A New Tyrant in Town

"All hail Tyrant Ben!"

Java Turtles coding party

As we've continued to work on our two apps, we've constantly been joking that Ben has become the over-ambitious tyrant of our group. While meeting up for a "coding party" Ben suggested that a cool way to incorporate different strategies to break the brick would be in the upgrades. The idea is that the user will initially only be able to tap the brick to break it but then once the users accumulates enough "brick bits", the name of our in game currency, the user will be able to purchase a swipe upgrade. Swiping the brick will have more brick breaking power than merely tapping. Once the user has purchased the swiping upgrade, we want the user to be able to either tap or swipe as desired. And of course, the user will be able to buy upgrades for both tapping and swiping.

In terms of progress on Brick Bash, we have continued to work on our upgrades. We now have a basic xml file for the upgrades and a java class to go with it so that when the user clicks on the upgrade, the upgrade actually works. Of course, there is still a lot of work to be done. The next steps are to link our upgrades to the in game currency so that user is able to purchase them.

In other news, we have continued to make significant gains in Sketch Send. Using parse.com users are able to create a unique username that is associated with their email address. Then, using parse, the app checks to make sure that the user entered a valid username and email address. Once the user has created the account, the user is able to switch users, or create a new account. As of right now, we don't have an option for the user to log out, but are definitely hoping to include that in our final version. Instead, the app just automatically logs in the last user.In addition the getting the username feature to work, we have also been able to create the canvas for the user to draw on. From here we hope to add in features to change the color and width of the line you draw.