Castle Mooch

Bit late this, as it’s about the walk that Gill, Peggy, and me went on last Sunday. Continuing on from my run on Saturday, I embarked on a 3.5 mile walk on Sunday to keep up my quest for fitness and weight loss. I want to lost a tad more weight before my most excellent wedding on the 25th February this year.

It was excellent weather for walking, being bright and clear and cold. In fact, it was so cold that I even wore a scarf. It was a pretty nifty scarf though, so that’s ok. The route took us past a few places where anglers were freezing themselves whilst watching their rods catch nothing. This meant, of course, lots of water around that had partly frozen. And so, in true childish Mooch and Gill fashion we threw stuff – stones, not people or anything – through the ice so as to make nice noises. The best noises were when the ice was thick enough that the stones just skittered across the top. This made a great noise, which echoed around the bare tree branches.

I should point out that we were throwing the stones into areas of water not populated by anglers, little puddles and the like. We weren’t being hoodlums out there, peeps!

So, yeah, great walk, fun, and it meant that Peggy Dog was quiet for the rest of the day which is always good. It’s good because she doesn’t go back-and-forth to the kitchen searching for food and thus opening the lounge door letting all the cold air in. It may be thought that just drugging Peggy or shutting the door properly would suffice, but that’s just silly.

Thanks to the kindness of my family at Christmas I received a lot of vouchers for Up and Running. I’d asked for them, because I wanted to purchase some new running shoes. Specifically, I wanted some shoes that were more “minimalist” than I am used to.

I’ve been running in Inov-8 trail shoes for a year now so my first thought was to try out their new(ish) range of road shoes: Road-X. Basically, these are shoes designed for road running, but without the excessive cushioning/motion control “technology” of more traditional shoes. I bought the Road-X 255, which are the closest to traditional running shoes, and so the perfect introduction to a more natural running shoe and style.

I used them for the first time today and I love them. The lack of bulk and therefore lightness make them a nice shoe to run in. I do think the fit is a little snug compared to other Inov-8 shoes of the same size, but in use this was not a problem. I ran 3 miles and they felt great.

Now that I have Inov-8 trail and road shoes, I have left behind my old stalwarts Saucony Grid Omni. They did well for me over the last 8 years, but I now prefer the feel of the lighter, more natural shoes. Of course, this sort of shoe isn’t for everyone, and I’m no zealot. I firmly believe you should run in what is comfortable for you, and only consider a change if you suffer from repeated and similar injuries.

Now to kick my training up a gear and enter a race or two to test my new shoes.

Thanks to Up and Running for the excellent service in getting the shoes to me so quickly.

Followers of this blog will know that I don’t really update it very much, but today I have momentous news!

I’ve been developing apps for iPhone all this year and today, finally, our (yes, our, more on that in a moment) app is ready to hit the App Store. It’s currently “In Review” with Apple, so hopefully by tomorrow morning it’ll be approved and on sale in the App Store.

The app is called Super Smoothies and it’s a fruit-mixing puzzle game, developed by me with graphics and sound done by my good friend, Nofi. Together we’ve called ourselves Touch Junkies, and we’re pretty excited that all of our hard work has finally paid off.

And it has been hard work. It’s about 4 months effort on this game, but before that we tried two other games which never quite made it. We got started by using the excellent Corona SDK from Ansca Mobile (thanks, guys!), and once I’d got my head around the coding we started in earnest.

This is a major achievement for me personally. To complete a project such as this after many years of false starts is something I am very proud of.

Please follow us on our journey over at Touch Junkies, and let us know what you think of the game. If you buy it. Which you will. You will, won’t you?

Slamball is a management game, inspired by my exposure to the seminal Football Manager and various other more involved but less fun games over the years. A big part of these games is the management of your team’s finances, and that’s why Slamball needs an economy.

My game won’t be particularly complicated with the financials, but there will need to be enough aspects to it that it adds to the challenge. The player will have to manage a squad that collectively can only be paid a certain amount of weekly wages. Then there will be the buying and selling of players, and finally the training of players. I’m still toying with some other aspects, such as being able to upgrade a team’s stadium, but pretty much that’s the extent of the finance possible in the game.

So what makes it difficult? Balancing, that’s what.

If the economy isn’t handled correctly then the game could quickly lose its challenge as the player becomes super-rich, buying all the best players and training them all to within an inch of their potential. The other way is that the player can never generate enough income to progress in the game. So, the economy has to be balanced such that it’s always a challenge to play the game, but that the player has a chance to win.

In order to get this balance I started by looking at how I would calculate a player’s wages based on their statistics. From that I could work out how much an “average” team would cost to run, and therefore I’d be able to calculate the income required.

This wasn’t the best way to do it.

I then scrapped that approach – but kept the formula for calculating wages – and instead looked at income, i.e. the areas that the player would receive money from within the game.

There aren’t many areas, basically gate receipts, selling players, and prize money. But once I’d worked out these things I was able to more accurately set the “cost” of other things to try to keep a balance.

Right now I’m happy enough with how it will all work. But the real test will be when the game has been coded and I’m able to actually test the economy. In fact, the more testers the better, so if you’re reading this and have an iPhone running iOS4, then you may get a chance to help.

Aside from the economy I’ve been busy (re)learning iPhone development. I’ll have more to talk about on that score next time, as I start to build the user interface and integrate the SQL data access bits.

With a bit of help from the super coder behind Touch Cricket I’ve managed to get SlamBall communicating with the SQLite database I’ll be using for the game’s data store. I’m going to explain a little more about how I’ll be implementing this and why I’ve made some of the design decisions.

The database serves two purposes: firstly to store support data for the game, e.g. generic fixture lists, team data etc; secondly to persist the game’s state, i.e. save the user’s game.

To do this I’ve chosen to use two types of tables. One set will store data that doesn’t change and that can be used to “seed” the save-game tables. This will include things such as the generic fixture list data, the default team data, default admin data (current season number and week number etc). The second set will store the data that is, in effect, the user’s save game data. This will be fixture lists with results for each season (so as to have a history), ever-changing team data, player and player history data, league tables and so on.

The first set of tables will allow me to easily reset the save-game tables whenever the user wants to start a new game.  It’s the save-game tables that have proved more of a challenge.  Although they are, in most cases, an almost exact copy of the base tables they are derived from, the nature of saving data has given me pause: The basic problem is one of SQL updates.

I may be worrying about nothing given the tiny amount of data my game will utilise.

A SQL Update is a potentially “expensive” operation in terms of performance, i.e. they can be slow. You may be updating records on multiple tables, using complex joins, and once the data is written there may indexes to recreate or update. All this takes time, and although SQL is optimised for this sort of thing, I don’t want my game to take an age to save.

I believe I have two options: Either I update on a row-by-row (RBR) basis whenever the uses chooses to save, or I update in a more set-friendly manner and update a whole table at a time.

RBR would involve iterating through all my game’s objects and running an update query. If I have one thousand players in the database, then that’s one thousand update operations every time I save.  And that’s just one table.

The set-friendly method would involve a third set of tables that mirror exactly the save-game tables in terms of structure. Whenever the user loads a saved game, I’d populate this third set of tables with the data from their save. This set of tables would then be updated on an RBR basis as the game progressed. The key difference between this and the RBR mentioned above, is that I would only perform updates as data changed, e.g. if a player scores a goal, I’d update the history table. In this way I’d still have many updates to do, but I’d be doing less of them than a full RBR in one hit. Then, when it came time to update the actual save-game tables, I would just update the whole table in one Update statement using a Primary Key join and a LastUpdated column to ensure a net-change, i.e. only altered records would be updated.

In theory, the one-off big update should perform better than many single updates. However, until I start to load/save real game data I can’t be sure if the set-friendly method is actually a necessity or merely overkill.

A third option is to force an auto-save onto the game and just implement the RBR of the set-friendly approach, but without the need for the big update at the end, i.e. the incremental updates will serve as the actual saved game. This is very appealing as it would simplify everything and make the game more challenging as it would prevent people from re-loading after they’ve lost a match!

I’ve nearly designed the database itself now, so I’ll be taking a closer look into the implementation of my save-game routine in due course. The next part of the development I want to talk about is the game’s economy: Income, expenditure, and the cost of everything.

The new development is development itself. When I talk about development I usually mean “dev”, as in computer programming. Or coding if I want to make it sound cooler than it actually is. I’m starting up some dev work again and when the mood takes me I’ll be blogging about it here. My first project is going to be an iPhone version – and possibly iPad too, but let’s crawl first – of my old Amiga game, SlamBall.

SlamBall is essentially a management sim, based around a fictional game that is part football, part rugby, and with a smattering of Speedball thrown in too. I’ve chosen this as my first foray back into dev because I know the game well and it’ll therefore take away one aspect of game creation, that is the creating of new ideas.  In other words, it’ll make the dev easier given that I need to re-learn the iPhone dev skills I last used over a year ago.

To get the project off the ground as quickly as possible I’m going to implement the game using standard iPhone design patterns, e.g. task bars, table views etc.  I won’t be doing a graphical version.  Again, this is to help me get to grips with dev again without having to worry about learning how to actually implement graphical stuff on iPhone.  Once I’ve done that, and if the game is good enough, then I’ll probably take the time to convert it over to a nice graphical style.  With the help of a friend.  Yes, you.

To this end, I’ll be designing the data structure for SlamBall and using the SQLite engine to implement it.  SQL is second nature to me now, so it’s the best choice for me. I’ve discounted Apple’s own CoreData this time as again I don’t want to get bogged down in learning new tech, especially when it’s not really necessary. Plus, SQL is cool, awesome, wicked, and splendid.

To help implement the database in SQLite I’ll be using SQLite Manager by SQLabs. It’s a GUI for dealing with SQLite and will make the process much easier and quicker. I can build the database quickly using the tools provided, and also easily test new SQL scripts that will be required within the SlamBall code for creating data etc.

That’s it, that’s what I’m up to. In the next post I plan on going into a little bit of detail regarding how I’ll be using SQLite as my game’s data store and some of the design decisions I’ve made along the way.

I’ve been working on one.  A made-up-by-me-and-someone-else one, not an actual good one like Batman or something.  In fact, I’m not sure comic is an apt description, it’s more just crap jokes by me illustrated with skill by someone else.  I’ll tell you who the someone else is later, when we launch, which will hopefully be soon.

Basically, it’s about things that happen in the world and trying to make a video game funny out of it.  As I don’t really like video games so much anymore this may change!

Look out for it.  It’s coming soon.  Possibly.

Hurray for the end of the week.  The end of the working week, I suppose.  Although given my current level of work apathy my working week usually ends at about 8:30 am on the Monday that it typically starts.  This end of week is better than most because it signals the start of an extended weekend.  Firstly, it’s Bank Holiday time – which means, no doubt, rain – and it’s also my birthday soon – Tuesday, Star Wars Day – and so I now have four days off work.

Right now though, it’s Friday Night!  Which means, in typical Mooch fashion, a can of Coco-Cola and some chocolate.  Now, I know you were no doubt hoping for tales of wanton debauchery and the like, but I am as likely to indulge in such shenanigans as Gordon Brown is to indulge in being Prime Ministerial.

So, some sugary water, some sugary chocolate, and I’m all set.  For what?  Well, writing this blog, of course!

Today’s blog was going to be about some serious stuff.  I have forgotten what serious stuff though, so instead you’ll have to make do with the above blog about chocolate and Coca-Cola.

I apologise: And now to enjoy my Prime Minstrels.

I can’t even blog once every other day.

Oh wait – I just did.

Phew!

Seriously though, I’m finding this difficult.  I don’t seem to be able to find anything I feel strongly enough about to write about.  Except for running with the dog.  And the odd TV show I’ve watched on box set.  I don’t know if it’s just laziness (likely) or apathy (as in, I am so apathetic about things that I don’t feel inspired or passionate to write about them) or what.

Anyway, before this gets too EMO I am going to finish it here and head off to sleep.

I had earmarked today as the day I was going to attempt to up the distance I was running.  It was a beautiful morning, so around 9 am I set off to do five miles or so.  I had my Garmin 405 with me so I’d get an accurate distance measurement.  Unfortunately, today I had to run without the company of the magnificent Peggy-Dog, because the route wasn’t all on off-lead ground and it was also probably too hot for her to run for an hour.

I knew the route I was going to take, but I wasn’t sure of the exact distance.  As it turned out it was pretty much bang on five miles, and I ran for about fifty minutes in total.  And that included a little stop to say hello to a gorgeous German Shepherd too!  It was a great run, I felt good all the way round, and despite the extra distance it wasn’t a problem.  In fact, if anything, running five miles again is like getting back to Distance Basecamp when I look back on the running I’ve done.

Last night I decided – actually, I decided days ago, but last night I beat my apathy – to put up for sale all my decent, sellable PlayStation 3 games: Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, FIFA 10, MAG.  I haven’t played anything on my PS3 for nearly a month now and I decided I may as well have the cash instead.  I am considering using it to part-fund a PSPgo, but now that we’ve – Gillibobs and I – bought Jay-Z tickets for June, I may use the cash for that instead.  Not really very interesting, I know, but it’s all I got today.

And now it’s time for tea.  Any runners out there – or people that do any form of exercise – will know there’s nothing like the hunger you get from physical exertion.  Bring on the chicken casserole!