fw2.xyz - a descriptive url service

Let me introduce you to my most newly released little experiment, fw2.xyz 

Forward2Xyz is a service which allows you to build a url, for instance, such as fw2.xyz/the.megas.history.repeating.youtube.full.album (which I choose primarily because that band has been my most recent choice of work music) and have it magically direct you to the appropriate page. In many instances, it also successfully gets preview generation from sites such as Facebook.

Let's talk a little bit about the motivation for this - "why would I want this?" is always a good question to ask yourself. The scenario I have in my head is that a user wants to be able to share something that is reasonably commonly known (hence appears on google - which the site relies on) but cannot remember the exact URL.  Normally this would involve the user going on to find the URL using google, then copying and pasting that into whatever message box they were going to use.

With Foward2Xyz you simply type in some description of what you would like to type in directly into the URL (it will accept spaces, but most social media sites won't recognise the whole thing as a single link so periods or plus signs are recommended - periods are probably easier for most users as they don't require use of the shift key)

So what are the advantages, for a user, of something like this?

The URL is descriptive - it would be quite hard to Rick Roll somebody using a URL like this, for instance, unless you were seriously committed to SEO. Youtube on the other hand obscures the title of the video in their URLs opting for some non-human-readable key fw2.xyz/never.gonna.give.you.up

 It's very easy to type into a text input box and most social media sites will use it appropriately meaning these kinds of links are easy to share.

It's resistant to typos - this is the advantage of using Google's search for the back-end.

The resulting URL is sometimes even shorter than the actual URL of the page - although this definitely depends on how specific you need to be to get the right page.

But as with all things of this nature there are some disadvantages such as:

Non-persistence of URLs - these links are not necessarily reliable as they rely on Google search results. I think this caveat is not necessarily a huge problem as the use case is supposed to be for people sharing things on social media or IM meaning that the lifetime of the link is limited anyway.

You might not get the page you expected.

People may not trust the service (but you should definitely trust me. I'm from the Internet after all!)

Top 5 Your Game Jokes

So there was a conversation going on between people on #gamedev on twitter with the most amazing type of joke - jokes insulting your game! These are Your Game Jokes. So without further delay here are my top 5 your game jokes.

5. Your game has such little gameplay, they started calling the YouTube videos "Let's Reads"

From @keadin

4. Your game's so bad, not even Anti-Virus programs thinks it's legitimate software.

From @0010_Games

3. Your game's so bad, you'd even make ET the Atari game wanna leave this plannet!

2. Your game's so bad it killed gravity!

From @Cardanai 

1. Your game's so unbalanced, it needs orthopedic shoes just to avoid falling over.

From @keadin

436Tap - addicting game released!

Test your concentration with 436Tap, a free casual Android game developed by yours truly from here!

This is of course a google play games free download! :)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.perceptrobyte.match436.game.android

Can you beat my high score?

Here's to this and hopefully more maths games or otherwise addictive mobile things!

I look forward to your feedback!

Just crushed the last couple of issues...

Just crushed the last couple of issues that were keeping me from releasing 436Tap!! - a resource leak and have made a couple of tweaks to the difficulty level. So I will be uploading the current build to the Play store! See you when it's fully published!

Tumblr

You can now find all game development related posts mirrored on my new Tumblr account! Check it out here: http://perceptrobyte.tumblr.com

Into the land of mobile development

It has been a recent dream of mine to run away and build a startup - my first tentative step into this is to start building small Android mobile games in the hopes of getting my foot some way into the door of casual gaming. My first real attempt at this is a fairly simple reaction memory game for which I've made a fair amount of progress over the last few days - in the practical sense it is currently functional, however it has a couple of bugs to work out in both the technical sense and the interactive sense.

However I now have a list of features that I can add which should make the game a much more enjoyable experience. These include tweaking the difficulty curve and making sure the user's hand does not obstruct the screen - so for this I'm lucky to have some friends who are willing test subjects. The moral of the story is live, naive user testing is a good idea. Naturally adding the most evil features, social media sharing and ads, took a disproportionate amount of time to get right.

Having looked at the numbers, it seems like getting hold of a low cost iPhone development platform might be a good move. iPhone 3GS's seem to be going for less than £40 on eBay right now.

Anyway, for now here's a screenshot of what you see when you get a game over in the app as it currently stands:

My current highest score :D

The banner at the top was an interesting idea (this also appears at the start screen) - I wondered how I could best get across the gameplay concept simply and decided that indicating that you had to look for the middle value and a sequence of 4,3,6 followed by a tap from the user could be illustrated as it is to the left. However, from what I found, this does not translate well to intuition for the user of the game. As such I will be adding some explicit instructions.

You may also note at the bottom right the new logo (don't steal, it is my eye-P ;)) and identity for my one man shop named after this blog.

I've been using LibGDX for this project - so far it has shown a great amount of promise and a good tradeoff between flexibility and quirks, given it can target most platforms a casual games maker would be interested in. In particular I like its abstractions for hardware accelerated graphics - although I'm finding the UI system somewhat cumbersome. (particularly in terms of skinning - some things are available in code which are not available in JSON, or at least aren't easy to find documentation for); however that does its job well, too. I would definitely recommend for rapid development work when you want to target multiple platforms.

It is surprising how much work can go into designing a relatively simple game if the concept is novel (as far as the designer knows ;)). Hopefully after the next iteration of features it will be ready enough ship and that's what I'll be posting about - and if I don't, I guess I can always just say "April Fools!"

In continuation of my last post...

Here's something interesting.

http://www.immortal.org/5211/new-34-smartphone-device-tests-hiv-syphilis-15-minutes/

A smartphone device which can perform tests on you to determine whether you have syphilis or HIV in a convenient and compact form factor. While this kind of technology no doubt has a legitimate premise and obvious usefulness, given the sort of dealings some tech companies seem to have in ethically questionable research, potentially giving them access to this kind of information could be a little unsettling.

(the aforementioned post)