Ports and new devices!

Hiya bloger bros. Long time no speak. Maybe not as long as usual, but still. Anyway without mincing words, I'll just jump in as usual with general updateyness.

JumpBurger Android - as anyone who has been following this blog has noticed, I've been working steadily on rebuilding the port of the game. It's been slow going but I've been developing a good framework of tools in so doing, and learning lots of techniques (hint - this is my secret goal!) I had planned to try and wrap the entire thing up by late March or so - as it's obviously June in a couple of days, the deadline is obviously missed but that's fine with me. I've been busy with other projects and life in general, and that all means that overall other things have taken priority. But rest assured I will take the project as far as I can (planning to release it obviously!). I've been testing it pretty stringently all the while and it must have the smooth stability of it's predecessor, and on that front it is feeling quite successful. It's still lacking many key elements (no real graphics in there yet, other than placeholders!) but what I had anticipated to be some of the stickier points of the development have been handled, so I am very satisfied with all of that.

Blast Rover iOS - I was hoping to see this get ported to the iOS platform this year, but it looks like that is not going to happen. It's possible that I could do that myself. down the road, but probably a rather huge task and I'd prefer to spend such an effort on a different production instead. I've been looking into repurposing assets for other projects which, while sounding like a lame thing to do, is probably one of the better ideas I have had in recent memory and 99.9% of people would ever actually know or care anyway. So long as I turn it into something else that still looks cool and is fun to play, I am cool with that.

Hololens - I have recently acquired a Developer Edition and have been making some small projects for this new-fangled Microsoft device. For those under a rock, it's an augmented-reality visor that one wears, which effectively scans one's physical location and uses the data to overlay "hologram" 3D imagery into the space via the heads-up display. The effect is quite convincing, if still quite early and fraught with issues - main sticking point being that it is nowhere near as immersive as current virtual reality technology, which limits the effectiveness of the illusions. There are naysayers about these issues, but personally as it is still considered development hardware I consider it a reasonable state (and quite useful) as I'd prefer to have access to such hardware and begin figuring out development strategies and techniques NOW rather than wait for many of those issues to be sorted out down the road when there are a lot of other players in the field. Despite my tone, the takeaway should be that the hardware and overall experience is nothing short of miraculous and it's quite exciting in consideration of what is to come.

On that note I am working on a couple of small projects for the device, I'm intending to get something up on the UWP Hololens store during the short term. I've no experience with their market so a great many questions will need to be answered before I can figure out how legitimate a plan that actually is, but so far, so good. I've been successfully building to the device in a test environment so far, and looking forward to some bigger steps soon. Excited to get more material to share, if you would like to follow along than keep an eye on my twitter and facebook feeds.

Plenty of other things to say, on topic and otherwise -but it's late and would like to get a bit more work in, before calling it a night. Thanks again for reading, and check back soon!