Facing with an increasing need to improve the performance of the game, we have decided to use the ever-so-popular Amazon “Simple Storage Service” (i.e. S3). Ironically, despite it having the word “simple” in it, using it is really far from being simple…
So over a month of development, and now it’s that time when we show our game to others groups. 
We are still developing content, but for this presentation we would be showcasing a recently developed map that was not “officially” shown to other groups nor the TAs. Our focus is on polish and adding more content to provide a richer feel to the game.
So apparently, I’m facing a very interesting challenge. My team is making a HTML5 game, and I’ll eventually need to make it into a mobile game. So some say PhoneGap… while others (notably Colin… and from ownpersonal experience), might disagree. You may have noticed the blue thing at the top left, that’s the frame rate counter. For most applications, performance is not so important, but for games it is part of the user experience. Hence we had to make our prototype run as well as possible on a variety of browsers.
So roughly 3 weeks of development time and now we have an early prototype. Our focus would soon be shifting from writing code to doing not-so-programmer stuff, like adding new game content, performance tuning and marketing. This is probably the shortest post I’ve ever written, but that’s what happens when you have 3 concurrent major projects.
So, apparently there exist ninjas. At midnight of assignment 3, I was certain no other commits was going through because I only see the green branch, after all, so much planning and testing went into the project. I was wrong – someone ninja-ed a commit at 00:01, right after I turned off my computer to have a night’s rest. And I only found that out just a while ago…
Managing a team isn’t a new thing to me. The most difficult thing about managing them, is that you would be largely responsible for how well the project goes.
Apparently, it feels as though some hours in the recess week were missing. I didn’t manage to complete a lot of the other stuff (non CS3216) that I was hoping to complete. With the mobile assignment done, I think I could concentrate on the other stuff. I’m particularly excited about the final project, because that would be the first time I am making a commercial application for a university project.
Hello all, here’s a little neat trick that you can use for assignment 3. Some groups have already used it, but this post is meant for those who are not yet aware of it. You can make your web application really look like a web application by hiding the browser bars.
Hello all, this is just a little precautionary notice. The new iOS version comes bundled with a new version of Safari. As with any new version, it is possible that it may come with bugs. Unfortunately, it does come with bugs… So aside from the people being able to bypass my iPad’s lockscreen, now I have to deal with Safari deciding to render things a little “off”.
Our application (Taak) (offline-capable version) has now reached its second iteration – it’s fully functional, so feel free to play with it. Progress on it is still a little slower than expected, but I guess a working application right now is probably pretty good considering the status of the other teams. I am also quite impressed with the Cloud Chess application at how polished and quickly it was developed. 