2015-12 summary

Early December 2015 centered on Daniel's new Xcode survival game, shown with placeholder red blocks. Players survive across days by managing energy, hunger, warmth and happiness, gathering wood and berries, facing hazards in the woods, cooking, building beds and fireplaces, and sleeping to advance days.

Planned features include game over conditions, a marketplace, quests, more furniture and a pub where players court a spouse with gifts. Daniel rewrote the statistics code from scratch and noted two finished games on the App Store.

Daniel also produced a two-part Xcode platformer tutorial series: part 1 covered setup, jumping and floor collision; part 2 covered left and right movement, with obstacles planned next.

Mid-December shifted to camera gear. Daniel tested the Sony 16mm f/2.8 lens and then voiced regret over its handheld shakiness without optical stabilization. He chose to keep his current camera for now and weighed how to resell the lens.

The lens test footage also covered a pond where a boat or large rubber duck could go, and tree and bush clearing that removed privacy and exposed a neighboring house.

Survival game mechanics: stats, sleeping, house door heat loss, resource gathering, combat, cooking and fireplace smoke.

Planned game features: marketplace, quests, and pub relationship or marriage system.

Objective-C Xcode platformer tutorials: project setup, NSTimer movement, collision, jumping and touch events.

Sony 16mm f/2.8 lens: lack of stabilization, comparison with Olympus bodies, reasons for purchase and resale dilemmas.

Lens video test: focus distance, background blur, autofocus, walking stabilization and iMovie cropping.

Landscape changes near the house: cleared vegetation, lost privacy, and pond decoration ideas.

Recording dated 2015-12-05 (two entries covering what appears to be the same showcase): Daniel presented an early build of a survival game with placeholder red blocks, built around energy, hunger, happiness and warmth.

Around the 2015-12-05 recordings, Daniel reported rewriting the game's statistics code from scratch to fix earlier issues.

Recording dated 2015-12-06: a tutorial (part 1) built a jumping character in an Objective-C Xcode project, using NSTimer-driven falling, floor collision and a jump button.

Recording dated 2015-12-07: part 2 added left and right movement buttons, with Touch Up Outside handling to stop the drag-off bug; an obstacle to jump over is planned for the next session.

Recordings dated 2015-12-18: a video test of the Sony 16mm f/2.8 lens led to a decision to keep the current camera for one or two years rather than buy an expensive body-stabilized model.

Recording dated 2015-12-19: Daniel said he regrets buying the 16mm f/2.8 lens because it lacks optical stabilization, and he considered selling it despite an eBay selling ban.

Whether the new survival game build has undiscovered bugs is unclear.

Additional furnishings beyond a possible stove and chairs, the quest design and the pub relationship mechanics remain undecided.

It is unclear why the chimney smoke initially failed to appear, and why rewriting the statistics code resolved its problems.

In the part 1 tutorial, the direction of positive and negative values, the floor offset and the jumpValue of 50 were untested at that point.

In part 2, Daniel was initially unsure how many methods and actions were needed and could not recall the earlier drag-off fix.

Whether a zero-feedback eBay account would sell the lens, and why Amazon sales are slower, are unknown.

The reason for the tree and bush clearing, and whether it was a major cleanup, is unknown.

Whether the footage is truly very shaky, what the alien-looking plants are, and whether the autofocus is actually faster or just seems so remain unresolved.