Freakin' Out?

You know when you get an important email that says you just failed at something but tells you to check your account directly on "x" website to find out why, but you're already beating yourself up over being a failure? No? Well, I suppose that was oddly specific... This happened to me today.

So I revisited the idea of working on mobile games recently, and I decided to choose the Windows 7 Phone as my poison. Why? Well, it was the only language by default that wouldn't require massive amounts of learning to tackle. Sure, I could have gone the route of BlackBerry again, but I sort of cheated that one by choosing a wrapper language around Java. That ended in failure, as what appeared to work on the emulator didn't work at all in production.  Windows 7 Phone: you've got either Silverlight or XNA.

I use Silverlight on a regular basis at my job, but I've also used XNA in the past and found it to be easy to learn *and* it has awesome documentation (one might argue "it's Microsoft" here, but I would argue that the person who says this has never used SharePoint -- another language I use, unfortunately, on a regular basis at my full-time job).

I used XNA to create a simple enough puzzle game.  I did a Google search for "Grid Bouncer" and couldn't come up with any matches. Maybe not the best sounding name in the world, but my creativity for names is limited.

The idea is to select an adjacent grid to move forward the indicated number of spaces. Each time you do, the value of the selected tile decreases by 1. As the player, you have to decrease all possible movement across the board to 0 (what the non-numbered tiles are in the above image). You can lose a game by landing in a position where all adjacent spaces are nothing, making you incapable of moving.

Anyway, so I finished up the process of getting the game to where I want, and I submitted it for review on Saturday. I received an email today saying that the app failed along the process, which had me playing worst-case scenarios through my head. When I checked the App Hub site to view the error report, I laughed at the reason for failure: a support email is not present in the App. I have since added the support email into the app's About section and reviewed the rest of the requirements list to ensure there wasn't any other asinine requirement I may have missed.

*Phew* Here I was, getting worked up. I've started to port the code over the the Android SDK now, but I realize that the differences between the two languages are enough to where calling it a "port" wouldn't be accurate. Talk about complete overhaul. Still, I'm looking forward to doing actual tests directly on my phone.