Devlog: a Detour

I have made a ton of progress on Meteoroids in the past week. I was sick for almost all of it, so it was slow moving progress, but progress nonetheless. However, with my friend Don in town (one of my oldest friends and collaborator on many a project), I’ve decided to take a bit of a left turn and let Meteoroids percolate for a week or two.

A Detour

As much as I love working on Meteoroids, I allowed scope creep to rear its ugly head, so the project has become a little larger than I’d initially anticipated (although, a lot more fun). Sometimes, I run out of steam working on it, so I figured taking a short break would be a good thing. That’s where Don comes in.

Don had an idea for converting an old pen-and-paper game into a mobile game. It’s a letter/word based game, and it sounded very cool – I instantly saw how to code it in my brain as he was describing it. So, I put Meteoroids aside, and knocked out a prototype so I could have him and some other friends try it out today. The basic foundation of the code is built in the prototype, so work on it would be minimal – I could, conceivably, have this done before Meteoroids is even ready.

The fun part about this particular project (name TBA) is that I can jump in and out of it, and it covers some different coding skills I haven’t really worked on. Namely, accessing external dictionary files and creating lists and arrays out of those words. Breaking the whole dictionary apart then putting it back together with code so it’ll be a fast enough search on the phone has been really interesting. I’ve started delving into buffers to see how much I can speed the thing up.

It’s a short update today, and people just arrived, so I’ll cut this one short. Next week, I’ll be back with my regular Meteoroids progress, and once I’ve got a little more progress done on the new game, I’ll start updating that one a little more regularly as well!