And It's Goodnight From Me...

It's 3AM and I'm about finished for the night. It's been a long day.

The game should be back on the Play Store and I'm hoping that tomorrow will see fewer dramatic bugs.

I'm still not sure what caused the physics glitches except there appears to be a difference in how screen touches are handled between Android devices. I increased the sensitivity of the throws and that allowed the pucks to fly at the maximum speed. However, this caused a very rare situation to occur on the Dutch Shuffleboard, in which the pucks could bounce back towards the front of the board. I'd written code that caught them and destroyed them (putting them 'out of play', as the rules of Sjoelen dictate). However, the code had a loophole I hadn't spotted and it allowed some of the pucks bounce back, escape the board, and cause all manner of hell with the game logic, which didn't expect pucks to be rattling around the floor.

But this is the nature of computer programming. One small change (the sensitivity control) caused a bigger bug to reveal itself. And this is why I never believe any leader who announces that new computer systems will improve the NHS or any branch of the government. The complexity of computer systems increases enormously the bigger they get.

In addition, I fixed about nine or ten smaller things. Or I hope I fixed them. I'll be playing the game tomorrow and hunting out more bugs. I'm sure there are plenty.

If anybody reads this blog and has an Android device, please give the game a try. Perhaps drop me a line to say it seems stable because now I'm now going to bed and I know I'll be dreaming of pucks flying out of the screen, causing all kinds of havoc as they break noses and glasses, chip tooth enamel, go flying out the window, damaging cars, nuns, and policemen...

Shuffleboard King: Your New Must-Have Android Game

Well, here it is, the efforts of the past few months which I've given the catchy name: Shuffleboard King.

I'll probably regret this in the morning but I've now released my first game onto the Play Store (hopefully, it should appear here in the coming hours). I might have delayed more but I'm mentally and physically exhausted and this is a somewhat daunting moment and I just wanted out of the way so I can move on and improve the game.

What is Shuffleboard King? Well, it's the version of shuffleboard I wanted to make for myself and for my friends who regularly play shuffleboard on their tablets. The problem with current shuffleboard games is that they feel quite artificial to play. Their physics tend to feel and look quite scripted in that you throw a puck and the damn thing flies out of your hand in a perfect straight line. Even the best shuffleboard game out there feels like the computer is playing the game for you.

So, I thought I'd try to make a shuffleboard game myself and this is the result.
I'd like to say it was 'easy' but, in truth, there are many hundreds of hours of work in this and it's probably thousands of hours if I take into account the many months before I started, just to learn Unity and all the other packages I used in this game's creation.

The part I'm most proud about, I guess, is the version of Sjoelen included in the game.
I nearly released this a few weeks ago but at the last moment, I discovered Dutch Shuffle (called Sjoelen on the continent). I watched a few videos and got hooked on the gameplay. I also realised that I could add my own Sjoelen mode to Shuffleboard Kings using the code I'd already written and, an extra month of work later, I'd expanded my original three game modes to include a fourth.

Those 4 games are the traditional shuffleboard, Sjoelden (Dutch Shuffle), as well as two games of my own creation: Angleboard and Crossboard, which do pretty much as described. On Angleboard, you bounce your shuffle off a rail so you have to play around a 90 degree bend in the table . In Crossboard, you can throw your puck from one of four sides toward a target in the centre of the table.

There's a tournament mode, in which you play opponents who are increasingly difficult to beat. There's also a challenge mode in which you have to beat 50+ challenges, such as throwing the winning puck on a board already dominated by your opponent.

I know there'll be bugs, typos, and probably even the occasional glitch. Some I can't fix but are part of the Unity engine. Others, I'll work hard to eradicate in the coming months, should enough people actually play the game.

I hope you will take a chance and play the game and perhaps, if you do, you could tell me what you think in kind, even patronising, words.