Arachni Crusher Released!
After roughly four months of development, I’m happy to announce that our first Android game is out the door! We actually turned the release key about a week ago and in that time we’ve had two people purchase our paid version (ad free) and received 114 downloads for our free version.
We have an additional mode and new holiday themed levels in the pipeline.
Check out my Arachni Crusher portfolio page for information and grab a copy from the google market.
Introducing Arachni Crusher
My old roommate and I have always been interested in game development and have always wanted to create our own game. We’ve played with a few different platforms in the past however nothing has either come of it or been successful. After finishing our latest project we’ve decided to take a shot at the mobile scene and develop a game for Android devices.
We’ve bounced a few game ideas around and have decided to go forward with a simple tap game called Arachni Crushers. The game objective is to crush spiders that run across the screen by taping on them. We’re planning to have 10 levels that increase in difficulty and ending with a boss spider. Difficulty will be determined by the number of spiders on the screen at one time, speed of the spider, and spider type (poisonous for example). Arachni Crushers will have two game modes: Endurance (crush spiders forever to achieve an all time high score) and Time based (crush x amount of spiders within a timeframe).
I’ve never written anything for Android but I’ve done a fair amount of Java in the past and Android has been on my radar for quite some time. After spending 2 months I’ve managed to churn out a very early alpha build of the game that consists of the basic game mechanics:
I have a goal to complete most of the code by the end of the year so I can focus on testing the game against a wide array of hardware while my roommate completes the art.
Pandora Scrobbler Chrome Extension
For the last year or two I’ve been using a web based application to scrobble tracks played from Pandora. However the latest UI (HTML 5) has broken the scrobbler and I haven’t been able to find a replacement. With the possibility of losing track of my music listening habits I decided it was time to write my own chrome extension.
I’ve been using an extension to scrobble turntable tracks that Gabek created and I decided to simply clone his project and replace the turntable detection with Pandora.
After spending a few hours learning how chrome extensions work I ended up with my version of a Pandora Scrobbler.
Running it is simple:
- Install the package
- Open Pandora in a new tab
- You’ll be prompted to authorize the scrobbler via last.fm
- After authorizing, simply reload your pandora tab.
Once you’ve authorized you won’t need to authorize again unless you remove the extension or remove the app from your last.fm account. You can click on the “PS” icon in chrome to sign in as a different user or see which user you’re logged in as.
I need to add a delay between when the song starts and when the scrobble request is sent (currently the song will be scrobbled as soon as it begins playing).
Rocking a VPS
After almost exactly four years of hosting Xmech with hostmonster, I’ve finally moved to my own VPS from Linode. I’ve been really pleased with hostmonster and I would highly recommend them however I’ve come to a point where I require more control over the server hosting my projects (installing specific applications, libraries, etc) and a VPS is the way to go.
There are quite a few VPS providers out there but after a few hours of research I’ve decided to go with Linode due to the high customer praise, affordable prices, and a great community.
X360 Share – New Profile Feature
A month and a half after launch, X360 Share has crossed over the 100 active user mark! What better way to celebrate than with a new feature? I’m happy to release the X360 profile feature; This allows you to add a flag to your status updates which will includes a URL pointing to an X360 Share profile where you can find your latest achievements. For example: http://www.x360share.com/users/dremex
Facebook users will start to see this change immediately (the link in the wall postings will now point to your profile instead of the main X360 Share site). Twitter users will need to add the %u flag to their update strings, for example: Unlocked “%a” worth %p points in “%g” – %u #X360Share. I’ve implemented a Bit.ly URL shortener so the URL in the tweet will be as short as possible.
Next I have a few bugs to squash, as always let me know if there’s a feature you’d like to see or if something isn’t working quite right.