After almost two years of tinkering off and on in my spare time and getting great help from this community, I’m pleased to announce that Good Fences, a geometric puzzle game, is now available in the iOS app store. The idea is simple: you’re given a shape, and must surround that shape by copies of itself. Sounds easy, but some levels are brain-breakingly hard.
The game is written entirely in Haxe using OpenFL (in Legacy mode), with off-the-shelf openfl.display classes. Unlike a lot of OpenFL-based games all the content is procedurally generated (the Assets/ folder contains a font and a single SVG), which leaned a lot on straight-ahead drawing code that perhaps doesn’t get used as much elsewhere. I also made use of the Actuate and SVG libraries, as well as the Linked Queue out of the Polygonal libraries. And I wrote a pile of separate Python and C++ code to generate the levels.
The obvious next step is to get it up on Google Play (it already runs nearly perfectly on Android, thanks OpenFL!). Then I’ll move on to adding the obvious features that didn’t make it into the first version.
I hope you like it!
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Interesting. I’ll probably give it a shot when it comes out on Android.
Any plans to release it online? A demo on Kongregate or Newgrounds could get you some extra attention.
Thanks for your help during development, @player_03. I’ve struggled with the question of how to create and offer a demo version, and your approach may indeed be a good one. I don’t those sites very well – are they entirely Flash-based?
(Of course, my top priority at the moment is to fix a crashing bug a few friends have reported on iPhones. Argh, it didn’t show up at all during testing.)
Both sites support Flash and HTML5.
Ah, interesting! In that case, let me ask a follow-up question, which probably betrays the fact that most of my programming skills are from a Bygone Age. How do current programmers view the risks associated with putting apps online in Flash or HTML formats? It seems to me that HTML+JS risks exposing your source code to all takers, which is presumably bad for a paid game. Or is that just a paranoid point of view? Perhaps this generation sees compiled JS as too obfuscated to be worth looking at. Or maybe it’s simpler, and I have an overly inflated view of the value of my source code. Anyway, I’d be curious about Best Practices in this area.
Yeah, there’s a definite risk there. SWFs are pretty easy to decompile*, and JavaScript code isn’t compiled at all. Fortunately, it’s possible to obfuscate a SWF pretty heavily, while still allowing everything to work.
Note: There are other obfuscation tools than the one I linked, but that’s the only one I’ve ever used. It seems to work well enough after some fiddling on my part, and I’m not aware of anyone having decompiled my code. (Not that they’d let me know, but some quick Google searches didn’t turn up anything.)
*Usually decompilers are tested against SWFs made by one of Adobe’s compilers. Haxe produces different bytecode, so that might trip them up a bit.
