Lucky Day's Wizard War! for Android development thread

Very interesting, I am following this so thanks for the updated.

yw Sherwin. Thanks for your response.

here's the last weekend update. as in my update from last weekend.

After consulting some friends I added the rest of spells. I was looking for some ideas other than combat spells and one of them came up with XRay. So far that is the only one that doesn't quite work like its supposed to but I'll get that cleared up.

With all these spells I needed to update the sound effects. I can't get sounds to work in my emulator, Oracle's VirtualBox. There's a new solution to making it work in VMWare so I'm looking at that.

I had my nephews do some more testing. One was more interested in the movie that was playing, the other wouldn't stop resting to increase his mana to blow up kobolds in the same room over and over again. Its good to know the game can keep someone enthralled.

It also shows I need to allow mana to increase by exploring rather than just sleeping. His step mother might not allow me to come over with the game with all the annoying noises she kept hearing from it.

I'm going to try finish off XRay this weekend and then maybe get started on the intro and ending. There's a number of balance issues and a few small problems that pop up that need to taken care of.

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The worst thing I've discovered though is someone has already made an Android game called Wizard War. Its a simple RTS as near as I can tell.

I need a new name for the game. I was thinking Wizard's Eye (kind of a reference to that old MS-Dos game with the randomized text dungeon).

However, maybe I'll ask Spud to contact a poll.

Arcane wars
War of Wizards
Warlock battles
Spellcraft
Quest of the battlemage
War and wizardry
War of spells

The Sorcery War
War of the Arcane

Not sure how important the word war is to your story. But if that is something that could be dropped, it would open up some other possibilities.

I've enjoyed following your progress so far. Good luck!

The Day the Wizard got Lucky
The Lucky Wizard
The Wizard's Lucky Day
The Wizard's Day
Luck of the Day
Day of the Wizard
Wizard of the Day
Wizards' War

Those are hi-larious; others pretty darn good. Getting the word Arcane in there might help. I think Unlucky Wizard might be more appropriate considering you're trapped in a dungeon.

This week I've more polish on the game. My nephews complained the wrong the messages were coming up since I used the "Heal" alpha image as my placeholder. I filled on those in with the proper names at the cost of my elbow on my desk after using the mouse so much. I also moved the weapon image to its own line to keep it from getting squished.

You might remember me reporting in a previous post that Android before a certain level can not resize normal text fonts. I had to create a image words and display them as the backgrounds of buttons to make them size properly.

I now have the enemy bosses casting spells. This wasn't working at first it seemed to me. In fact, it turned out to be a grpahic issue - they were casting magic missile but it was appearing like a sling attack. I could tell because their mana was going down.

I then fixed it so they cast the rest of the combat and heal spells in some rudimentary AI based on their level and current mana. Only I noticed they only kept casting Missile.

After some study I found their health going up while still giving me damage from missile it appears. I think what is going on is they are casting heal when appropriate then attacking with their ranged weapon which is populating with the Missile values. Weird. Further investigation is needed.

Just need to polish up the X-Ray spell then get the enemy wizards to cast the unusual spells when appropriate then I just need to script the intro and the ending.

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Just a note - its September, so if you look at the original post its now been one year since a I started this game.

Warcane wizard
Arcane warzard
Warcane Warzard Wars!

I dunno…I'm out

Wizzing Wars

Originally Posted by Pladio
The Day the Wizard got Lucky
The Lucky Wizard
The Wizard's Lucky Day
The Wizard's Day
Luck of the Day
Day of the Wizard
Wizard of the Day
Wizards' War

Lucky Wizard's Day ?

This would give the thing an ironic note, though, depending on the outcome.

Wizard's Spellcraft Dungeon of Dragon Scrolls, Plus Loot.

I don't think arcane fits my other suggestions, so I'll try new ones with Arcane.

Arcane Wars
The Esoteric Wizard
Arcane Luck
The Wizard Wars: Lucky Arcanius
Arkania : The Lucky Goth Wizard

I just had an idea for a title just now and that is Big Flipflop Hats of Warring.

Bewear: Pointy Hats!

Arcane Hats of Fortune (or Luck)
Fortuitous Wizard
Robe of Arcania
Sorcerer War ? (This would work, basically the same thing as Wizard War)
War of Arcane Wizards

Arcane of the Wizard

The problem with Arcane as a word is its..Arcane

Wizard's Crawl

Makes you think of spiders or something

Wizards of Doom

Sounds like some game that came out in the mid-90's

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Sounds like a Disney Film

Hall of the Mountain King

Sounds like an Opera (but so does Lord of the Rings)

Besides, there is no mountain king. At least its in the public domain.

In the past I've pointed out that there have been 100 games that threw the words Dungeon and or Dragon in the title. The worst abuse of this bad naming policy have been the relatively recent titles Dragon Age and Dungeon Lords. How about Dragon Lords or Dungeon Age?

Codex Watch?

Sounds like a Swiss time piece

Originally Posted by guenthar
I just had an idea for a title just now and that is Big Flipflop Hats of Warring.

Originally Posted by hishadow
Bewear: Pointy Hats!

excellent!

or just Beware!

that sounds like a Hitchcock film

Originally Posted by Caddy
Wizard's Spellcraft Dungeon of Dragon Scrolls, Plus Loot.

good one! (see prev post)

Originally Posted by crpgnut
Wizzing Wars

sounds like something that goes on in the P&R forum

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
Lucky Wizard's Day ?

This would give the thing an ironic note, though, depending on the outcome.

this is quite true!

Originally Posted by Pladio
I don't think arcane fits my other suggestions, so I'll try new ones with Arcane.

Arcane Wars
The Esoteric Wizard
Arcane Luck
The Wizard Wars: Lucky Arcanius
Arkania : The Lucky Goth Wizard

Arkania might have a better ring to it. hmmm.

In all seriousness, as I left work today the name came to me:

The Halls of the Wizard King

I had been studying the Thesaurus earlier and that helped.

At first I thought..wait, that's like Lizard King..Jim Morrison.

Then an hour later I came home I was like..duh

still..I was considering what the premise of the game is about.

here's the Help! button

helppng.jpg

To Oppugn with Sortilege!

this is what studying the dictionary gets you.

OK, I just determined the cause of the AI making multiple attacks. The enemy wizards were not casting one spell then physically attacking with a false image, they were casting any spell they qualified for.

For some stupid reason Android/Java is treating "else if" like it was just "if". It should quit the whole nested if statements as soon as it gets one hit. This is called a "shortcut" and at compile time its really efficient. I've had to add a "boolean done = false" and change it to true for every flow group when it gets a hit. I shouldn't have to do that. At least it works like its supposed to now.

The core of the game is finished. I just need the intro and the ending.

I need to expand the manual too. I don't know if I should include a complete weapon, armor, and spell lists and the bestiary. I like to have surprises in the stuff I do and doing all this would obviously spoil it.

But I don't know, from a player perspective didn't I want all of this? Wasn't this something to obtain? I seem to recall those old manuals didn't tell you everything.

Almost Finished ch 1

Ran into two nasty bugs while testing for balance and small bugs:

The first one I discovered after I loaded a save game then tried to re-equip another weapon. It ignored me! Some testing showed it only happens when the app is closed and removed from memory, such as uploading a new version of the app.

This could have slipped through the radar. A debug line showed that it saved the itemType string perfectly, it just didn't recognize it in the pull down menu as what it said it was. Yet it worked when the app was active.

Fortunately, I know a trick with custom classes: my guess is it changed from being a String to something else along the way like a StringList item or (more common in C) a character array. They account for this by creating a method .equals in most classes instead of using the == operator. so

if(p.inv[invItem].itemType == "weapon")

became

if(p.inv[invItem].itemType.equals("weapon"))

And that worked! Whew!

The second one involved crashes with the only information being a Null pointer exception error, but not telling me what caused it. This is a real pain in Eclipse: it can never seem to isolate where the problem is 80% of the time.

Well I knew it was related to combat and I managed to track it down to surprise attacks while resting (resting in a dungeon - see HiddenX's "realism" thread). After adding a bunch of debug code to it I tracked it down to a missing "Toast" message.

On Android you can make this small messages pop up called toasts. They're really easy and convenient. I use them all the time. Alerts in Android are a lot more complicated.

So somehow I deleted the message line then called the toast itself. Null pointer exception, indeed.

In addition I fixed an old bug where combat can occur twice. This happens when the player keeps tapping the screen in the middle of the combat launch. I put a switch down on all six buttons to check if combat is started. It turns off when one leaves combat.

—

But the big news is I've completed the intro:


enjoy

Just need an ending now and I have a complete game!

note: after some tweaking it will be ready for full beta testing very soon.