prototype is finally a go

[quarrel]

It took me a full day of updating, re-installing, and trying things on two different computers, but I finally have a fully functional development environment for the Android G1 again. Somewhere along the line, firmware upgrades broke my ability to download applications into the phone itself.

I wasn't totally stuck before that, mind you. The development environment comes with an emulator program. In fact, it's actually faster to test things on that than to download them to the actual phone. But I can't test animation smoothness in the emulator, or vibrations, or the compass or accelerometer, and most importantly I can't get feedback from friends.

Now all I need to do is figure out a way to avoid all the frustrating crashes that are also still interfering with my ability to prototype game ideas rapidly. I should be finding out what mechanics are fun, whether the controls are obvious, whether the core concept has the promise I think it does...you know, design. Instead I've been firefighting unhandled exceptions and multithreading collisions.

Comments

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

This is, of course, a large part of the reason why third-party game engines are so popular and so useful. I hear people occasionally say 'can you really trust someone else's code in a production environment? Wouldn't you feel more comfortable doing all that yourself?' and the only answer I have is 'God, no! Please let someone take the really sucky boring bits off of my hands.' Handling the framework stuff is always a royal pain in the ass.