My Android Journey - continued.

[oynaz]

I changed the structure a bit, this first post is now a table of content. Hopefully, this thread will be long enough for this to make sense 🙂

 

[oynaz]

Time to make an Android app!

About a year ago, I made a thread about my first venture into making Android apps. I learned a lot from it, but I became too busy with other stuff, and I abandoned it. Plus, I did not really know what to make.
Well, now I know. I play Pathfinder (Dungeons & Dragons spinoff) with some friends. Lots of fun, but late in the game you need to roll a lot of dice and apply modifiers. This gets to a point where it slows down the game too much. You can get dice rollers for you phone, and they help a lot. However, I found that they all are rather limited, so I decided to make an app which solves these limitations. It seems like a challenging project for a newbie, without being too difficult, and I get instant feedback from my games. Perfect.
So, here is what I want my app to be able to do:

Create a dice pool with a number of different dice and apply modifiers. For instance, a roll of 10 four-sided dice (10D4)+10, and 6 six-sided dice (6D6)+20. The roll should both output the value of the individual dice, and the sum of it all.
Save a dice pool, and the ability to name it. For instance "10D4+10+6D6+20" og "Evil Dragon's Flaming Breath"
Save a set of dice pools. For instance "Dragon's attacks" or "Evil overlord and stupid minions"
The ability to save these pools and sets somewhere which isn't local, for instance Dropbox or Google Drive.

Now, there might already be an app which does this, but this is partly a learning process as well.

I considered making a blog, but I suspect no one will read it. And I hang out here all the time anyway. I am quite the newbie, so I will make tons of mistakes. Feel free to educate me 🙂

I am quite busy, so I will only be able to update once a week or so.

Next post will have pretty pictures of how I want the UI to look.

See ya.

 

[oynaz]

I forgot to tell about my programming experience. That seems relevant, so here goes.
I have some basic HTML/CSS and ASP experience.
I have some basic Java experience as well.
Those are some years ago, though.
Recently, I have done some PowerShell scripts, some of them quite advanced.

Onward to my current project. I did my drafts. So far, I can see 4 screens in this app - the main screen, a result screen, a dice pool designer and a settings screen. Like this:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m81fm5h84ni60i2/designer.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xg97246otcd9miw/homescreen.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/s/gq3vuw60ry7a6qp/Results.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/s/s6udq69frvi9hpu/settings.jpg

No, graphical design is not my strong suit 🙂
I could not get img tags to work here. Any idea what I am doing wrong?

I have some choices to make already:

1. Which software should I use? I have Eclipse installed, and that seems fine to me.
2. Which Android version should I make this for? I have no idea which features are in which version, but are anyone using lower than 2.1?

And then a more general point. How should I structure this? My first thought is to make a HTML/CSS-like structure, with a stylesheet and each screen a different file. This must be in a tutorial somewhere, but I cannot find it, for some reason. Does someone have an explanation or a link?