How I spent the holidays on my first application

Day 00

Most of my intelligent life, I admired the people who make games, earn it and get real pleasure from it. And all this time I wanted to enter the circle of these very people - igrodelov, but I did not have the time and necessary resources. As we know, there is a crisis in our kingdom and we need to work a lot. In this connection, most of the time I read various stories of creating high-quality projects and looked through game development platforms for people who have no experience. All the hope I had to get at least in the segment of indie developers, well, at least somehow, sideways, but to get. And then came the day "D", when there was no longer the strength to endure, but the desire to do something (the same tic-tac-toe) burned through my neurons. I had to set myself a goal, estimate a time limit, take a vacation and start.

Day 01

I had a few ideas in my head, and the simplest of them seemed to be a clicker game, with stuffing something and buying things for stuff. The idea is, you need an engine. In operational terms, the Clickteam Fusion 2.5 Developer engine, remarkable for its simplicity, was found, which I had already seen on youtube and which made it possible to build an Android game immediately. Well, the idea is, the engine is. Having put a finger to his nose, he decided to start.

The first and most severe mistake that I made (and in fact I often read about it) - I forgot about compiling even a primitive one. tasks. In which it would be worthwhile to indicate, at a minimum, the very scheme of the game and the calculations of global variables. Well, what could be here. Forgot and forgot.

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The first two days, I was so carried away by the creation process that I forgot to sleep. Because of the computer, I got up probably 5 or 6 times. And the time flew by just insanely fast. True pleasure, I will tell you, to do something interesting for you.

Day 03

Two and a half days later, a primitive game mechanic was ready, allowing you to open boxes and knock out coins. It's time to think about how this result is stored and loaded when you restart the application? One more day was spent studying and working the functions of the .INI file as a save file. Now the game correctly showed stuffed coins and saved the result. Rejoicing. It's time to create a store, with the purchase of various improvements for development. And it was here that the absence of a plan was well rekindled. Correct execution of the purchase and sale of improvements required the addition of more than two dozen variables with prescribed scripts.

Considering that at that time it was for the first time for me, I decided to save everything and, taking a pen and paper, I still had to make a subtraction scheme for the cost of improvement, increase of improvement, and so on. It took me another couple of days. Having made the scheme, it was necessary to overhaul the already written scripts. Day is lost.

Day 06

Finally, having exhausted myself and still making this damn store work, I decided to take a break and take up the visual part. Namely, to draw a nice-looking pixel chest, and design. Then the name was born: "Lord of the chests" sounded strange on ours, so I decided to call Chest Master. Here you need to say a special thank you to the person under the nickname vertibirdo who gave me a wonderful background art. Drawing took about three more days. Buttons, menus and more. I took some of the basics from free sources, exclusively with the permission of the authors.

Day 10

The turn of sounds has come. Namely, free sound libraries. Especially low bow SonyVegasPro, which helps me for a long time. And, for example, it allowed me to quickly identify the problem of white noise in some files. It turned out that ClickteamFusion cannot reproduce .ogg files above 24 bits correctly, and 8 and 16 go without problems. Another day away.

Day 11

The picture starts to gather into a whole, everything seems to be working, and even it does not look completely disgusting. Yes, what is there? In the editor, everything works like a clock. Time to try the game on your smartphone. And then the first difficulty. You need to configure the SDK packages, design a digital certificate, write all this into the application. Eh, another day was spent on figuring out how to create a certificate using the JDK, and with it build an application, incidentally, forcing a build error.

Day 12

The application is packed and already in the phone. And the first launch ... and does not work. Well, that is, nothing works at all. Even the screen saver does not turn on. Cold sweat runs down his forehead. It begins a tedious re-reading of forums, which does nothing at all. After almost another day, I noticed one remarkable thing. One of the counters that I deliberately left visible to the assembly simply does not work. Having fidgeted, I found out that the Android device responds very badly to thousandths of seconds, in which I had some basic mechanics. Time to take a shovel and climb to fix almost all internal scripts -_-

Day 14

And here it is, version 1.1. And it works! It works correctly on the phone and all that is required is that it displays correctly. Rejoicing. I even decided to take a day off on my vacation and drink champagne. The next day, I spent on the distribution between their close applications with a request to test, as far as possible. Fidbek was positive, no errors were issued.

Day 17

And that means time to go to the Play Market and upload your creation there, simultaneously filling in information about the product and getting the keys to advertising.

Day 18

The game loads and even works. It is clumsy and the word “game” itself is not very appropriate, but a start has been made, gentlemen.