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Personal Music Discoveries for 2011 (Thanks Spotify!)

One of the best parts about working at Spotify is being paid to listen to music. After all some has to do the quality assurance! Actually, our QA guys and gals do a great job… but I can’t help myself 🙂

This year I’ve spent a lot of time with my old favorites, recapitulating my youth and young adulthood into playlists. You can find all my playlists here: JPavley’s Spotify profile.

But the known is not the topic of this blog post: Today, one of the final days of 2011, I want to tell you about unknown music.

Spotify has over 15 million tracks available in the US and I doubt that I’ve listened to more than 3000 different songs in my entire lifetime. It’s hard to guess but generally as we age our tastes settle and we stick to what we know. As much as I love the familiar I love the thrill of discovery even more! It’s painful for me to think about music that I may never hear yet that I would love if I had the chance to heard it.

Here are my top 10 personal music discoveries for 2011*:

10. Wire – Red Barked Trees Tension and power slowly build up “to find the healing red barked trees”.

9. Harald Grosskopf – VIVACISSIMO CON MOTO – Album Mix Like a mini sci-fi epic Grosskopf’s a great sound track for living in the future.

8. Röyksopp – Keyboard Milk Scary but mentally danceable.

7. Zomby – Witch Hunt Another scary, haunting song with a fast tempo and bonus gun shots.

6. The Cinematic Orchestra – Evolution – versao portuense Slow and relentless and dreamy.

5. Digitalism – Miami Showdown I grok the repeating patterns that ebb and flow around a central beat.

4. 8 Bit Weapon – 64 Gigabit Mario Epic Like something out of a electronic Miyazaki movie.

3. Wye Oak – Two Small Deaths Could be electronic-pattern-based but actually made by Indy humans.

2. Lullatone – My Second Favorite Song In The World I could live inside this song for ever.

1. John Fahey – Sligo Mud Starts out like a blue standard and moves into abstract and concrete bliss.

Each of these artists is new to me. Hearing each track for the first time was more like remembering something that was missing than finding something new.

Here’s the complete playlist: Personal Discoveries 2011

* This is new-to-me not necessarily new-to-the-world. There is a lot of back catalog that I’ve missed over the years!

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Dungeonators Battle UI Redesign


There is nothing quite like real user feedback. The Dungeonators game that I started coding about a year ago has been through several design iterations. Before I wrote a line of code I mocked up the whole UI and tested that on my friends and kids (paper prototype, an honorable UI design tradition). And with each development build I tested everything again and even enlisted strangers. I must have played though the final release candidate a 100 times. (It was then that I realized that game programmers must get sick of their games if they properly test them!)

When I uploaded Dungeonators to the App Store on 14 October 2011 I was pretty confident about the game play and the user interface. Famous last words as they say 🙂

After an initial healthily growth curve Dungeonators installs tanked:


The message I get from this user adoption curve was simple: Dunegonators stinks!

So I went back to the drawing board to search for the stinky bits. After much reflection I realized three things:

  1. Dungeonators is too hard for casual users and too easy/dumb for hardcore gamers. People who play MMORPGs like World of Warcraft punch through my game. People who play Angry Birds get stuck around level 1.6. (Which is as far as you can go if you don’t know what you’re doing.)
  2. People don’t know what to touch. They want to touch the avatars and not the raid and spell frames. If you don’t know what raid frames and spell frames are then you are not going to get my game.
  3. I was going to have to fix this. I could fix this problem with a lengthy tutorial or FAQs. But Dungeonators is causal game not productivity software. I never read manuals and skip tutorials. I expect my audience to have the same level of self respect!
So here is the new battle UI that tries to clean this mess up:
  • The good guy raid frames (on the left) are no longer touchable: They just display status. I couldn’t find a casual user who knew what a raid frame was so I got rid of raid frames.
  • Good guy spell frames are no longer associated with good guy raid frames: Spell frames are now modeless and never hidden. Each good guy has two spells available 24/7. As the game progress the spell are automatically upgraded. I’ll have to rewrite the game mechanics to handle the fact that the total number of available spells has gone from 4 x 6 (which I understand is 24) to a mere 8. But that actually makes Dungeonators a heck of lot simpler to program and to play.
  • The bad guy raid frames are still touchable and still enable the player to switch targets. But in the original UI you could have separate bad guy targets for every good guy. In the revised UI all the Dungeonators are synchronized. It’s a gross simplification that is all for the best.
  • Touching the center of the screen, where the avatars live, is still not part of the game play but if you do, the game will pause and bring up the main menu. I was able to kill two birds with one stone: No main menu button and a valid response to a user touch. Feedback is everything thing: In the original design touching the center of the screen was ignored and could have been interpreted as the game freezing up.
In general I learned what I thought I always knew: iPhone games have to be simple and causal gamers don’t have the time or energy for complex mechanics. But in practice I learned a lesson that every battled hardened game developer must know after their first game is released: There is no better test case than the real world!
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Sprite Playground

I wrote a little Cocos2d-iPhone test app and committed the project to GitHub. (Like every dutiful hacker should.) You’re welcome to download the project and fool around with the code.

My goal was to figure out how to create a composite sprite, make sure it could respond to touches, and rotate and move it round the screen. With a little trial and error I got it working. Here’s how I did the hard parts:

I created a sprite from an PNG file and got it’s dimensions:

Then I created a CCNode to be the parent of my sprite sandwich. (I originally tried to use my cocos2dGuy CCSprite as the parent but Cocos2d stacks added on top of partent nodes and I wanted the particle effect under the cocos2dGuy not on top of him.) I set the size of the CCNode to the dimensions of the cocos2dGuy so that when you touch the CCNode it responds as if you’re touching the image. Then I add the CCNode to the layer. It’s also important to set the CCNode’s anchorPoint to the center (0.5, 0.5) as it’s default is bottom-left. CCSprite default to center anchorPoints and I want my CCNode to act like a proper sprite.

Next I added the cocos2dGuy sprite to the center of the composite CCNode. These two entities are now both the same size and stacked on top of each other. (It’s probably not necessary for me to set the cocos2dGuy’s anchorPoint and so I’ll remove that line of code down the road.)

Finally I created the custom CCParticleSystem from a Particle Designer file and added it to the composite CCNode but at a lower Z value show it shows up under the cocos2dGuy sprite. See how I had to set the position and the anchorPoint to ensure everything lined up.

Movement and animation are easy in the world of Cocos2d. I really like the visual effect of CCEaseExponentialInOut. It has a nice punch.

Handling touches are bit harder. I had to remember to set self.isTouchEnabled = YES in my init method and override both registerWithTouchDispatcher and ccTouchBegan. The key bit of code for responding to a touch is isTouchForMe:

The main thing here is to give each touchable node a unique tag and test each node in the layer for that tag. If you touch the sprite he inflates for a moment. If you touch an empty part of the screen the sprite turns and launches himself at your finger. Ouch!