Shortly after I wrote and published my last post, I spoke to my brother and there was some uncertainty as to whether or not we should finish Blood Touch, the simple text-based game we've been working on for awhile. The main concern was that we had decided to cut out quite a bit in an effort to simply finish the silly thing and release it on Google Play. Both of us are the perfectionist types, and didn't want to release something - even something we expect would get very few downloads - that didn't meet up to our initial idea for it. It would feel like we released part of a game idea we had, and that wasn't good enough.
So while I saw his point, I really hated even more the thought of working on something like that (and our first joint effort together) to all be for naught. So we've basically decided on a compromise. The game still won't be as long as we originally planned, but we are going to add more and make sure the story is complete--bottom line being that production has begun on that little guy again! My brother has already made several very needed tweaks, including in the battle system. There's still some fundamental stuff to work out, and then many more "monsters" and some other content to be added. But we are getting going on that again, so I'm excited about that.
For those of you following along post to post, the Gradle issue I mentioned last time is still unresolved for now. The idea there is to carry on finishing BT, after which my brother will update his own Android Studio and such, and then see if that somehow messes his own BT files up - but we're expecting that whatever is different on mine, is because mine is upgraded and his is not, but when he updates it will update his files however necessary to keep it all working properly. So, if it still works on his after the update, he can copy and give me the files then when we're on the same page with updates and it should work. But that's pretty far down the line, so we've just put a pin in that one for now.
Then there's my replica app project, which is coming along slowly but surely. I've got the launcher screen and main activity looking about right, minus the fact I still haven't figured out the border on a passcode field issue. The Main Menu (main activity) screen now has a couple icons/buttons on it with images that I like and are almost good to go except maybe still a little too big. Then there's corresponding activities that those buttons connect to, and the start of the layouts for those screens. There's a couple tricky issues I've run into on one of those screens, where I need to replicate a screen-wide button at the top, but it needs to be over a grey field which only occupies a top portion of the screen. Then there's a little notification message that pops up in the real app to tell you if the scanner accessory is connected or not, I'm going to have to figure out how to simulate that. Also that screen will have more editText fields where the user can click into the field, put it a numeric value, and then (eventually) click an "OK" button to move onto the next screen. Again, the border and alignment bit of that is being tricky, but I'll get it there.
Lastly for this post I want to mention, mostly for my own documentary purposes, that my phone started acted crazy this past Sunday, October 4th, 2015. I am really bummed by this because I have absolutely loved this phone so far. This display/screen sometimes goes nuts, doing all kinds of crazy stuff. The phone itself seems to be ok, and reacts normally as if nothing is wrong. It's not lagging or slow. It recognizes touches and stuff, but because of the screen messing up, it's hard to press what you wanna press or work with it. I guess sometimes it has been so bad the screen will be mostly black (but on), or a really dark blue or something, and unresponsive. So I don't know what happened to cause this, I haven't dropped it hard, it's gotten hot at times but nothing too abnormal and not recently. I'm going to take it back to the store today and see what they say, I'm sure I'll mention next time what happens there!
