Cheers
unlikely, this is a game idea I've had for a while and I've only just got the motivation to bite the bullet and make it
Good point about the trademark - I'll have to think of another name as I would like to release this on Desura and I don't want to run into any silly issues like that. Also I really should have done a simple google search as there are already three other games on the Android Play store titled AsterDroids!!!
Ah well, I'm sure I'll find an suitable name before too long.
And judging by today's progress that could be quite some time! So today I expanded on the mining mechanic, but soon ran into a few annoying bugs.
The bit I implemented was to define the 29 elements that will eventually be used in the crafting system. The 29 elements are based on elements from the periodic table and the player will extract these elements by mining the asteroids.
So my idea for the mining mechanic is for the player to manoeuvre close to an asteroid and deploy the drill into it. The longer the drill is in the asteroid, the more material will be extracted, but if the player hasn't matched the speed and rotation of the target asteroid, the drill will snap off.
But assuming the drilling has been a success, the player will now have a random amount of elements to play with.
I'm not sure how to actually implement that part yet, but I want it to be quite experimental where the player will mix the various elements together to create components, upgrades, fuel and repairs.
But I hit several bugs before I managed to test my implementation so testing is tomorrow's job. One of the bugs I hit was all of my own doing. I wrongly assumed val() returned a float and not an integer and that simple mistake meant the drill wouldn't deploy when I ran the game!
The second bug was stranger. I have a log file that I create when the game is ran to report various statuses and player actions, all time-stamped. But weirdly AppGameKit would crash claiming it couldn't find the file, despite having written to the file several times before it crashed. I also spotted the last time stamp would have corrupted characters. But one restart of my PC later and the bug vanished.
The one bug I still can't resolve is the one where the game crashes when it closes. I'm hoping this will go away when I change how the game ends, but for the moment every time I quit the game, it freezes and crashes.
I really need to shorten these blog entries.