Corona SDK Storyboard – Rolly Bear World

In this post, we start (finally) with the first lines of codes. We set up the skeleton of the Rolly Bear World Game. With this I mean the navigation between the different screens (home or menu, level selector, options and the game credits). To get this fixed, we use something (very useful) called the storyboard API/Library of the Corona SDK, which pretty much does all the work for us.

Currently I’m still in Nepal. I just really enjoy Nepal. The people and food are amazing. Despite this we decided to fly next week to Indonesia to see some of the Islands. We booked a flight to the island Lombok. Today we visited the Peace Pagoda which is a temple on top of a hill in Pokhara. The peace pagoda is a buddhist stupa. This one was build by Japan to widespread the peace message after the horrible bombings in Japan by the end of the 2nd World War. Besides Japan there are Peace Pagodas all over the world eg in India, Japan, Australia, Africa and even in California!

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Developer tools & Resources

I was thinking it would be useful to dedicate a post on the tools and resources I’m using during my trip to create Rolly Bear World. From all the tools I use I can group them into developer tools, graphical programs, books and other learning resources and finally apps.

We are currently still in Pokhara, Nepal. We are planning to leave monday for Bhaktapur which is near Kathmandu. We decided to stay longer in Pokhara, mainly because it is so peaceful and beautiful. Yesterday morning we hiked at 4:00 AM to a small village in the mountains called Sarangkot to see the sunrise.

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Early Game Sketches and User Stories

This already my third post. At this stage the game already starts to get some shape by some early sketches. I decided to make some high level sketches to get a better feeling of all the elements which should be developed and how the game and different screens should look like. With user stories I tried to specify the most important user requirements, they are not complete in terms of specifying the complete functionality but provide a fairly good overview over the different features of the game.

We are currently in Pokhara, Nepal, which is compared to Kathmandu a very chilled out location close to the Himalayan mountains. Many people come to this place to enjoy the lake called Phewa Lake or hike the Annapurna Circuit. I you read my previous post, we had to escape from Kathmandu due to the elections. It became quite dangerous in Kathmandu with the Army being deployed all over the city and some gas bombs being thrown on busses and cars. In Pokhara, it seems that the country has no elections at all, making this place an excellent alternative for Kathmandu. Besides some hiking and mountain biking I hope to make some progress on Rolly Bear World.
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The Game: Introducing Rolly Bear World

In the last couple of days I have giving it more thought what game I will be developing during my travels. In this post I will introduce high level the idea of the game, the game character, and my first thoughts about the game play.

We are currently in Kathmandu in Nepal. It took is over 30 hours to get here but it is absolutely a beautiful country and the people are very friendly. We visited Patan, which is an Unesco World Heritage site full of temples. We will spent 5 days in Kathmandu before we head out to Pokhara which is east of Kathmandu. Kathmandu was quite chaotic as the elections are planned for the 19th of November. Some of the members of certain parties were throwing gas bombs on cars and streets. Our hotel recommended not to take any bus to Pokhara, as they will be escorted by the army or police. We changed our plans and decided, given the unsafe environment, to book a flight from Kathmandu to Pokhara.

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My Plan & Goals for Rolly Bear World

The Change

Thank you for visiting my site. I lived in Amsterdam and really enjoyed living in the Netherlands. But since a year my wife and myself have decided to go for a change in life. As such, we have started 12 months ago the emigration paperwork to get a Greencard for the United States.

I have been a product manager in mobile services for about 6 years and I have always been excited about  Silicon Valley and being part of the action :). So we have decided to quit our jobs in the Netherlands and plan for a big move to the Valley.

We had both employers which are not located in the Bay Area, I worked at Vodafone and my wife at MTV Networks. So we took the bold step to quit our jobs and pursue a new start. Just to be clear we didn’t hated our jobs or we weren’t stuck in our careers. No, we both liked our jobs very much, we just wanted something different, something new, and something exciting.

At this moment we left our jobs, our apartment and our life in Amsterdam and we are enroute to California. Going through this decision gave us the realization to pursue another dream. We both love to travel and experience different cultures and countries (we actually met in Finland a few years back). So we decided not only to emigrate to the US, but also take this moment in our lives to travel for six months through Asia.

In the next one or two weeks we will board our plane to Nepal, this will be our first destination. We have an idea of the countries we want to visit, but we rather keep things open and see where we end up during these six months.

Rolly Bear World Plan:

Being on the road for 6 months, I will get some moments that I rather have something else to do. Therefore I decided to have a side-activity along our travels. In the last years I have self-taught myself to code. I started with Java and Android, and for the people who are following me for a while, probably noticed that I recently started to learn Lua and Corona SDK. One of my problems in the last years was that it was difficult to have focus on one project as I had only a few hours per week to work on my hobby projects. Since I will be travelling in the next months I came up with the idea to create a mobile game in the six months we are traveling in Asia.

In the next posts I will explain what mobile game I will develop and what exactly the gameplay will be. But I have already decided to create a physics based game and to call it Rolly Bear World (more in the next posts). As six months is also a short time to develop a mobile game, I will try to plan a bit ahead by creating some high level requirements. I want to keep the creativity part of the process, but having outlined the scope of the game to some extent will actually help me to succeed in the goal to develop a game in this time frame.

I have “rebranded” my blog into “code and travel”  to capture what I will be doing in the next few months. I hope you like it, beside the code tutorials, which I will be sharing along the development of Rolly Bear World, I will also share some of our travel photo’s and stories. All the existing tutorials are still available for you, just use the navigation on the top of this page.

Goals:

Throughout my travels I will update my site with my progress but will also share all the code so you or other people can take the code and use it for your own.

So the goals for Rolly Bear World are:

  • Developed across countries in six Months
  • Have to some extend a clear scope before the start of the project
  • Learn more about the Corona SDK Framework and Lua programming language
  • Share as much as possible with you
  • Have a lot of fun!

Keep following me for updates! It’s gonna be a lot of fun!

Christian