tom moor

2010 in Review

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 20:20:00 +0000

It’s that time of year, and for once I thought it might be rewarding to reflect on the achievements of the last year inspired by similar yearly posts from Seth Godin and Kevin Rose amongst others… In some kind of order:

- Learnt Java and the Android SDK

- Built and launched a popular Android game, Fish Food

- Became involved in the local tech scene, in particular StartupMill

- Attended Launch48 and built an MVP for Commutably over a weekend

- Quit a job that was not challenging or enjoyable

- Started a new job at a web development practice

- Bought a share in and decorated a 6 bed student property to rent

- Grew cadyou.com to 25,000 monthly uniques

- Launched skinnyo.com, which is growing steadily and currently at 3500 users

"We have been so successfully brainwashed by the idea that we shouldn’t know what our own..."

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 21:04:30 +0000

“We have been so successfully brainwashed by the idea that we shouldn’t know what our own government/military is doing, that when unadorned truth is given to us, it looks so alien that we actually believe we shouldn’t see it. We’ve been kept in the dark for so long we’re like prisoners released from solitary confinement who are so pained and frightened when exposed to sunshine we want to go back in the hole.”

- Cintra Wilson

'Headline' Chrome Extension

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 20:50:00 +0000

Headline is a chrome extension I developed in an evening. It brings the speed and simplicity of google reader to the rest of the web by enabling the same keyboard shortcuts on normal websites.

This extension will help if you find yourself using the google reader shortcuts around the web. Currently available are:

j/k = selects the next/previous article on the page

n/p = selects the next/previous article on the page

o = opens the article link (if available)

Install Here

jQuery Distribute Plugin

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 16:43:00 +0000

Just created my first public repo on github and outed my first public jQuery plugin… A bit of a seminal moment so it deserves a very small blog post.

Check it out here: Distribute jQuery Plugin

Edit: Documentation and Demo here.

skinnyo: How To Start Your Own Weight Loss Challenge Yesterday...

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 22:34:57 +0100

skinnyo:

How To Start Your Own Weight Loss Challenge

Yesterday we put the latest Skinnyo design online in a very quiet fashion and sent out the first batch of invites. Our homepage is still very simple and you need an invite to get in… but if you would like to use Skinnyo to start your own weight loss challenge you can skip the invite process and do so right now!

Simply follow the link below, sign up in seconds and then go to the challenges tab to start your own. You can then invite your work colleagues, friends or anyone you like straight from facebook, twitter or email.

Start a weight loss challenge

"The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed a little bit less,..."

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 21:04:45 +0100

“The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed a little bit less, but still failed. The third one, you know, proper failed, but it was kind of okay. I recovered quickly. Number four almost didn’t fail. It still didn’t really feel great, but it did okay. Number five was PayPal.”

- Max Levchin (Cofounder, PayPal)

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure,..."

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 14:58:10 +0100

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

- Theodore Roosevelt

Yesterday I updated Fish Food to version 1.13 in the hope it...

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 21:15:28 +0100

Yesterday I updated Fish Food to version 1.13 in the hope it would fix some of the FC issues that a minority of players are still having, although this doesn’t appear to be the case so the hunt goes on! It is incredibly difficult to debug a game when you don’t have any access to the phone model it is apparently crashing on!

In better news, Fish Food has just been reviewed today by Android Pit, the game scored 4/5 and a Very Good.

Thanks guys!

Fish Food has been online for a couple of weeks now, and in that...

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:34:00 +0100

Fish Food has been online for a couple of weeks now, and in that time I have updated it nine times, including adding a new game mode added called ‘drop’ and it has been downloaded approximately 12,000 times as of writing this.

I am beginning to learn a couple of things about the market and hope to post my thoughts on the whole process soon as there is a bit of good and plenty of bad! In the meantime, if you have an Android phone and haven’t downloaded it yet - get on it - it’s free!

Oh and it has received some favourable reviews from Android Game Blog and Android Pimps, thanks guys!

Bugs: Squashed.

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:08:00 +0000

I might as well resign myself to these updates being weekly, but hey better weekly than not at all! I have had a great week working on the game and received a ton of assets, I would say that Fish Food is now 95% complete.

Although in the last post I had hoped to focus on the side screens, instead I have worked on making the game rock-solid, halved the loading and resuming times and added saving, so you won’t lose game if a phonecall comes in or you need to switch to another app - awesome. In detail, work done this week:

Fixed a bug with the difficulty selection menu, and added an option to resume your previous game.
Fixed a bug where a bomb on the left of the screen might not explode properly.
Added some nice audio flourishes for combos
Fixed a bug where you could gain unlimited score in certain instances.
Fixed a bug where creatures ready to pop might not play the correct animation.
Fixed a bug where the bubble bar graphic was not chopped correctly
Fixed a bug where graphics and sound would potentially be reloaded on resuming the game, causing the app to run out of memory allowance.
Received the final music files from Rowan and incorporated them into the game.
Received the graphics for ‘worried’ fish and mines from the animator, Shane.
Reduced the filesize by half.
Reduced loading time by half.
Added a help mode that kicks in after several seconds of the player not moving anything which highlights a fish that can be moved.

I am really hoping to get a v1.0 on the market before April, maybe even towards the end of next week.

Over a week without a post, but that doesn’t mean there...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:26:31 +0000

Over a week without a post, but that doesn’t mean there has been no progress! Last week I finally caved in and bought a Nexus One which has enabled me to easily test the game on a phone (Eclipse integration is excellent). Because of this there has been a bunch of progress made, summary:

Added bomb character, which explodes an entire row
Added difficulties, easy, medium and hard
Added local highscores for all difficulties (no network highscores in this version)
Finally added a gameover screen, which shows you your score, game time and lets you save a highscore if you got one.
Lots of tweaks and polishes to sound with subtle variations and a timer that beeps when it’s low so you get warning before the game abruptly ends!

I am still waiting on both the ingame music and some sprites from the art guy, hopefully these will be completed this week. My focus over this time will be the side screens such as a tutorial, credits and a splash screen.

Last night I bought the domain fishfoodgame.com in preparation for adding future highscore tables...

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:57:14 +0000

Last night I bought the domain fishfoodgame.com in preparation for adding future highscore tables and promoting the game. No going back on the name now, not after spending $6 dollars…

What does three hours on a Tuesday get you?

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:28:00 +0000

Lots of progress! I think the final bugs with compatibility across devices have been resolved, the game seems to run in a selection of emulators at different resolutions fine now - of course the real test will be when I acquire an actual phone to test it on..

In other news, completed tonight:

Added the code for a ‘bomb’ or ‘mine’ creature that when triggered wipes out all the surrounding creatures and potentially creating a nice multi-point chain reaction :-)
Fixed a bug where pausing the game would pause half way through a frame draw, causing the creatures to jitter annoyingly.
Added a pre-game screen which just pauses the game with a message ‘Touch to Start’ so that you aren’t thrown annoyingly into the action losing precious seconds..
Fixed a ‘feature’ where animations got chopped off at the top of the screen and did not overflow with the score information because the buffer bitmap was offset.
Also gave the game a speed and smoothness boost by changing from an ARGB_8888 bitmap to RGB_565, as detailed by Robert Green on this page

Shane has just sent me the game icon, and I couldn’t...

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:31:00 +0000

Shane has just sent me the game icon, and I couldn’t resist a post - really chuffed at the way this has come out, should draw some attention to the game when it gets to the Android Market!

A weeks work

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 11:11:09 +0000

I don’t feel as though I have been terribly productive over the last week, but the time that has been spent working on the game / engine has resolved a few niggling issues that we’re there as a result of my inexperience with Android and Java. In no particular order, the items I have managed to complete this week:

Flexible resolution support, the game should now be supported across a wide range of screen shapes and sizes - I have tested on a number of emulators, and there is one VM outofmemory error left to sort.
Added vibration when creatures pop and / or are touched
The game now has a pause menu that works with the ability to resume, restart or head back to the main menu
Multiple difficulties that mean you start with a different amount in your bubble bar and have adjusted difficulty ramps (these will almost definitely have to be tweaked yet)
Completely recoded the music system which handled background music across activities. I was previously binding a service and then using that to play the music but it turned out to be overly complicated and a static Music Manager class has done the trick really nicely, handling music events between activities.
Included a large number of animation sets from my artist, including a draft eating animation which seems to work quite well.
Added background art across the game.
Added a multiplier effect for cascades, this currently x2 for every extra cascade you get, so as you can imagine the points rack up pretty quickly, this is another factor which might need tweaking or capping to stop scores getting too high, too quickly.

That’s it for now, tomorrow I may well publish some screenshots and a list of things that need achieving over the following week.

After struggling for name ideas for over a week and after...

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 21:59:11 +0000

After struggling for name ideas for over a week and after getting bored of my codename for the project (‘chomp’) I decided to throw it open to Aardvark and my twitter followers!

I received a surprising amount of answers, but the best had to go to Ash with the name of ‘Fish Food’, gotta love that alliteration and thanks Ash!

A busy evening of coding later and all of the game mechanics are...

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 13:37:33 +0000

A busy evening of coding later and all of the game mechanics are now in place… I have added a ‘bubble bar’ (which is just a text counter for now) every score you get goes towards filling your bubble bar and it gradually decreases over time, of course the longer you play the faster it decreases and when its empty it’s game over.

This final mechanic certainly adds urgency to the game! I think there will be quite a lot of tweaking and play testing to make sure that the 3 difficulty levels offer a fun amount of frustration / fun!

Got some new artwork through from Shane, we are definitely...

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:05:30 +0000

Got some new artwork through from Shane, we are definitely heading in the right direction and the ‘cuteness’ notch has been turned up a bit!

Last night I added the code to handle an ‘effects layer’ which sits in front of the main puzzle for explosions, scores, bubbles and other fast sprites to be played on, very excited by the progress.

After a weekend off development and a tech-meetup last night, i...

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:50:24 +0000

After a weekend off development and a tech-meetup last night, i am just getting back into the game code to finish the final dynamic of creatures ‘popping’ when they get too full. I also need to implement scoring and score multiples for cascades.

I am hoping to post some more technical details of problems i come across in this process, but hopefully there shouldn’t be too many! In the mean time i have a composer and a sprite artist on board, the image above is a first draft of a potential underwater theme for the game..

Android Development

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:27:14 +0000

So, i have been meaning to post about android development since i started playing around two weeks ago and only just got around to it. The idea was to create a development diary and although it is a little late - better than never!

I have decided to bet some money and resources on Android becoming popular throughout 2010 and beyond by creating some games for the platform. I have zero experience in Java or mobile phone games but I have created several flash games in the past and understand many of the principles involved.

The first game I am creating is as yet untitled and has been a testbed for learning Java and Android. It is a puzzle game in the style of PopCap (dependent on how much I decide to spend on an artist!), the screen has a grid of cute creatures of varying sizes, you use your finger to swype the fuzzy buggers in different directions causing them to eat creatures smaller than themselves until they grow too big and pop! There are elements of Bejewelled and Pacman - so hopefully it will be as addictive as those two combined … right?!