Stuck on Apple Error Status

     In case you're wondering why TriGrid is not on iOS yet, it's because I found a pair of annoying glitches with the AdMob banner and my In-App Purchase Unity plugin. The banner never disappears and the purchase recovery button crashes the game. Instead of fumbling with these problems until I stumble across a solution (the usual way I solve programming problems that stump me), I'll just finish up Candy Catch first and fix TriGrid before beginning my next game.

      Candy Shop Catch needs to be out by November so I can start making money, validating to my parents that this mobile games thing is profitable. As of today, the game is completed and I'm getting it ready for the Google Play store. Once I can get a comfortable income, I can try to produce games with greater scale and polish. I really want that by January. I need to start making bigger and better games to prepare for the giant RPG I'll be starting next year.

Making School Relevant

     I doubt I'm the only one who finds school boring. I suffer from narcolepsy every time I hear about working at a generic IT job or sit in a class that I can't relate to anything involving the games industry. Most college students either don't know what they want to do and be or do know what they want but only chose it for the money. I'm not one to trade happiness for a guaranteed paycheck, and the thing I want most is the thing I'm most passionate about. My psychology teacher even asked me the other day "What's your special talent?" And I answered "Game development. I am an artist, I love bringing my ideas to life, and I'm willing to tear the world apart to do what I love most."

Status Report #9

   Time for the home stretch. I'm coding Candy Catch Shop into Unity now and it should be ready to upload on Google Play by next week.

Logic on Paper

I scribbled out some logic for Candy Catch Shop the other day

     Every idea sounds great in your head. Same goes for programming ideas. It turns out when you write out how you plan to code a game on paper, you find lots of flaws when you try to connect the pieces. Over time you get better and find less of them, but the fact still stands. You should scribble out your programming logic before diving into an editor and start typing.

    It's good to have a little logic chart around anyway. If you make a mess with actual code, it's much more hazardous to fix. I learned the hard way from TriGrid that deleting one useless script does more harm than good and makes fixing whatever missing link you made a black hole for development.