lists.

As study tool I use my iPhone the most not with a app but a website ReadTheKanji. It is a Kanji flash card site but with two differences. First it shows you words like "行く" or "説明" to learn instead of single Kanji with all the possible pronunciations and meanings. I find it much better memorize one thing at a time than 5 things at once. ReadTheKanji reduces it 2 things, a reading and an English meaning. It also give a sentence for each word. Its layout is not good for the iPhone but I still find myself spending hours reviewing and learning new words/Kanji with it. The other frustrating point is that the site is often slow. An iPhone app version would solve both these problems. Hopefully I will be writing that app with them in the coming months. It is an app I would use a lot so I want it done right and as they say - If you want something done right do it yourself.

Startup Weekend Tokyo

2009-12-21T10:18:00.006+09:00

Spent the weekend coding, networking and making a pitch at Startup Weekend Tokyo. It was a good time and I learned a lot. Started Saturday with breakfast and networking for an hour or so. Then we sat a different table by our primary expertise. I was at the developer table, there were also marketing, design and idea tables. Dave McClure with Geeks On A Plane got the startup activities going with a session of half baked dot com . My team cam up with FreshYopparai.com (FreshDrunk.com in English). Then it was on to the first pitches of the session. any one who wanted to could get up and give a two minute pitch and then the best 5 would be chosen by vote and those 5 would be developed over the next day. The pitches were translated between English and Japanese by Samuel Baron. He did a great job. I am amazed by the ability to remember a a minute of pitch and smoothly translate it to a another language. My pitch did not get many votes but I did get some interest and question if I was going to do follow through and try the startup or if the pitch ws just for the weekend. (I don't know the answer to that yet.)

I ended up joining the iPhone Yoga app team. Yoichi Shirakata was the idea man. In marketing was Yoshiko Yamamoto and Loren Fykes. Design - Gohsuke Takama. Programing Aaron Franco, Takashi Kaneko and I. The Saturday afternoon was spent discussing what we should make and why. Market size, competition and product features. When we had agreed we had a feasible product for a business, I started coding. From here my perceptions of what was was going around me become quite limited. I went into head down mode and only had one ear on the surrounding conversations. Which was mainly in Japanese so I would have needed to concentrate to follow it. The app design did not include any 3D features but Unity3D was still great for prototyping work. I had some basic features running on the iPhone within an hour so. Having something on a phone that people could see and feel (it used the accelerometer) help my (and others I think) energy level. The ended around 21:00 and people went home or off to the bar.

The second day started with breakfast and a little hanging out, but people were pretty focused on getting to work on their project. We were down to 4 people in our project. This was not a complete surprise some of our team had told us at the beginning had told us they would not be able to come the second day. I spent the morning on twitter stuff for the app, getting it to tweet the right information in the right format,with some help from Aaron. Aaron was working on the website while I did app work. Gohsuke and Yoichi were working on the business plan and presentation. We got a call for two a sentence description for the panels summary sheet. I came up from coding to join that discussion a little. We then got a quick lunch in our room.

Time for the presentations, there was a panel 6 people I think. I dozed off a few times until it was time for our presentation. When we went up to the front and started Gohsuke going through the power point I realized I had not really seen all the slides and not in order. I found myself thinking "Wow this is a real business plan". I gave the live demo of using Wubble (our product) to track your balancing time. We took some questions from the panel and later I saw a nice tweet from Dave McClure "Wubble presented compelling idea for suite of mobile fitness apps for jp women". Wubble took first place among the entries as best startup business plan/pitch.

We then had a Japanese TechCrunch interview and things wrapped up.

Here are some videos. Our presentation is at about 1:30 in the first presentation(1/2) video and the the Awards presentation video.

Relaxed Play

2008-08-30T10:40:00.005+09:00

I changed the game so that after reached the level goal , you have more relaxed time where you can run up the score. When the level goal is achived you get moving Gold Spike Gem that lets you score points form Gems. Also I made Rings worth positive points instead negative ponts. Doing this also gave me an idea gave ma an idea for a beginer (new setting) and advanved setting (old negative point rings. Maybe in advanced mode you'll get positive points for putting rings in the fires.

Changing the score values of rings on each level and adding a new prefab link to each level was made some much easier by the Editor classes. was able to write a quick script to handle it.

I added a new feature for later levels and put it in my level editor but have not made any levels with it yet. I think this will let make add another 3~6 levels at each of Easy, Medium and Hard.

Make game more relaxed.

2008-08-27T11:32:00.002+09:00

I think maybe I should make the game more relaxed. having things that cuase your score to go down may be a bad idea.

Fxed bug with Menu Gui appearing behind game play gui sometimes. I did not figure why it sometimes happens and not other, instead I moved the whole menu gui to floating window so it is always on top. Looks the same though.

easier level E1

2008-08-26T11:11:00.004+09:00

Getting more feed back. Learning curve for a causal game is stil too steep. so I made E1 completeable with only 6 rotates and and have 3 backup cirlces almost made incase a mistake is made. I tried making floating tooltips for the scores but found out the having a statement like

if GUI.tooltip != "":
    GUI.Box(GUI.tooltip)

Unity does not like it because of they tooltip is handles. for now I have just shown the score in static postion instead of floating tooltip. Maybe later I'll change it.

[edit] Ok it's later I figured a work around. I only want to display the box if there is a tooltip, but Unity's internal design does not allow that, so instead I change the skin for my popup tooltip to be transparent with nothing in it if tooltip is an empty string. Still display the box , but make it invisible.

Tutorial added

2008-08-24T08:13:00.001+09:00

I had a couple of suggestions to add a tutorial from the Unity Forum so I have. New version is up.

2008-08-16T08:54:00.003+09:00

Oops. Found I had word wrap off in new GUI for instructions, making them unreadable, fixed that. Added 12 Hard levels . So if you have 5~10 minute please give it a try, link is on the right.

2008-08-15T09:33:00.004+09:00

I forgot to write that Q quits a level and P pauses a level.

Got the instructions done. So try playing. Please put a user name, any name, in near the top of the opening sceen. I am tracking scores for play testing and if you use a name (and the same one if you come back and play again) it will help me see how people progress in scores and through level. Of course I would appreciate any comments, bug reports feedback etc.

The Game is playable now but needs some more features still. For example there are no hard r impossible levels yet. also you play any level you want, I would like levels to be unlocked by completing the previous level. Also I keep you high score for each level and would like to display on the opening screen and maybe on score screen.

And now off for breakfast.

2008-08-14T19:37:00.003+09:00

I have now made 24 levels although the game has some unimplemented features it is playable. bigest unimplemented feature is instructions have to be written.

2008-08-11T20:28:00.002+09:00

I was working on more levels, when I found two bugs. fixed one related to storing a variable as static. tracking what goals had been reached was static because I had been keeping the data from level to level in the original design but changed my design. So if the previous level had goals that we not reached and did not occur in the current level it screwed up checking if the level had been completed. Fixed that one. Other bug was a bit deeper. When a player uses the same flip a lot they are penalized by making low scoring rings more common. problem I was not resecalculating a total used to figure odds of a new color coming up so if you could get it to make al new sections same colour. On easy level this generated a new gem every frame (looks neat). So now I need something to change the color of one pie section to least mostlickley color not already in that circle when anew cirlce would generate a gem. So no free gems.

Also working on keeping score by level. I was testing that when I found other bugs.

Playable levels up.

2008-08-09T16:14:00.003+09:00

OK I have half a dozen playable levels ready. You start directly on level during play testing I think in the final game you will need to have reached the level to be able to start on it. Any feedback on things being too easy or too hard etc. would be greatly appreciated.

Some things am wondering about is the game too busy? Is 5:00 minutes a level a good amount of time? Can you see what is happening when you play or does the screen get too clutered?

After making these levels I realized how to divide levels by difficulty so next release some of what are now easy will be medium and difficult low levels.

Dev notes: well I only did a bit of game coding today. Just the code to let you play any level. lots of editor coding. I think it will be well worth it for designing levels over the next couple of weeks.

Code for single player version finished?

2008-08-08T22:13:00.002+09:00

AFAIK I have now coded all the features I need for asingle player version. From previous experiance I think I am wrong and will need new code. Still tomorrow I will switch to level development and hope to have a new version with a couple easy levels done and released. I will also do a instruction level. That will probably need a little code to allow me to change the screen for examples outside of normal game play, but maybe not I lready have some instruction code and I may be able to make the changes directly in the editor.

So from tomorrow I will be thinking level design mainly with a few thoughs and tinkers towards multiplayer/network play. Current plan is to have a playable easy (single player) game out tomorrow, with full single player beta out in 2 weeks.

Idea for one player goal

2008-08-07T20:22:00.002+09:00

No new screen shots or even any code today. Too tired to to much but sleep tonight, but I did have an idea for one player goal. For each gem type a certain number must be gotten to their goal. This number will be shown below on red background, when that number is reached the background will turn green, Levels will be timed maybe around 2 minutes each. I should make either the red or green backgrounds patterned so red green color blind can see the difference, nt sure what to do about red and green colours elsewhere is the game.

Flip Tracking

2008-08-06T12:29:00.003+09:00

OK tracking flips is done, also know how to fit the one and two player games together better. Your goal will be to get as many Gems to there goals as possible and to keep the evil rings from getting to their goals, throwing them in to the handy volcanoes is he preffered method of dispossing of them. Also iyou should use your flip types evenly. If you use any type 10 or more times than the least used type they will be highlighted in red and your changes of getting more valuable colored gems will be reduced. So use the other type to get you high flip numbers back down.

This all works in to the future two player version where you will play gems and he other player will play rings. your goal will be the same as 1 player mode. Players will see dual versions of the screen with rings/rims and gems/centers swapped. So you will be trying to drop your opponents pieces in the fires well getting yours to your goals.

For one player game you must make a given score to advance to the next level I think. Two players game will be playabe either co-operatively or as opponents. (handy feature that, unplanned but I'll try to develope it.)

No new stable version yet. Need to spend more time rebuilding demo level.

todo: instruction scene.

todo: game play :: need to have some sort of goal to do each level. Maybe get so many of each gem to goals. (will think about this well working on others.)

todo:think more about multiplayer game play

2008-08-05T16:15:00.006+09:00

One last post before bed time. This scene has the tracking of what flips are used. I normally only use the left turn but used some other for this image. I am thinking about how to force people to use a range of flips instead of just one or two they are used to.

That only leaves 2 things on my todo list. they are both good things for sleeping on.

todo: game play :: need to have some sort of goal to do each level. Maybe get so many of each gem to goals. (will think about this well working on others.)

todo:think more about multiplayer game play

Quest for Fire

2008-08-05T16:15:00.004+09:00

OK not much of a quest since I just loaded the excelent fire tutorial - pacakge by Forrest, off the wiki, and there was a fire. Much easier time than Prometheus and I get to keep my liver. I also tracked down a long standing bug in my code I though I had squashed last year. I did not find the cause but did cure the sympton. It was related to some collisions not triggering, but also involved frame rate game was playing at, and also it seems if a mesh and rendered were attached to directly to the game object with the OnTrigger. I happen to have some objects where I had the mesh and render on a child because I wanted them offset from the position of the gameObject and they never suffered missing triggers.

so that is one thing off my todo list.

todo: numbers under flip toolbar are static should be linked to use of flips

todo: game play :: need to have some sort of goal to do each level. Maybe get so many of each gem to goals. (will think about this well working on others.)

todo:think more about multiplayer game play

New Layout

2008-08-05T12:17:00.004+09:00

Well I've my new layout. It has more room for the board. Also the board is no longer square. I hd made it square to start because I thought I would have one player play with the goals up and done and the other play with goals right and left, but now I think goals for each player will be intermixed. So there is a new stable version up.

For those of you wondering where the background Muzak (I don't think my arrangement makes up to the standard of music) I made it with GarageBand Magic. It took about 4hours. 2 hours of trying to figure why my Apple loops were not working. GarageBand had a corrupt index and I had to delete the index and reload all loops. 1 hour to figure out there is song length feature that may be way off to right of your last note. And 1 hour to choose a genere and instruments to be used and to clip out the intro and closing stanza so it would work as loop.

todo: fire boxes should be real fires.

todo: numbers under flip toolbar are static should be linked to use of flips

todo: game play :: need to have some sort of goal to do each level. Maybe get so many of each gem to goals. (will think about this well working on others.)

todo:think more about multiplayer game play

New layout started

2008-08-04T19:59:00.002+09:00

No new stable version today. Started working on new layout and changing the last few things that need to be gemmified. Screen shoot above is 1/2 o new layout in unstable version. Spent a bit too much time trying to make ring gems look nice. I will have to put that aside till the gem rings are the worst looking parts of the GUI. Lots more ugly things to fix first.

Need to think about how I will synchronize running on two (or more) machines. First guess is run it live all machines with one machine running master. when a sigificant event happens on the master send it to other machines. For example any collision that triggers something. Triggers that cause destruction of an object will have to disabled on slave machines, so that only collisions have to be sent not that data needed to resurect an acidently destroyed object.

Also slave machines will have to send player actions to master. I think a queue with a slight delay so player on master machine does not have an advantage may be the best way to handle this. As thing is hopefully more of a think ahead game than reaction game opefully that won't affect game play too much.

New Ring gems.

2008-08-04T09:14:00.002+09:00

Changed the Ring Gems. I like these ones. I made them with Cheeta3D.

I started with a truncated Icoshedron (polyhedera)and flattened it. Then took anther truncated icoshedron (polyhedera1) and shrunk the x and z scales rotated it 30 degrees in P: and subtracted it from polyhedera. I then made three copies of polyhedera1 and rotated them to 90,180 and 270 degrees in H: subtracting them also from polyhedera. I think it is a nice looking gem, the yellow and hole both show clearly.

Added gems

2008-08-03T18:11:00.007+09:00

OK added gems for pieces. The gem pieces are straight from the gem package on unity web pages. For the gem rings I made the mesh with cheeta3D subtracting one truncated octohedrons from another. I tried using truncated icohedrons but the colors of the gem did not show. I don't like the gem rings so much, I may try changing the mesh. Which since I saved the cheeta file directly to the unity project folder will be pretty easy. Nice work flow design from Unity there. I also added a destorying box, the little flame thing on the edge of the board. That should be upgraded to a real flame if I can figure out how.

Adding gems was more work than I expected because I used Materials to match between pieces and the tile that create them. That meant I had to add a set functions to map the tile materials to the piece materials. I tried using gem materials for the tiles but some colours did not work.

Doing all my coding in Boo. I got lazy and did not declare a local variable called name and the spent an hour tracking down the fact that I was not using a local variable called name but changing the name of a gameObject attached to the script.

Also spent fair amount of time fiddling with colours and sizes. I am using EditorWindows a lot to build my scenes. The image above is of the tile editing window. It lets me change colors and deactivate arcs and pies on the disc. It knows what colors are being used in the scene and shows only those.

I forgot to put any moving obsticale pieces in this level (also done with an editor window). Next time I do an update I'll make a kittle more playable level.

Single player game play mostly done.

2008-08-02T19:12:00.003+09:00

Weel single player game play is mostly done.One more play element needs to be added then some level developement. The instruction are not written so that button just produces an error. the open screen shot is for another game. To play flip and rotate tiles to make circles with one color for ring and one color for center. Then get moving disks and rings to matching pieces on the edge of the board for points. There are some moving obsticles also.

Next I think will try to pretty up game. Maybe make the moving rings and discs in to gems.

First Demo

2008-08-02T07:54:00.001+09:00

My first stable demo is up. It does not do much. Try making circles with one color for center and another color for rim by clicking on tiles. That will make some moving pieces. I changed the borad layout and now realize it was better the way it was before (at least for the single player version) so will change it back.

I am fickle

2008-08-01T10:11:00.001+09:00

I am fickle. I thought about my game entry and decide I would be better off doing something slightly different. This entry will let concentrate more on game developement and learn new (for me) aspects of Unity and less on writing non Unity specific code. I will be able reuse more aspects from my previous game but hopefully come up with very different feeling 2 player game. Most of the above is justification for changing because I could not get a feel for what was exciting and different about my first entry as a game.

So my new entry is:

Team Name:Ryuuguu
Member Names:Grant Morgan
Game Name: Drop Loop
Game Description: By flipping and rotating tiles create rings and disks and then move them off to the correct board edge.
Technology used (Terrains, procedural, ragdolls, etc.):nothing much fancy here. Lots of collision detection, hopefully some network freatures.
Number of players network or single machine: Final target network 2 player. Will start with single player, move to 2 player networked play.
Target distributable (standalone, web player, widget): web player
Website/blog/development journal:ryuuguujo.blogspot.com
Optional concept art: see above
Optional playable demo: not yet

all the stuff about goals remains the same. My starting point is more advanced.

2008 unity contest

2008-08-01T08:17:00.002+09:00

Here is my Unity 2008 Unity contest log.

Team Name:Ryuuguu
Member Names:Grant Morgan
Game Name: Drop Loop
Game Description: Tetris style dropping game, able to flip and rotate blocks to make loops which destroy the blocks
Technology used (Terrains, procedural, ragdolls, etc.):nothing much fancy here. Lots of collision detection, hopefully some network freatures.
Number of players, network or single machine: Final target network 2 player. Will start with single player, when done if time remains move to two players single machine and then finally 2 plyer networked play.
Target distributable (standalone, web player, widget): web player
Website/blog/development journal:ryuuguujo.blogspot.com
Optional concept art: see above
Optional playable demo: not yet

Goals:

a)have a lot of fun :).

b)end up with a playable game

c)learn how to synchronise games across a network. I think the network comunications should be easy with Unity but synchronising objects which move based on frame rate and collisions may be tricky

d)learn more about incorperating user feedback from playtesting in to a game.

e) learn how to do some cool visual effects. Yogi's code and explanation are just waiting in the resources area to read and learned.

Starting point: The screen shoot is from a modified from an existing game I trying to publish. So those visual elemnts I have to start with but a lot of the game play will be new code.