The Vicious Circus

11/12/2023

06/15/2018

In the beginning of February I decided it was high time I got back into programming. I was doing well last year but when working on a fairly complicated app I burned myself out around the end of June.

In order to ease my way back in I decided to do a one man hackathon and create a simple app that could be created over the weekend. I chose to do a simple water tracking app. I know they are a dime-a-dozen and in doing research found almost all of them to be these overly slick, glossed over apps with tons of data metrics and blah, blah, blah. I wanted to make tracking my water consumption to be well, fun. So I decided to make it a game of sorts.

You log your water, gain XP, level up and get new character classes, and achievements for number of days completed. But there is a catch, if you don’t drink (ideally) and log your water each day you lose XP and can eventually die. The algorithm for leveling up btw is the same formula used for D&D (with slightly simpler numbers, 1000oz of water to make it to level 2 seemed a bit steep).

I also decided that since all those other apps were slick and glossy I wanted to take an approach inspired by the game Castle Crashers (Steam and Xbox) where all the elements are actually hand drawn. All the app art (with exception of the progress bar) is hand drawn in Procreate on my iPad Pro. This is basically where my one weekend hackathon blew up in my face and has now taken me 4.5 months to complete.

I have a few more things to do like figure out in-app purchases so that the first 3 levels are free but after that it’ll be $0.99 to continue, but ideally my “simple” app will be released before July. It is called AquaQuest.

11/18/2017

Putting out new pieces on Society6 all weekend. Check them out at: https://society6.com/greckler

11/18/2017