New Release: My Mind Western Trust

My Mind is an app designed by the Western Health and Social Trust that would aid people with mental illnesses and offer support to such people. The app features descriptions of illness, help, useful contacts, videos to support content and some advice for friends and family of those with mental illness to help them cope.

There was already an app for My Mind created by Tom Brewster, but it was not fully compatible for all major mobile devices, so it was decided that the best way to have a finished product that looks the same was to recreate the iOS version and create Android and Windows Phone as we go.

When it came to start on My Mind, I was given all the assets that I needed from the beginning, so I had to organise the previous app, figure out menus and find all the pages that were needed to be created. I was expecting development of the project to be smooth and relatively easy, but with most development projects there will be something that delays you. In this case, it delayed me in the beginning, but shortly became a worth-while investment of time.

About a week before development for the app started, Xamarin released Xamarin.Forms, which would allow for development on iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices using the same base code, this would mean that you can "write once and run everywhere". This added some difficulty in the beginning of trying to learn some of the new references and libraries.

As with new software there will always be a lack of documentation and a few bugs, this added a few days to production time, but once I had figured out the base code that I needed, development started to pick up and the app was full of most of the content it needed within the first week. This left the rest of the week and the next week time to test on all devices and make sure that all was working correctly, was aligned correctly and we had all the features needed.

Two weeks after starting the project I was due to be on holiday for 2 weeks, so it was important as the only developer to get as much of the app working and in a good position to send it to another developer if it needed to. At the end of the two weeks, the app had not been finalised as some of the content and use of features was in dispute. This meant that I had to give the source code to the CTO of Troll Inc, so that he could finish off whilst I was away on Holiday.

The app is now finished and available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Check it out;
iOS Download Link.
Android Download Link.
Windows Phone Download Link.

Frozen Fishy out.

New Release: St. Mary's College Derry

St. Mary's College Derry is a school situated in Derry, Northern Ireland, they had asked us for an app to reflect their school website, that could be used by pupil, teacher and parent alike to know what is going on in the school news and could find out more information about the school. This blog will be looking at the development process from the start to the end and some of the troubles we faced.

After completion of Medical Me, I was put onto helping to complete the St. Mary's College Derry app along with 2 other programmers. The app had already had a firm start by one of the developers at Troll Inc. It was a smooth transition as I was still using Xamarin, and all the code and menus were fresh in my mind.

However we shortly ran into problems with our server where some of us were losing files in Xamarin by either not committing work often or other updates overriding our files, which lead to us losing progress and being forced to recreate .xib files and sometimes even re-write code. We were originally focussing on getting the iOS build complete and then focus on Android and then eventually Windows Phone.

It became clear, with the problems that we were having with the server that we would need to start development on the other devices to avoid further problems occurring. With this I was given development of Windows phone using Visual Studio, on the sole reasoning that I actually have a Windows phone for testing on.

As I began to develop on the Windows Phone, I was now using a .xaml files in Visual Studio, something I had little experience with. But after a few hours familiarising myself and reviewing other apps on Windows Phone. I had decided the set up on Android and iOS would be a waste on the Windows Phone which has the built in panoramic feature that makes navigation easier and reduces the number of pages by about 60%. It was a fast progress of recreating menus on Windows Phone and quickly got to a stage where the app was up to date with the iOS version, and we would have to start implementing new features to our respective platforms. This meant adding media galleries, videos, maps and making tweaks to match the requests of the school.

After a few days of adding new content, we were asked to redesign the main app, for the other devices this was more of a problem due to them sharing styles, but I had made the Windows Phone app using a lot of standard layouts and assets to save memory and make it easier to use.

Our last milestone to creating the final app you see today was to add a link to the server from the school rather than the private one we were using, whilst this was set up by the school to meet our requirements, I had time to experiment with the windows app further. From this, the only feature that stayed was the speech recognition to launch the app, which I am sure will hardly be used.

After a few weeks of developing on Windows Phone, it was finished and checked for any final bugs, before being given to the school and is now released on all major devices after their own official launch. It was a well developed project with support throughout, we had our issues and problems early on, but once we had got those ironed out. The development really picked up and I am really happy with the finished product.

Frozen Fishy out.

Summer 2014 Update

It has been a while since my last update, since then I have created more Apps and Games for mobile. And apart from the work side of things I have been taking my holiday easy before moving into final year and the stress I expect to get.

I am still working at Troll Inc, and will continue to do so over the summer and leading up to the start of university, where I will gain more experience in making both games and apps and will have more releases to app stores to add to my portfolio of work.

An update of all the projects and apps that are available are as follows:
Escape Harmony - Available September 2013
Chicken Jumper - Released April 2014
Medical Me - Released May 2014
Jellyflug: Antibody Assault - Released May 2014
Including another two apps complete waiting for release and a game in the works. I will soon have a healthy looking portfolio of games and apps that I have been a part of making.

I now have the task of finalising my final year idea into something that I can work with for 8 months and be able to create a finished product by the end of it. It will be a struggle, but one I feel that I am prepared for especially after my year of placement. I have been working on simple side projects and experimenting with plugins in Unity and other Engines to widen my knowledge for final year and help me to make a realistic time plan.

I will keep this update short as there are a few more to come in the coming weeks with new releases to talk about and eventually the start of my final year project, which I intend to give regular updates on progress over the next year.

Frozen Fishy out.

The End of Placement

Its coming to the time for the end of my placement, and in this post, I want to talk about the benefits I feel that exist with doing a placement during a degree in an indie games company. I am fully aware that there are many cases of students disliking placement, but in my case, I have had a really good time.

My placement started 11 months ago in July 2013, and since then I have developed my abilities more than I could have imagined I would and have been offered a great deal of experience. At the time of writing this, I have been a major contributor in developing 4 games/apps, of which 3 have been released for mobile devices: Chicken Jumper, Medical Me and Jellyflug Antibody Assault, and helped testing in 3 other games. As soon as I joined Troll Inc, it became apparent how much I needed to pick up and learn, and with that, I feel that I have learnt so much in a short space of time.

At the start, as with every new placement student at Troll inc, I was instructed to refresh my skills in Unity3D, a simple start, to what was going to become 11 months of hard and rewarding work. At the end of making videos for Unity3D, I was thrown in the deep end where I was given Jellyflug Antibody Assault to work on with 5 other developers at the time. This was to be the first big project I ever worked on. Working on the game covered almost all aspects of making a game for mobile, including getting involved with some art.

As the year went on, and programmers finished placements, Jellyflug Antibody Assault was finished and it was time to move on to another project, this was when I started working on Chicken Jumper and Medical Me, and then not before long working on another app yet to be released.

Working at Troll Inc has been great, not only has it given me amazing experience and helped me develop my skills, it has given me the opportunity to release games and apps to the market, allowed me to work closely with different aspects of the game development team and cemented the idea of working in the games industry. It has also given me the confidence to work on apps and games by myself, which will surely help me a lot in my final year in uni, where I am to design and create a game by myself.

For the report for my placement, I constructed a graph that shows a self analysis of skills learnt over the course of the 11 months and my perspective of their importance to working in the games industry and my degree. I feel it is interesting to look at as a 'look back' at the previous year, as it clearly shows that over the whole year I have learnt new aspects and techniques of creating games and apps for mobile development. It is important to keep in mind that this is a graph with values decided by me based on their importance, with key skills ranging from creating level art to testing and performance optimisation. For each of the new skills I learnt week by week, I rated them on a scale of 1-5, 1 being a minor skill, and 5 being a major skill learnt.

Before I started at Troll Inc, I had only been programming for 2 years, with little knowledge in various languages, and now I feel more competent and have been introduced to new languages and software(for me). I have become really comfortable with C# and the Unity Engine, but I was also given the opportunity to try out Xamarin for app development and explore app development for Windows Phone 8 using Visual Studio. This is something I was not necessarily expecting to do when I signed my contract with Troll Inc, but now I feel comfortable in games and apps development, I will not complain. It also gave me a chance to look at some HTML scripting.

Where it has been difficult financially this year, I will never look back in regret about the experience I gained at Troll Inc, and I will encourage anybody who is thinking of applying for placement, or even a degree with a sandwich course, to give it a go as you only have something to gain. Working in a small indie team of people is really exciting, often with new projects to work on, and surrounded by talented people is a big encouragement to stay up to speed with everyone else where everyday there is a new challenge to face.

I now look forward to working for Troll Inc over the summer, working on another game title and more, then move into final year of university.

Here are the apps I have made at Troll Inc that are released:
Jellyflug: Antibody Assault (Available for iOS and Android)
Chicken Jumper (Available for iOS, Android and Windows Phone)
Medical Me (Available for iOS)

Frozen Fishy out.

New Release: Jellyflug Antibody Assault

Finally, the game is complete and can be downloaded today on iOS and Android. This game has been in development for a very long time, and was the first game to be released that I have worked on. Originally developed by a fellow student and co-worker at Troll Inc, Lewis Farrall. The game is an arcade style game, where you Collect all the germs to win the level and find how far you can reach without being caught by the enemies, but luckily there are powerups to help you. Powerups include; time freeze, magnet and invisibility, all of which can be upgraded through the in game shop, allowing you to spend your hard earned coins.

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Eat all the germs! Dodge the enemies! You are the body's first line of defence!!

Play as an Antibody defending the body from outside bacteria in Jellyflug Antibody Assault!!

Collect all the germs to win the level and find how far you can reach but watch out as there enemies out to catch you too!!! Collect Powerups including Time Freeze, Magnets and Invisibility to help you reach as far as you can!!!
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When I first joined Troll Inc on my placement, I was set to work on this game, it was definitely a straight in the deep end situation, that taught me so much in the months that followed in developing the game. I was straight into a project which was using a modular grid for AI control, something I had never used before, and hundreds of lines of code for me to start to understand.

When I first began on the project there were 5 of us in the office working on it, so support was always there for when I needed it, but as time went by, placement and employment schemes ended and as that happened, the number of people working on the project were reduced. This meant I had gone from trying to get used to the code and the system in place, to working in the core development of the game, even creating menu art and level art.

Development was to last a long time on this project, from first getting a build onto the iPad to the first round of playtesting. On the first round of playtesting we knew we had a game we were happy with, but the results from playtesting showed that some of the features were not very clear. This added an extra couple of months onto development, but in retrospect, those changes we made in those months, made the game so much stronger. 

We also needed to add in a few plugins to help with integration, starting with in app purchases, Facebook and Twitter, this further increased the time of development.

We also found we had a problem with performance on less powerful devices, so this was an urgent problem we needed to fix, as we compressed textures, reduced objects in the scene, tweaked physics and tried everything possible, we finally have the frame rate at a steady rate. Through all the testing and building to devices, I accumulated over 500 separate builds, which will be a relief to delete the ones which are no longer needed.

I am currently the high score holder for the app, holding a score of 596900 after playing for 41 minutes testing the game, trying to see if the frame rate was a problem, thankfully it wasn't, but that score will always remind me of the problems we had with performance over time playing the game.

But after a long development, I am happy with the end result and happy for it to finally be available to download. From the feedback we got the majority of players enjoyed playing it, and would always come back for more. They wanted to beat their friends and the more they played they understood the game better and had fun playing it.

It is near the end of my placement now, so it is a relief to see the game released and not passed on through another programmer or artist.

iOS Link

Android Link

Frozen Fishy out.

New Release: Medical Me

Welcome to Medical Me!

As with Chicken Jumper, Medical Me is an app designed by local school children as part of the Creative Schools App Challenge and developed by us at Troll Inc.

Medical Me was designed by Amy Mullan and Rachel McGivern of Thornhill College, and is intended to make sure that you never lose any medical documents and information again. The app will keep all your medical information in one place and under a secure password to make sure that no one else will be able to access your information.

Development of this app began shortly after getting Chicken Jumper ready, with a reduced size team, of only two developers, and new software there were to be struggles ahead. We were using the Xamarin development suite to create the app, and Xcode for the visual design.

It was important for us to find a balance between a professional and a fun to use app, with a lot of changes early on in the development on the setup, we eventually found the best way to navigate through the app was to use a split view controller to have a master view to control the navigation and have a detail view to handle all the content.

After the second week, we had a working app for iPad with all data entry saving and all emails and passwords working efficiently.  We started to look at extending compatibility and started to get the app working on iPhone. This was to include redesigning all the .xib files in Xcode to make the view actually contain data fields, we also needed to add in a scroll view to nearly every page, to allow all the data to be able to fit on the page, another step we had to learn. This added a week onto the project completion date, but was a necessary step to make sure that users are not only limited to using an iPad, especially considering the design was from local school girls who are more likely to have an iPhone than an iPad.

Now we have a fully complete and functional app that allows you to enter you contact details, register appointments onto the device, keep all your previous and ongoing conditions in easy access, keep your doctors information handy and even add photos to the app if you have photos of prescriptions or dosage instruction you can’t risk losing.

The app is available for download on iOS devices and can be downloaded now off of the app store, if you are constantly having to try and remember your medical details or you just keep forgetting appointments, this app could be perfect for you, to help you keep all that information in one place

Link for iOS Download

Frozen Fishy out.

New Release: Chicken Jumper

Meet Chicken Jumper, the first and definitely not the last game that I have worked on to be released for mobile platforms, out now on Android, iOS and Windows phone. 

RUN! The crazy Felix the Fox is HUNGRY! And he has a massive craving for CHICKEN! Jump between the clouds and use the super power-ups to escape Felix's grasp! How long can YOU survive!? High speed arcade action! Fun, colourful graphics! Collect super power-ups!

Working with Unity2D, this side scrolling endless runner will have you fighting over high scores as you try to be the best out of your friends. Development of this game was relatively short compared the the other game that is awaiting release as I write this.

The game itself has been designed by 5 girls from a local school, who had the chance to design a game that would be made by Troll inc with the original aim to be released solely on iOS. 

Development on this game really began three weeks ago, where we all sat down and read through the application for the game and tried to figure out how the game would play and recognise the limits we had with the time given.

It was originally planned to use the 2D toolkit to speed up production time, but after some discussion it was decided by the programmers that we would rather start from scratch and adapt code from the toolkit, rather than trying to understand the sample code, without guarantee that it would have been what we needed or wanted the game to feel like. 

After two days we were starting to get somewhere with the game, controls were coming together, level design was starting to come together, sounds had been recorded and art for the chicken and the fox was complete. It was starting to become a real game. With the original challenge of getting the app finished within one week it was a real rush to try and get the game finished "on time and under budget".

We were soon looking at focusing the gameplay, working on enemies and working on menu integration. On the right is a look at some early development for the game, almost past the clipart stage (clouds are still using clipart) and moving into artwork created by the artists at troll Inc. As you can may notice if you play the game, some of the artwork has changed since this time, where we changed the background art, sorted out the UI, added in full powerup abilities and costumes and made the clouds to actually match the art work of the rest of the game.

After the first week of development all the art was completed for the game, and we could focus on getting the rest of the game working as we needed, making sure all controls were consistent, making sure all powerups worked properly and efficiently and getting some feedback. By midweek of the second week, all core functionality had been completed, with everything as we wanted, and the project had been left to work on another app developed by some local school children. However, when it came to play the game, it became apparent that not everything was working as we wanted. Things were falling apart and a lot of the game had to be rebuilt.

A lot of the problems came from using a new server that we weren't all familiar with that made it difficult to work on the same things as other people, as it seemed to struggle to merge all the files. It was left to one programmer to handle the problem, so as to work on one machine to remove any differences that occurred. After this point it took a further week to find and fix problems that arose and made the game what it is now and ready for release to iOS. 

After sending the game up to the app store for verification, it was then built for android where the problems that arose were not too large to make it difficult to port over to Android, the same case applied to the windows phone build. 

I have been playing the game on my windows phone for the last week, trying to get the best score I can, but so far I have only managed to get a score of 7618 but i'm sure it won't be too long until someone passes me again and I feel the urge to beat them and be the best. 

Go now and download the game, try to beat my score and try to be the best out of all your friends!

iOS Link
Android Link
Windows Link

Frozen Fishy out.