So I’ve read woot commstoday and they mentioned 5 great reasons to start a developer diary. My favorite of these are staying sane, and feedback.

In the past I’ve written slightly more but about more broad general things, the industry and concepts instead of concrete things like what I’m working on. I think that, in part, is why there has been trouble trying to get engagement. So here we will try and foray into the more concrete. I know way to bury the lead huh?

I’ve been working on an android app we are calling Marco Polo for now. Apparently the name is taken and we’ll have to come up with something else when we release but it works as a working title. It’s kind of a mess as its my first time working with android and despite knowing java I’ve still been learning a lot.

I’m currently working on testing framework which I probably should have done much earlier in the project to try and help debug and polish the mostly functional code at this point. Debugging smart fox server has been an interesting challenge. I spent some time with Junit and the client software to implement fake users but hit a snafu when trying to use more then one fake user at once. Fortunately updating my version of smart fox server provided some NPC functionality on the server side. The past few week or so has been trying to shape that to what I need it to do.

We are also planning on incorporating a neat service called kiip, which is basically attaching real world rewards to achievements in games. So when we get this integrated properly people will be able to get free stuff for doing awesome things in our game, and we may be able to make enough to cover server costs.

Things are really starting to come together and I’m really glad to have my business partner James and my fiancee Gina believing in me and helping me keep slogging on in the dips and lagging periods of this project.

We are also plotting our next android project which will be based onthe card game fortunes. The game is a tie in to the “The Way of the Gods” book series by Barbara Friend Ish which if you like fantasy you should go check out a copy.

I promise I’ll work on making these less ramble-y in the future.