The Gods of the Internet Don't like Cartoons.

The gods of the internet don't like cartoons. This is something I've noticed in the approximately two months I've been back, trying to write or draw something new for the blog every single day. If I write a blog post, the gods will generally look my way. They send their minions to scurry around the article, rip out the keywords, and then transmit these to the other minions that start to send traffic my way.

However, if I draw a cartoon, the gods aren't happy and their minions don't do their work. They don't have easy keywords to manipulate, so they don't then trigger the other minions to send people over here. The whole thing is strange and without logic. It's also extremely unfair to anybody who puts effort into drawing a cartoon.

Last night's doodle took me, perhaps, the best part of four or five hours to draw and is therefore probably no longer a doodle. It started around 7.30pm. I was feeling tired and just wanting to play around with the proportions of Nigel Farage's head. His head is something I want to master drawing and this wasn't meant to be a finished cartoon. However, around 9pm I saw that the story of Farage's meetings with Desmond and the head quickly became a body. I wanted to draw it in the spirit of those horrible porn mags that were once passed around the schoolyard as though they were the high watermark of erotica; the kind of thing that had ugly women hanging their sagging boobs out of the back of a Ford Cortina. However, try as I might, I couldn't get Nigel to look quite that tawdry as that so I just reduced him to an ugly set of genitals. Looking back, I should have left his socks on.

About midnight, I was still tired but still in the mood to draw so I quickly drew Richard Desmond. It didn't take me long because I guess few people could say what he looks like and I don't know his face well enough to have a sense of my capturing any recognisable features. Finally, I added a few shadows, which I borrowed/lifted/stole straight from the great Gerald Scarfe who uses shadows particularly well as a framing device.

Not that Google's gods would have been interested in any of this when I posted the cartoon. However, now I've put all this into words, perhaps they'll have something to chew on.

***

This afternoon I have to head out but, once home, I hope to finally put the finishing touches to version 1.1 of Shuffleboard King. The problem is that I've changed so many things, I fear that I'll have to give it a thorough testing before I can upload it to the Play store. The ad revenue is coming in but very slowly. I'd intended the next version to be the paid-for version I'd actually earn a little from but I'll probably end up giving it away. Google have now introduced a policy that all developers selling products on the Play Store must provide their home address which will be visible on the store. It's something that nearly the entire development community is angry about and has already seen many small developers quit Android development in favour of Apple. It's typical, however, that the one way I might have earned a little from the months of work on this game is now blocked off to me.

Isn't it always the way? The small guy always gets screwed.  Amazon wants us to sell our books for pennies and now Google want us to give our home addresses away to anybody who fancies sending me crap for all the crap I've done in the past. I really don't want to spend the next few years, tearing up UKIP newsletters because some clever sod thought it would be funny to send them my name and address.

I'm so desperate that I woke up with the idea of publishing a book on Amazon that I've had written/illustrated for months but will now never see the light of day. I might as well publish it before it becomes completely outdated. Earning pennies is surely better than earning nothing. Or is that how all saps think? I don't know. The whole thing is so damn confusing. Yesterday, I was visited by an engineer who came to install a new modem. His life seemed to much easier. He just spends his day installing modems and fixes TV installations and he earns what is euphemistically called a 'shit load'. At night, I guess, he drinks a lot. Everything about him said: heavy drinker. I guess I should have got into that game a long time ago. Then I might not now be looking at a life that I've utterly ruined by trying to be different. Some days if feels like I can do so much and have so many skills yet I know that as soon as I walk into a job centre they'd reduce me down to a big fat zero. They say all artists suffer for their art and that's great except I don't think of myself as an artist. Artists are those cool guys and girls with talent. I'm just me, creating the stuff that makes me extremely happy to create. At the time and moment I write this, it feels like the rest of the world looks my way and mutters 'what a complete shmuck'.

A Day of Shuffleboard King

Today I intend to blog more but less. A few short posts that nobody reads rather than one that nobody reads. I think it will suit my brain since today I'll be pulled in every direction, when my mind only wants to work on the game.

Wednesday was a rare day which I managed to entirely devote to improving things on Shuffleboard King. I coded all day and night but, looking back, it doesn't feel like I added a great deal. It's odd but adding things that are small and user friendly can take much longer than implementing things that are big and game changing. The game runs on a loop, which means that the same code executes every fraction of a second. Adding features that don't interrupt the running of that loop are easy. Adding a dialog box to help the user means bringing everything to a halt and that can be tedious. Saying that, I added a shot counter message, which works well and was a good suggestion by a player.

I've also added a few other features that people have been suggested and, late on, I started work on a new game mode, which proves my point about the differences of big and small since I got it working about 2AM. My intention now is to have features which are enabled on a version of the game which people can buy for a paltry sum. There'll be no micro transitions or in-app purchases. Just an old fashioned choice on the Play Store of either playing the free version or pay a little and getting a lot more.

Having said all that, after yesterday's hard work, I've also broken a different part of the game than I was working on. How it happened, I have no idea since these things are mean to be isolated from each other. However, it has happened and I'll probably spend the entire day figuring out why.

 

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.