Mat's blog

On phones which use google’s android OS, there’s a little checkbox buried in the settings menu, “Use only 2G networks” which turns off 3G. I use this all the time because of the huge impact 3G has on battery life; however, it’s really annoying to keep having to go into the menu, switch it on, then go back and switch it off again when I’m done using the internet (especially on my sluggish T-Mobile Pulse).

I had the idea of creating my own app which would switch on 3G for a set amount of time only. By integrating this with the fantastic Locale application it would also be possible to automatically trigger this by shaking the phone or something cool like that. I had it all planned out, except for one minor detail: how to actually toggle the setting. You’d think this would be pretty simple, seeing as plenty of other useful settings are exposed through the API, but no, the fascists at google do not allow it!

So now, when I am left helpless and alone as my anthropomorphised battery breathes it’s final breath, I will remember this day with a tear in my eye, and I will never forgive the murderers who cruelly condemned this poor innocent battery to death. So much for “don’t be evil”.

Game 1 ended up being a huge failure. I think the main reason for this was a lack of experience in game development in general, and a poor choice of programming language, which I didn’t really know how to use properly when I started (flash/actionscript). As a result I wasted a lot of time trying to learn stuff and wasn’t able to put together anything playable within the time span I set myself.

Trying to come up with good ideas in so short a time was challenging, but I think I did have some workable ideas. While the obvious interpretation of “space” is a broad enough theme in itself, I decided to explore other meanings rather than immediately settling for some kind of spaceship game. Some of the ideas I had -

• An abstract game where the player manipulates empty space somehow, by rearranging or destroying things
• A tetris variant
• Human expansion has left the solar system overcrowded and you have to destroy things to make space, possibly related to the Vogons in h2g2 (reflecting the theme in two ways)
• Something related to recycling and consumerism (not enough space for all the garbage we produce?)
• Any kind of space in the mathematical sense
• Something related to the concept of personal space. e.g. avoiding other commuters on a crowded train (I rejected this but kept the general idea for my final game)

The idea I went with was a game in which you have to maintain a certain amount of space around you to survive. The player is a boy who is trying to avoid catching “cooties” from girls who run at the player from offscreen. Also the player is armed with a baseball bat.

This is as far as I got:
Failed game