Christian Engvall

As i’ve mentioned before , I’ve picked up game development. But i haven’t told you what i’m working on. It’s a game called Friendsheep. The game will be released on iOS and Android phones in 2016. The game is my first game for the mobile market and I’ve put a lot of effort into it.

The plot

It’s about to Sheeps, supersheeps, who are friends. They need to eat something otherwise they will starve. That’s your mission as a player to make sure they can continue flying. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. You have to use both you brain halves to get somewhere in this game as mutlitasking is a key thing to be able to handle.

Here is a screenshot from the alpha 7-version:

Friendsheep alpha 7

Beta testing

Right now it’s being beta tested by around 30 players. It’s about 50% testers on each platform.  And this has been a great way for me to get input on the game. When building a game you have a different perspective than your players. They also see a lot more bugs and have a lot of comments on how to improve the game. When i released it for beta i thought, wow, i’m getting very close to finishing this game. Now two weeks after i think i’ve got a few more fixes to do before i release. About 35 new issues were added to the issue tracker of the game. Which is awesome and means I will release a better product.

Open source

Working with this game under my own company Honkbark Studios is something that gives me freedom to release code as open source. During the development of Friendsheep i’ve written tutorials and released example code for them, and also library that pools objects so they can be reused without being instantiated again, and both are released on github.

Next post about Friendsheep is hopefully about the game being released! Stay tuned at honkbarkstudios.com for news and updates.

By using git commit amend you can add files if you forgot to do that to your most recent commit. I’ve written about undoing a commit before, and also about undoing pushed commits. which you also could use in this scenario. But this is a bit faster.

Say you’ve made changes in asdf.txt, and added a new file called fdsa.txt with very important stuff in it. You are very happy with the results and commit it.

git commit -a -m 'Doing changes'

Exactly after hitting enter you realized you forgot to run git add – . to begin to track and stage fdsa.txt This is where amend comes in. But first run add.

git add -- .

to add this file to the commit you just recently made all you got to do is run this command:

git commit --amend

Git commit official docs

This trick amends the new commit to the latest one made. Read more about the git commit command at the official Git site.

To commit changes to new branch with  git you can use the following three steps:

Create a new branch

 git checkout -b mynewbranchname

This will leave your current branch unedited, create a new branch called mynewbranchname, and you still have your uncommitted changes. It’s the parameter -b that tells git to create a new branch with a selected name.

Add files

 git add -- .

This adds your new files for git to track in the new branch.

Commit changes

git commit -a -m 'Adding my files'

This commits the files, and you’re done! The parameter -a tells git to automatically stage files that have been modified and/or deleted. and -m tells git that you provide a commit message.

Read more about commit in the git docs.

A few years back i needed to serialize and deserialize a dictionary. The solution turned out to be Adar Wesleys SerializeableDictionary. I can’t find the source blog post by Adar Wesley anymore but only the classes that you need to import into your project. If those files has been deleted as well i have a backup of those files here: serializabledictionary. This is an example on how to do it with C#.

Serialize and deserialize dictionary example

Once the files are included into your project you can use this example to serialize and deserialize a dictionary:

/// <summary>
/// Loads a Serializable dictionary which holds a saved values
/// </summary>
private void LoadExistingFile()
{
    SerializableDictionary<string, int> data = new SerializableDictionary<string, int>();
    if (File.Exists("file.xml"))
    {
        XmlSerializer s = new XmlSerializer(typeof(SerializableDictionary<string, int>));
        using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader("file.xml"))
        {
            data = s.Deserialize(sr) as SerializableDictionary<string, int>;
        }
    }
}
/// <summary>
/// Saves existing KeyValuePairs to disc
/// </summary>
private void SaveDictionaryToDisc()
{
    SerializableDictionary<string, int> data = new SerializableDictionary<string, int>();
    XmlSerializer s = new XmlSerializer(typeof(SerializableDictionary<string, int>));
    using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter("file.xml"))
    {
        s.Serialize(sw, data);
    }
}

This post is a translation of a blog post that i wrote in Swedish a long time ago. I finally got my thumb out and translated it to English.

To schedule script in OSX to run every now and then you can use launchd. Add a scheduled job by saving a .plist in folder **/Users//Library/LaunchAgents**. This example will run a php script every 10 seconds.

1. Example .plist

This example is saved as se.christianengvall.dostuff.plist in the folder mentioned above.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
   <dict>
       <key>Label</key>
       <string>se.christianengvall.dostuff</string>
       <key>ProgramArguments</key>
       <array>
           <string>/usr/bin/php</string>
           <string>/Users/<my-user>/Sites/dostuff.php</string>
       </array>
       <key>StartInterval</key>
       <integer>10</integer>
   </dict>
</plist>

Set the label value to the same name as the file. In ProgramArguments we set the path to php and the path to the script we want to run. The StartInterval sets how often to run the script, set in seconds.

2. The php script

<?php
 syslog(LOG_WARNING, "printing value to log");

Nothing much going on here, just add a message to the system log.

3. Schedule script in OSX

Now to schedule the script run this in a terminal:

launchctl load  /Users/<my-user>/Library/LaunchAgents/se.christianengvall.dostuff.plist

Now start the Console utility and watch your script print: “printing value to log” every ten seconds.

4. Stopping the script

launchctl unload  /Users/<my-user>/Library/LaunchAgents/se.christianengvall.dostuff.plist