Inkman – update 00
Okay, I figure, maybe I'll just document everything I'm doing on game development... Just because. If I can't make money with ads... maybe the site will help fill in the holes.
Or maybe somebody who knows what the hell their doing will read my documentation, and correct me, or point out a better way of doing it. Either way, I figure this mystery person, or persons will probably look through the archive to find this, so I just want to point out some stuff for people who don't hang out on this site that much:
A. I went to college for game art and design. Mostly art. Not so much programming.
B. I made a webcomic, it didn't do too well.
C. I learned basic Java, then went into Android programming, then went into Android games.
D. 90% of the time, I have no clue what I'm doing, and I'm broke beyond broke.
That said, just to get up to date with all the stuff I've done on this project, which is currently known as "Inkman", just so I have a name for it:
A. Read the apress Beginning Android Game Development book by Mario Zechner.
B. Modified the hell out of his framework for "Super Jumper" to make a framework
C. Either way, framework is like... 30% done. Right now I'm working on graphics for the spritemap.
From there, I'm using the framework to build a level editor, which, when used saves the current level information to a text file. Once I make a basic set of, say, five to ten demo levels, I'll start building the game proper.
Ongoing problem list:
Bleeding off player velocity without relying on complicated states.
Bounding areas for environment objects. How do I handle gravity without relying on constant state checks? Such as, a stack of three boxes. I don't want to be constantly checking whether or not there's something under those boxes. They should just sit there until something changes. Same thing for the player character.
I really wish I had a few games from people more skilled than I to rip into. I need to see some good ways of handling things.
How you doin?
...Just discovered that it's... difficult to put ads into android games... and pretty much impossible to do without screwing the screen size, which stops you from having any viewable space with the UI included, which defeats the whole "game" thing...
So... it would seem that my efforts to make android games are pretty much useless, since I can't monetize the apps with ads,... and since the android market requires people to jump through flaming hoops to pay for apps, and they really don't like doing it, there's like... no way to make money at it.
Unless you're rich enough to hire people to do weird ways around the problem. Or are skilled enough to do it yourself.
I am neither.
So I feel like an utter failure. Like all my time was worthless, pointless, and whatever else.
...Right now, my life feels like a gaping black hole. I'm in a pretty dark place.
...Hopefully I'll feel better soon.
Seriously, try it.
For dinner tonight, I made this jalopy rice thing. And... it was awesome. So, just for my sake, and maybe the sake of anyone who likes good, simple food, here ya go:
2 tablespoon oil (vegetable, canola, whatever)
3 tablespoon water
1 handful of Tyson Grilled and Ready fully season beef strips
1 package Uncle Ben's Santa Fe Ready Whole Grain Medley
half a (15oz) can of black beans, drained (about 7-8 oz)
1: Toss beef strips, water, and oil into skillet, and cover until heated. while doing that,
2: Make the rice in the microwave, how it says.
3: When beef is thawed and heated, cut it into bits with whatever implement you're using.
4: Toss in the black beans, warm them up for a minute or so.
5: Take the rice out of the microwave and toss it in the skillet.
6: Stir it up, let the liquid reduce (if there is any). Eat. Enjoy.
Seriously, the Uncle Ben's Whole Grain Santa Fe stuff is friggin awesome. Both flavor and texture. The whole thing ends up costing like... $4.00 for the whole skillet, which is two meals if you don't binge. BAM! LUNCH AND DINNER!!
First Off, What the Hell?
Okay, so...
To fight all the spam that's been hitting the site over the last god-knows-how-long, I turned off the ability to comment for the vast majority of the internet. Nobody can register for the site, no more anonymous commenting, etc etc.
So I log in today and... there's spam in the queue again.
Which... bugs the hell out of me.
How? I have a fair idea... probably something along the lines of somebody else hosted with the same place I am infected my site with their shit again. (It happens like... two or three times a year.)
But alas! There's no new file, no modifications, no nothin... So... what, its running on their site and just casually infecting me? Can I do nothing to fight the deluge of crap?
Well, actually, there is. Get rid of wordpress. ugh.
I think I missed something there…
Okay... so there's this JC Penney commercial wandering about the webs... and people have called it sexist. Okay, fine.
"ZOMG!! It relies on horrible sterotypes!! It's SEXIST OMG!!!"
Yeah, I can sorta see where you're coming from. It portrays men as not really giving a damn about anything but boobies and butts... But even so it is a kinda-
What do you mean, it's sexist towards women?
...
From there, I just wandered around the net a bit, and most of the articles about it were level headed and downcrying the OneMillionMoms response, but there were still a good portion who also claimed the sexist slant, either siding with OneMillionMoms, or disagreeing with their response yet agreeing with their conclusion. Few were seeing it as using negative stereotypes about men. But, even amongst those few, the general response was "It's only insulting to men, and sexist to women."
So... Uh... I think I missed something here. Maybe the definition of sexist has changed so it can only be applied to things that are insulting to women? Even when... the women part of it doesn't have anything to do with implications or what have you? Just so long as it offends women, its sexist?
See, if there was a label on it that was like "ALL WOMEN CARE ABOUT IT GETTING IN AND OUT OF POOLS WHILE WEARING RED BIKINIS, BECAUSE WOMEN ARE SHALLOW"... See, then I could understand the argument of sexism. But when its playing a clip, from a movie,... not so much. It doesn't make any statements about women. It just shows a girl getting getting out of a pool. And then assumes that a man will be beside himself going "OMG BOOBIES!!"
So... its objectifying a woman? Okay... maybe...? But... that argument is... kinda vague. If she got out of the pool, turned the camera and said "You want this? Shop at JC Penney" then okay, I can agree. But... as it is... if that is objectifying women... then sunscreen commercials are objectifying women, too. ...And beer commercials... And summer vacation commercials, airline commercials, and anything else with attractive women in bikinis... so... what then? No bikinis... But technically, any commercial that uses a woman as an avatar for female consumers is also objectifying women. And from there...
Well,... eventually it all leads to hyper intelligent chimpanzees ruling the world.
So... what? Women aren't allowed to get out of pools? Or is it a video of a woman getting out a pool shouldn't be used in a commercial? Or is it that because the commercial was promoted to men it isn't allowed to show women? Or is it just that OneMillionMoms has a bug up its ass and is pandering to ridiculous things just to keep their name in the news?
Sure, a lot of advertising does objectify women. And some of that is really, really bad, offensive stuff. But when you blur the lines between what actually is objectification, and what's just tasteless... then you end up undermining the the significance of objectification, and turn it into just another mildly annoying condition of commercialism.
--------------- OTHER NEWS ----------------
Uh... I'm building a framework for my first game? Yay? Still haven't figured out what I'll do for Audio yet, though.
Arrrr.
As usual, I just can't leave this place well enough alone. Changed the theme again. Just got bored with the last one. Dunno if the comic viewer will still work.
Also, took out the forums. Yay or nay... I dunno. Either way, spam botting was getting horrible, so I figured I should finally do something about it.
Right, so, Android... right. Uh... Yeah.
The last few months have been rather annoying on that front. My phone, a Motorola Cliq Titanium, had gotten possessed by The Devil. And by that, I mean that it had suddenly decided it was going to start freaking the hell out and randomly activate touches all over the screen.
It made testing programs a pain in the ass.
It also made dialing the phone, answering the phone, and everything else a pain as well.
So, I've mostly just been doing the whole "Game Design ...in theory" thing. I've been working on getting game frameworks and stuff laid out
...in theory.
So yeah... nothing is actually done.
But, I just got a new phone a week ago or so. This time, it's a spiffy new LG G2x. Yay. So, I'm rocking Android... 2.3.3 (God, I can't believe I had to just look that up) instead of the Cliq's asinine 1.5 BS.
Although, while trying to exorcise The Devil from the Cliq, I did kinda install 2.1 as one of my last ditch efforts.
So the Cliq has 2.1 now. ...Still possessed, but hey, it looks better while its flipping shit, at least.
CHEDr.
So, after a long period of silence, I'm back, for now.
I just released CHEDr. The Basic version anyways. I should have a free version up sometime soon as well, maybe tomorrow. I should also be putting up some sort of infomation document/page for CHEDr too around the same time.
If anyone happens to buy the app, and has a problem before I can get those pages up, I'd suggest heading over to the forums and leaving a message. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
Right now though, I'm fairly exhausted. I think I need to get some sleep.
Yahoo! Answers is useless.
And it's being a bitch.
Something had been on my mind lately, for no real reason, and I finally decided to post a question about it on Yahoo! Answers, just in the whole maybe-somebody-will-answer-this-at-some-point sort of way. This was the question:
In AndroidOS, why is R.string.id singular, while strings.xml is plural?
This has just been bugging me lately: In Android development, you use resource IDs to grab resources (such as a String). Most of the time, the format makes sense: To grab a resource (say, thisimage.jpg) from the "drawable" directory, you use "R.drawable.thisimage". But in the case of Strings, the ID is more like R.string.hellostring, while the file for it is strings.xml.
Is there something going on behind the scenes where it ignores the 's' on the end of the files name? Or is it that the file name is irrelevant, it just comes down to what is declared as a String in the xml? Could I rename strings.xml to purplecowsfromvenus.xml and still have it work?
Okay, fine, but when I submitted it, Yahoo tells me my question has been deleted because it violated the community guidelines. Maybe the question was too well written?
Running Blind
Oh God, what have I stumbled into?
Alright, so, I started with Java. I ended up vaguely, mildly skilled with it, but Java was always intended as being a stepping stone to something else... So once I got confident with Java, I started poking around looking for the next stone up, and the options were Server-side skills, Desktop Applications, or Mobile App Dev.
Server-side looked like it needed a lot more time until it became profitable. So... Bleh. Still, it would be useful for the site... buuuttt... I needed money ASAP, so that option went into long term storage.
Desktop Applications, though, looked like it might have some payoff, so... Cool. I started down that one for a bit, but uh... the problem with it is that most of the references/answers/solutions/whatever were all written several years ago, and to get through to the current stuff, you have to really dig, you know? So it got pretty frustrating pretty fast. No worries though. But then, I start looking around for jobs in Java... and... well, honestly, it's a shitstorm. Pretty much all of the jobs for Java development have absolutely dick-all to do with Java. Instead, it's like, they're looking for a webdesigner to do their website, but since the last guy who applied had this "javascript" thing (whatever that is) on his resume... well, let's look for a javascript person... and the site that we're advertising on has a job title that says "Java Developer" and that's like... really close to this javascript thing... they must be the same thing!!
You get the idea.
Okay so, Mobile App Development!
Yay! Let's see, how can I use my newly acquired Java skills in the mobile enviro- *Reads Internet Articles* Oh! Hey! ANDROID!! Android uses Java! Sweet!! Let's go do that!!
And then there was bunnies and rainbows and bubbles and unicorns.
...Oh wait, no there wasn't. Because Android doesn't actually use Java.
F You, Internet. F. You.
See, Android uses the Java syntax and structure... but that's about it. So, switching from Java to Android isn't like going from San Francisco to New York, where there's just a few new things to pick up, but it's still the same language.
No, it's more like making the move from San Francisco to Barcelona. It's like... the only similarities here in language are that they still use nouns and verbs.
Okay, that's a little extreme. To put it another way, Android is still using the same structure and everything, but since the underlying methods and objects are different, it's like having to learn that this thing, this hotdog that you've known all your life as a hotdog is now to be known as a CylindricalMeatProduct. And while it has all the same behaviors as a hotdog, they're all named differently.
Way to make me feel like an idiot, Google.
For anyone who has worked with android:
Quick! How do I put text on a button?!? (The Android way, not the Java way)
Exactly.
On top of that though, Android has got a little storm on the horizon, particularly with App development progressively becoming more and more complicated as more handsets hit the market. I'll probably end up writing more about that later though.
Honestly though, it's starting to seem like getting into Android dev was a waste of time.
Comic Related News
So, there's been virtually nothing about the comic lately. Reason for that is: I still don't really have a way of drawing the comic. I was planning on just trudging through the piss-poor slowness of the laptop to get the rest of Issue 4 done, then tossing it up here, but the Fates have conspired against me.
I am however working on a java comicy viewer for the site, with some chat stuff. No guarantees, but so far it's looking kinda cool. If I can manage to get it up, there should be some happiness around here for once.
No ETA for the comic, or the new comic viewer, though. The comic stuff has to be packed around the stuff that has a slightly better payoff. Yeah, I know, it sucks.
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