16 July 2010

Android - Galactic Guardian: Zap GPS Lite Released

I finally released the free, lite version of Zap GPS to the Android market. If it is received at all well, I will do a paid version. If you have tried the Lite version and have ideas on how to improve it or enhance it for a paid version please feel free to comment.

The Lite version omits one capability that the ADC2 version contained: cloaking. I felt that was an interesting capability that would be better in a paid version. Cloaking is implemented by hiding a Sentinel if the GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) signal is lower than a threshold. The player still needs to damage the Sentinel to proceed to the next round but it is more difficult since the Sentinel cannot be seen. When both Cloaking and Command & Control (sequential destruction) are present it can be difficult since a cloaked Sentinel may also drop off the Sentinel list because its signal is weak and then lost. But if may reappear if the signal increases. If it is the lowest sequential number the player has a real challenge.

One additional feature is timing the player. The player would be allowed a period of time to damage the Sentinels in the list. After that time Sentinels would be "repaired" and added to the list. That isn't implemented but would be easy to do.

The big feature to add would be competition among users. That would require setting up a web presence to record scores and show the best players for, say, the day, week, and month. The effort for that would be about the same as developing the game up until now. Not sure I want to expend that much effort for little or no reward.

Any other ideas for Zap GPS? Any ideas for a different Galactic Guardian game?

2 comments:

  1. http://www.mail-archive.com/android-developers@googlegroups.com/msg46225.html

    I read your comment in the above link and am interested in sampling rate of acceloremeter data on Android

    I am trying to measure the time between each sensor and sampling interval(period).You said that you have done with it.Could you please help me with it?Can i see your code ?

    ReplyDelete
  2. That was so long ago that I don't have the code anymore. Sorry I can't directly help.

    It was fairly straightforward in that I wrote the times to the logging interface formatted with commas between values. I then did a cut and past from the log into a text file. As I recall I did need to to a text replace on the period between the seconds and milliseconds. I changed it to a comma. Then saved the file with a CSV extension. That let me load it into Excel as a worksheet. (CSV - comma separated values is an early format for handling data.)

    Hope that helps.

    ReplyDelete

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