Making a Calculate app for Android

Heya,

So basically I am trying to keep myself busy with a small project and one of the ideas I have in mind is a calculator application on Android.

Basically I would like to create an App that can be used for the Card Game Yu-Gi-Oh! and for now I am just working out what I will need for the prototype of my application and would like to run it through with some people before I dive to far into it and realise that would not be possible to do.

So basically this app will need:

• Displaying Life Point of Player and Opponent
  
  
• Dice Rolling Function
  
  
• Coin Flipping Function
  
  
• Ability to add and subtract life points
  

At the moment I've considered starting off with making a calculator (using C#) as a base then include two seperate scenes for Dice Roll and Coin Flip. Next would be to set a value to display the life point value of opponents at the start of the application and making them able for alteration like adding and subtracting.

After that I suppose its just adding Skins onto the app and adding other modes like tag mode, Team mode, sound effects and different pre-set life point start up.

But yeah, any tips, reference, feedback or guide could be helpful

 

This is an unusual thread. And, for now, it fits loosely under Game Design. Here's design tips:

• Fail fast - prototype quickly, get it working, try it out.
• Keep it simple
• Feedback matters - make sure your app has lots of it.

Good luck,
Gigi

 

I think there's room to bring this further into 'game-land' (assuming being a Yu-Gi-Oh calculator isn't far enough in that direction.)

C# is a good idea...specifically, consider making it in Unity. No, I'm not kidding; while a boring, phone-app calculator is possible, an application with a little bit more polish is good practice for games and other things.

In addition to your given base requirements - simulating coin flip, dice rolls, and life point counts - I challenge your app to include some special visual effects as well. Practice that 'juice' stuff @Gigiwoo is always talking about with UIs. Life counts are kind of important - make those extra juicy!

Also, consider further hooks into the Yu-Gi-Oh card game as well. While this app is a basic state-keeper of sorts, I challenge you to include hooks for at least one special rule that affects these basic parts of the game, if any exist (for instance, rolling multiple dice, or flipping a coin if a dice roll comes up with a certain value...or something. Not being a Yu-Gi-Oh player, I don't know what I'm talking about! Woooo!)

 

Just make sure your app is short and sweet. No one wants to watch a 10 second animation every time they loose a life point.

 

@Gigiwoo Of course I could work on other generic stuff like side scrolls and endless runners... but I wanted to work on something really simple. (I did have a horse running idea).

That is definitely something I plan to work on next. One thing I hated was that existing app's were to boring and were tasteless.

Some consideration was including SFX to life point drop and recovery and making different GUI Skins (GUI is something I definitely need practice on).

Other things I did think about was including animation for summoning methods. Where users can play special animation when they announce a summoning and select it. Other than that I suppose I will begin with the prototype and set up a basic calculator and other scenes for dices and coins etc.