Me, me, me!

Ok, I ended up writing a quite thorough anecdote yesterday so I had to go back and look through it to understand about where I left off. I guess I had talked about living in Brazil, studying a year in Luleå and should pick up from when I moved to Stockholm.

So I actually weren't all happy in Luleå, my student loans were all used and I really didn't have a very good prospect forward. I didn't know how to solve that situation but one thing were clear to me and that was that I really couldn't continue in the current direction. I more or less had decided that I would go to Stockholm as I always wanted to do so, and I figured that the work situation was much better there. Add to that mix that I was talking to a girl which seemed quite interesting I really had nothing keeping me in Luleå.

So as soon as my contract were canceled in Luleå, I moved to Stockholm. I moved in together with the girl I mentioned in a two month contract for a student room while looking for a more long-term living arrangement. I still didn't have a job but she did, so we actually had an arrangement where I worked on stuff to show off my skills and most of my time I wrote applications for jobs. Being desperate for something makes you look like a quite unattractive option. And that was most true for me. However after a little while I got lucky and got a consultant type job working at a start-up on their initial release of a new service on the web. The basic idea were to trade information in a way similar to eBay, where the presumption were that people have a lot of knowledge and others are interested in it and perhaps even willing to pay for it? It may sound like a crazy idea in some ways but actually at the time I still believe it was an interesting thought and a quite interesting experiment if nothing else. I also had gotten a small contract from "friends and family" to update a domain for a company. I kind of went over the top on that one and created in php and javascript along with mysql a quite deep system where they would be able to customize and create as they wanted more or less. I would argue it was a early CMS and it actually ended in me feeling that I just wouldn't get much money from it so I gave them the code and said that they could do what they wanted with it as long as I didn't have to do more with it.

I mean I was kind of desperate for work at the time and as it weren't enough with an under payed contract and the position as architect of the start up I had been in contact with a British company which I felt were really cool, I liked the people and what they were doing and we kept in contact more or less back from when I stayed in London where I had an interview where we had a mutual interest but they didn't really have the resources for hires. However they came across doing an iPhone application and felt that it was something they could out to me. I am not sure why they did it perhaps they felt that we had a good thing going and wanted to be kind, or perhaps they actually had some positive effects of hiring me to do it. Any way I did it but I had no idea how to work on iPhone so I made the soundboard applications (i.e. buttons with sound-files coupled) in opengl as it was what I knew and the sounds in openal. If you aren't familiar with the platform or the concepts I can assure you that it is a lot of work to do quite simple things. It took two weeks or so to get it together, but I got it done and got payed for doing so, and it led to the opportunity for another project.

So at this time I were doing full-time start-up during the days ans working on this new iPhone project on the evenings. I weren't super engaged in the start up but did the best I could and we were nearing the investment round for witch we would show the beta of the platform. And I was hard at work on the iPhone game during evenings.

Let's take a sidestep to talk a little about the iPhone game. The game design I got was for their own IP about Leon the Chameleon and the game were to be called: Super Yum Yum, Fruit Snatch. The design outlined a game where Leon was moving on a flat landscape a bird was dropping fruits for him to eat. And basically the idea behind the super yum yum games is that you can only eat the fruits with the same color as Leon. Leon typically starts out green. If he eats a green fruit he will turn into the color of the tops of the fruit. The original games were puzzle games where you had to figure out in which order to eat the fruits to eat all and clear the levels. So something like this:

Green Leon eats green fruit

Green fruit has red top

Turns Leon red, now Leon may eat only red fruits

 Ok, simple enough right? So the game I were asked to do this was pretty much it. I however saw potential and wanted it to be a bit more. So my first addition to this were to give the fruits some physics. As the game play randomly picked the next fruit you could end up only getting the wrong colored fruits, so I also wrote an algorithm to favour fruits of correct color. So it's more likely that you will get a fruit that you can actually eat, but still the reason you would miss a fruit is either because the pace is too high or because you were unlucky with the colors. I had a hard time letting that be the criterion for success. So I added in that you could still lick the incorrect fruits but instead of eating them it would apply force in negative direction i.e. give them a push in the other direction. So now you could play squash with the fruits!

I kind of got carried away and added more and more features such as power ups you could collect, we also added (I can't remember but I don't think this one were my idea) a chili fruit which would basically work as a power up where Leon could eat any colored fruit for a short period of time.

The game grew and sadly the technology and renderer I wrote started to be quite strained and we started to experience performance issues. Not severe but still noticeable. I actually kept on working on the game for evenings for some time after the mentioned beta of the selling-info-online project were done. And in the end it mostly just felt heavy and boring to wrap up the problems still persistent in fruit snatch. However the last steps, such as advertising and "packaging" were done by another developer. But I am still quite proud of the game and it was fun to have so much freedom and creativity in creating it. I wish I had limited the scoop so that it hadn't become so cluttered and difficult to work with in the end. I will put up some screens below for every one's amusement.

Phew these posts are becoming huge and I still feel like I am just skimming over all of it. But it's nice to write, and seeing the numbers of reads I get on the posts I get a notion it's pretty fun to read about as well. Please do share and follow me on twitter and the likes if you do like reading it all. I will be making progress on the underlying stuff which were my reason to start blogging as well, but as I've said before I am too busy at the moment with other engagements to really focus on it, so for the time being you will have to make do with the Me, me, me! texts. I am writing down my ideas for what I want to blog about when I've freed up some time and I have some rather interesting topics building up. But yeah, do share, and if I don't know you too well I would love comments and interaction as well!

here is a review of the game.

And let's wrap up with some game-play!

Next I will continue from where we had the beta ready and how we progressed from there, and that will take us much closer to today's date. But I am convinced there is a need for a couple of more posts before we are at today's date.