Developments

Oh dear.. I only managed about half-a-game yesterday. It started off well, but as I needed more and more art assets, I kinda got lazy, drifted off, and then started playing Words With Friends instead of drawing sprites.
Whoops!
That's not helping the limited schedule, much.

Hopefully I can get the game finished, today, and maybe even move on to the next one.



Meanwhile, I also started to write a small program to scan through all my games, hunting for "Too Small" sound effects.
The FlarePlay (PlayJam's next system) seems to stumble and fail when you try to play a .wav file that's "too small".. It seems to be starting the sound effect, then going "Hey, why isn't it playing?", then crashing the game.

I'll need to write a test game to find the minimum filesize of a sound, which will manage to play successfully on the new PlayJam FlarePlay, and then trawl through my games replacing any sounds that are below the threshold with longer padded out versions of the sounds.
Shouldn't take too long, but I'm unsure how fast I can get such a large directory scanner working, and it's probably going to show up a LOT of files, since I tend to stick to small sounds and blips and beeps and things.

Guess I'll find out soon enough!!

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Daily Doodle : Stick Waggling

Aaah, the good old days, when all you had to do was wiggle your joystick to have epic amounts of fun.

Mailbag

Today's mail comes from @tozeleal


Right now, everything's still up in the air. There are a lot of unknowns, as we head into phase two of OUYA's lifespan.
The biggest worry would be "When the OUYA Servers get switched off..." and for the most part that's a fairly decent argument, but realistically if they switch off the servers, it's not just OUYA that suffers.
MadCatz MOJO also uses the OUYA Everywhere framework, and will be similarly broken if the servers go away.
Also, the new Razer Forge system is going to be (as far as I know) based on OUYA Everywhere, but with a Cortex makeover.
If you bother to upgrade to Forge, you'll be using the same login details you currently use, and all that data has to be stored somewhere.

Basically, there's going to be a lot riding on having that server still running, whether it's OUYA branded or not, and whether it's in the same place, it still has to be accessible to a lot of devices.
As such, I expect the "Server Shutdown" panic to be a bit overboard.

If TeamOUYA have any sense, there'll probably be a big update coming, which will provide the OUYA with backup servers and such, so that if the worst does happen, the console will carry on regardless.

As it stands, I don't think there's any reason to panic, right now.
Having Razer buy out OUYA, and "replace" it with Cortex, has meant that things will still be running for a good while, yet.

I have faith.

As for buying an OUYA right now, I'm not sure. If you can find one cheap, then sure.. grab it! But I imagine that limited supply and "rarity" values might start to push up the prices online. People also have a habit of "Jailbreaking" the OUYA, to install none-standard apps and things onto them, meaning that if you do get one second hand, it might not be "right"...
..There are also a number of bricked consoles, again due to owners Jailbreaking them, then an official update coming along and the system getting all buggered up as a result.

If you CAN find a nice, proper, clean, unbroken one, going cheap, then there's no excuse not to pick it up. If nothing else, you can play 40 of my games on it

If you'd like to stuff my mailbag, (Please do!!) you can do so right here, at https://bit.ly/AGAW_Mail . Send comments, questions, game ideas, thoughts and more, and they'll probably turn up here, eventually.