Happion Labs GameDevBlog

Ok, Did Some Stuff

That should cut the server cost of the leaderboards by 4, so it should keep serving all weekend.

Here's what the leaderboards look like going into the weekend:

Both the Fristrom brothers on there, this time.

And, it has hit the 2000 mark for number of installs on the Chrome Web Store.

The Mac bug is unsolved, but if you turn "browser text" off, you should get a good framerate on the Mac. I just don't know why yet - it doesn't seem to be related to the page flow (because deleting the css and html do nothing), or how much information it's passing from native client to the browser, so I don't know what.

Also, trying out mercurial. Joel Spolsky's tutorials are pretty good.

Server Costs

Well, this sucks:

Guess when Google AppEngine changed their pricing model?

If I leave things as they are, it'll run out every night and still cost me $15 a month. Pretty sucky for everyone. So far I've made a whopping $10 from donations so I'm in the hole.

What's hitting now isn't actually bandwidth anymore - now it's datastore reads. The leaderboard. I don't know if the size of the database has anything to do with it or if it's just number-of-reads. Well, I'll do what we did with Bejeweled Blitz for XBLA - only read the leaderboard if you get a new high score. 

In the meantime, if you want to help me cover my costs, donate!

 

Ok, You Guys Talked Me Into It

I'm trying git now.

Also, hey, if any of you Mac guys want to help out, I've checked in a version of sixty second shooter into http://sixtysecondshootertest.appspot.com that lets you enable and disable a variety of different options. Are any of them responsible for the bad framerate - let me know.

You need to have Native Client enabled in about:flags to run it.

Frequency of Checkins

So I did it, I hung outside the Apple store with my laptop, checking in different versions to the sixtysecondshootertest.appspot.com directory and then going inside and running it on a Macbook Air. They were cool with that: "You don't mind?" I asked. "We don't mind! Enjoy yourself," they said.

I narrowed down to the revision that caused the problem, and my comment in the log is "I haven't checked in in a while."

Yep. Lot of changes in that revision, and I won't get a chance to work on it much more until Friday.

It's really easy to get out of the habit of checking in when I work alone. But, in theory, I should check in much more frequently, because my changes aren't going to break anybody.

Hopefully I've learned my lesson this time. I've just set my global ignores, and I'm going to try making add/commit a habit. I'm also checking my own copy of the nacl_sdk, so that will stay in sync too - when reverting these changes there were some include file differences between the version I was using and the version I'm using now, and I had to patch them by hand every time.

I just learned about mercurial and git the other day. (Wow, I used to keep so up-to-date on source control systems.) If I was working with anybody else I'd switch from subversion.

Meanwhile a friend asked me, "How many Mac users do you have?" When I started this project, about 25% of the visitors were Macs. Now it's down to 9%. (Part of the shrinkage, no doubt, is that the game doesn't work on Macs anymore.) "Screw 'em," he said. But I just can't. I have too many friends with Macs, for one thing.

The Mac Framerate Bug Continued

Chip Brown, one of my Schizoid team-mates, and I sat down with his Mac all yesterday afternoon narrowing in on the problem. We found a problem, and it seems to be related to the browser text, or perhaps the gateway from NaCl to the browser -- it's quite possible that my previous article on browser text for games is bad advice -- but had to go home to our families before we'd completely solved it.

The disparity in framerate between Windows machines and Macs does seem to highlight a truth: native client isn't magic. I still have to do compatibility testing on various platforms. If I had a Mac and Linux machine handy I would have caught these problems as I introduced them.

On the other hand, I'm trying to spend as little possible on this project. I've spent far more than I've made on indie development (especially if you count the opportunity cost of what I could have made working for The Man) and am trying to follow the advice of an indie role-playing game developer (but I forget who): don't spend any money until you make some. Wait for that first pre-order, and then print your first book. Print one copy. When you've made enough money to do a small print run, then do a small print run. Etcetera.

A friend suggested that I go to an Apple Store and do my development there. Maybe they'll think it's cool. So that's my tentative plan for today.

Though if you're a Mac owner You Can Help - get in touch with me via Google+ or Twitter (jdfristrom) - I'll let you know when I have new versions up on a test site that you can try for me. I'll give you credit and in-game energy and, I don't know, give your name on the leaderboards a different color.

And The Winner Is ...

biethb again, with 2846365 points. biethb and mantis9900 were neck-and-neck for a while there but then biethb brought the hammer down.

I'm gratified to see that there's such a high variance in scores - a newbie scores in the thousand point range, though it doesn't take long to start earning hundreds of thousands. Only the experts get into the millions, though.

I'm disappointed to see that biethb plays without missiles. That means that missiles are just a distraction, eh? So I've buffed them - they have a larger explosive radius and, if you get a direct lock on an enemy, you get an x2 DIRECT HIT bonus. Is this grognard capture?

But I've accomplished little else this week, because I was randomized.

"Randomized" is management-speak I've heard for making a team member switch tasks so often that they can't actually finish anything. Multi-tasking is harmful.

For myself, I started looking into facebook integration; then I started looking into the framerate bug; then my daughter got sick. She's better now.

Hopefully I'll solve the framerate thing this afternoon. As soon as I do I'll post another update.

Slow Framerate On Macs

The first two Macs I ran the game on - my brother's and one the Google guys were using - ran the game fine, so I assumed the reports of Mac problems that had been trickling in were the exception rather than the rule. But it seems like most Macs are having this problem. Sorry to all of you Mac users out there.

This is all my bad, I know - the Ogre 3D and Bullet Physics NaCl demos run fine on the same machines. Something stupid I'm doing - just haven't figured out what yet - and I can't justify the expense of buying a Mac to track it down, so I've been borrowing time on friend's machines when we can fit our schedules together.

I was sure I'd figured it out last night - found a particularly egregious line of code, don't know why I put it in there - but no.

I'm tempted to start a KickStarter project "sixty second shooter for Mac" to fund the hardware purchase but I don't want to wait that long to get it fixed...

In the meantime, it's gone over 1000 installs on the Chrome Web Store and part of me is saying "slow down! slow down! let me get the facebook stuff in and get it working on macs first!" 

And, here's the leaderboard going into the weekend. Tournament ends on Sunday, midnight GMT. Some high scores on there!

 

 

Killing Multiple Birds

Out of blind brand loyalty I'd been hoping to use Google+'s circles for the friends leaderboards - because, hey, I used Google tech for everything else, so why not go Google all the way down?

Well, they're not letting anybody else in on the Google+ API right now, but they're very open about Chrome Web Store apps using other technology, as long as it's open. So. Facebook it is.

Unfortunately, that means pulling everything else from Facebook in as well - authorization and monetization. On the bright side, that means I'm solving a few problems at once:  Jare's problem with it using your nickname in the leaderboards; monetization; and friend leaderboards all together.

On the dark side, it means everyone who's signed in using Google's authorization will have to register again once I switch.

So, in my Facebook tech exploration, the most useful factoid I've discovered so far is that when you're testing it on your local machine, you can use http://127.0.0.1:8080 (or whatever port you happen to be on) as your website URL and it works. Whew. I really didn't want to have to deploy the app for every change or test.