HexSLayer recently launched a few new versions. In the Android Marketplace (Now known as Google Play), HexSLayer 1.0.19 was launched, and in the Amazon App Store, HexSLayer 1.0.20 was launched. These may be the last updates for a few weeks, as there has been a major update to the packing system I use, known has PyGame Subset for Andoir. Both of the published versions of HexSLayer use PyGame Subset for Android (PGSA) version 0.9.3. This has been a great framework for me, as I have been able to write applications and games in Python, and then launch them simultaneously on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.

With the latest update of PGSA to version 0.9.4, there has been a change to how the system packages applications. Before, the system would copy over the raw Python source files (or .py files), but now the tool packages only the optimized and compiled versions of Python applications (the .pyo file). This means that if you come from an earlier version on Android and upgrade, you will end up having both versions on your device.

The problem with this upgrade path is that it leaves both versions of the files on your device, and the Python subsystem by default runs the old version of the application. That means that there is new code on your device, your phone will always run the old code.  This has been the core issue preventing me from releasing HexSLayer 1.1.x.

I wrote to the author of PyGame Subset for Android, and discovered that he had a fix prepared that will allow me to continue using the old packaging method, while waiting for my users to upgrade to a version compatible with the new method.

As soon as PGSA 0.9.5 is release, I should be able to repackage and release the next set of features and bugfixes for HexSLayer.

Thanks for playing!

All of the source code for HexSLayer is on Github. I'm going to try running this game as an open source project, and do all issue tracking using the Github issues list. If you like the game, or hate the game, or want to learn more about how it was made, follow me on github, or leave me a message.

Just like Google's popular Analytics program, it appears that the statistics for publishers in the Android Market are fuzzed as well. After about 8 hours of having my app in the marketplace, and having 5 independently confirmed users install and run the application, including myself, the statistics shown in the store are as follows:

It reports 3 total installs, and 4 net installs. This doesn't make any sense. These statistics mean that 3 people have ever installed my application, but 4 installs remain in production?

Looking depeer into the devices and versions of the users as reported by the control panel also shows some strange data. First of all, none of my devices shown up in the devices list. This is odd, because I was one of the first to download it. Second of all, despite having 4 equal chunks in the pie charts, the numeric breakdowns don't show 50% of my traffic.

These types of errors are common for Google, which processes trillions of petabytes per day. The only thing developers can do is hope that the data is correct and complete, with no additional information or assurances from Google. Google did a great job of Real Time search for Google Analytics. This offering provides up-to-the-second updates regarding visitors to the site. This leads me to trust their data. Google could do several things to improve the reliability of their data.

• Show real time data for statistics
• State assumptions, such as time updated
• State when you are excluding data, such as installs by the owner

You should Download HexSLayer now!

History

I released a linux .deb on hexslayer.com about a year ago, but I haven't really tried promoting it or talking to anyone about it, due to the small market share of desktop linux. Hopefully now with this Android release, I'll actually get a few users, some feedback, and hopefully make a great game.

I built HexSLayer for Android by originally writing the game in Python using Pygame. About a month ago I noticed that they had released a tool called Pygame subset for Android that allows you to add a few minor calls in your game, and then you can package and deploy Android apps. There were a few headaches, such as an issue with the package that made me learn how to build android applications with Ant, but the game is playable on all of the devices I have tested it with.

Current Release

There are a few remaining issues, that seem to be limitations of using Pygame subset for Android. Among these are the inability to determine the screen size in-game. Additionally, it seems like the splash screen doesn't work on 100% of the devices I have tested it with. Overall, I'm not sure how happy I am cross-compiling from Python into Android using Pygame and the NDK, but it's pretty cool to be able to do almost no work and deploy on a great big new platform.

I didn't have to do much work to get it running, but I spent a lot of time focusing on usability on the new platform. I resized and moved everything on the screen so that it is relative to the screen size. I increased the size of the icons while you are dragging them, as a finger blocks the view of a small icon. The game works well on phones, but it works really great on tablets.

The game I have been working on for a few months has now been packaged and lauched in its first incarnation! The instructions for download, files, etc, are all located on it's new site at hexslayer.com.

New Website

I decided to launch the game at its own URL, as a lot of the things that I put onto mortalpowers.com wouldn't relate to people interested in the game. I have developed my own blog software in the past, and used Wordpress and other options, and read a lot about some of the newer options. For this project, I decided to use Drupal, as my research has revealed it to be an extremely powerful (and albeit complex) system. I'm trying to stick with only the core modules, and major modules for the system (xmlsitemap, images, uploads) for maintainability purposes. If I adopt some unknown module it will be harder to stay up to date with security/other patches, and I might risk losing those modules if/when I upgrade to Drupal 7.

So far, drupal has been a very interesting and decent piece of software. For the type of CMS I was looking for, it is meeting all of my needs. My goal was to be able to create pages, posts, comments, and upload files and images, and to have a decent looking theme. Feel free to take a look at the HexSLayer site and let me know if I have met these goals.

The site is also on Github. One of my goals is to continue doing things in as open a manner as possible so that if someone else wants to contribute back to me, or learn from what I have done, they can.

Debian Packages

I have spent most of the evening re-learning Debian packaging (I use Ubuntu), and figuring out how to include the packaging component with the normal source code in a way that won't make it more difficult to compile/package for other environments. The solution I found was to create a packaging folder with scripts to generate packages/distributions for each of the platforms/environments I support. This seems to be working well, but I only have the Debian .deb file so far. The package includes nice features like menu and .desktop entries, which makes the game easier to launch and remember, rather than having a raw folder of .pyc files somewhere in your home directory.