David's Blog

Google App Inventor!

Ok have’t posted on here for ages…

First thing is that I quite like Googles new app inventor… I know the whole graphical logic builder / code generator approach is not new, infact knowing the amount of work Microsoft have put in to this kind of thing in the past, I wouldn’t put it past them to come up with something similar for their windows 7 phones.

Anyway, as it currently stands disappointingly you can’t do much with it… The first thing I wanted to try was to create some struts, save and load info into a MySql database to then display it as a list or grid in the same way you would build a web app but you can’t do either of those at the moment. You can’t even draw text on the canvas to try and take charge of the rending yourself and make your own controls.

Speed wise its quicker to type rather than drag each block out and click it into place…. and on top of that anything that is not super simple quickly starts looking super complex as you run out of space to spread all your blocks out.

But I can see the huge potential in this kind of technology especially in being an on-line graphical drag and drop development solution for a mobile OS. It in theory makes it possible to actually write android apps on an android tablet quite easily.

…

The other thing I have been doing this week was messing around with DBLinq which is now part of mono. I love the simplicity of LINQ and having just designed most of the schema for Asteroid Wars, I have been thinking on the business model for it and the website that would need.

Figuring I would stick to Linux hosting as its cheaper and I already rent two Ubuntu 10.04 servers, yet wanting to see if i could keep everything in C# (failing that I really want to learn Ruby for Ruby on Rails) I thought I would test out the new features of Mono 2.8 and XPS2 (a lightweight ASP.Net server running on mono)

I thought If this ever gets of the ground, a free 2 play model would work best and then charge for all the extra features where people can choose if its worth it to them or not… for example the Enhanced AI that will take me ages to write and use lots of server resources… Some people may not want the AI doing so much for them (or can’t be fussed with setting it up) and prefer to issue manual commands when and where needed, So the people with the money and that thing something is a worthwhile feature will buy it the rest won’t… where a lot of people buy the same features will just highlight areas potentially fit for future development and expansion.

This should maximise any changes of getting a suitably large player base (for a small indie game) yet still provide a means to pay for all the infrastructure and hosting.
Also this works quite well to open this up to allow other people to write content for the game, new ship models etc, and then take a cut of the profit for that feature. 

7 January 2011 ·