Synergy at beta

Finally got the last of the big features in -- the game will now state save and restore itself correctly.  This works very well, to the point that you can reboot the phone and start the game again, and it'll restore right where you left off.

I rearranged how the OpenGL surface was being initialized (doing the work in onPause and onResume instead of the constructor) and that seems to have solved the lock-up-at-a-black-screen behavior I was seeing here and there.  With these problems tackled I'm onto the home stretch of tweaking the scoring and gameplay behavior, and optimizations here and there where they present themselves.  This means it'll hopefully be on the market tomorrow sometime after I've had some chance to smoke test the first release.

In addition to this work I added more backgrounds and have some infrastructure in place to make the game pieces feel a little more dynamic, and added some niceties like the game over screen notifying you if you've achieved a new high score.  All this is shaping up pretty well and I'm excited to get the first release finished off.

Synergy working prefs and high scores

Got the sensitivity preferences hooked up, in addition to customizable player name.  I  now properly use that name to write out and read back high scores, so all that's in good shape now.  Plus, new button graphics!

Primary remaining task: State save.

Portable Alarm upgraded to v1.3

- Bug Fix: Volume is now controlled by alarm channel
- New Feature: "High Pitched" alarm sound available

Got a comment that the alarm wasn't loud enough, which is fair enough and bears looking into.  That led to some investigating and I found that I was actually doing something wrong here.  I was leaving the alarm sound playback on the default channel (probably the same one as media like music), when I should have been specifically assigning that to the STREAM_ALARM channel.  Alarms have a separate volume control than music (and may go higher, in fact) so this should help solve the issue.

I also added a new sound type, which is available in the settings menu.  It's high pitched and screechy, and is based on alarme_4 by davidou of FreeSounds.  I trimmed it and adjusted the range a bit but the core sound is definitely his.

Synergy title screen and high scores

Finally moved on and started getting menus and settings in place. The obvious options are for horizontal and vertical control sensitivity, and I'll likely get a few gameplay options in place eventually (possibly multiple gameplay modes, though that might not be in the initial release). The title screen's looking pretty good so far, though I need to make custom button graphics still that mesh with the background better.

This time around, pictures!

Synergy update

Quick-drop bug is fixed, white game piece has been revised, and I found a couple of physics loopholes that are closed now.  I added a proper preview of the three upcoming pieces and got it rendering cleanly to the screen with appropriate art, and the game over overlay is now in place and being handled correctly.

The main thing left now is to get the game to state-save properly, so that answering a phone call then going back to it doesn't cause you to lose all your progress.  After that, menus and some testing to confirm everything's kosher.

Synergy update

The actual game effectively reached alpha over the weekend.  The pieces have real art (though I expect I'll tweak it some more) and the difficulty progresses over time (filling the progress bar increases the gameplay speed and adds more colors over time).  Game Over is in place but isn't handled prettily yet.

I also added the ability to swipe down on the screen to drop a piece instantly, which currently causes a pre-existing collision bug to rear its ugly head in a very obvious fashion.  That's actually awesome, as I couldn't get the problem to happen reliably before.  So, next stop will be revising some of the collision behavior, then after that onto menus and other home-stretch activities.