Maddy Games: Privacy Policy

Maddy Games

Privacy Policy

By using our Game, you acknowledge and consent to the terms of this privacy policy.

User Age Limits

Our games and our website are not aimed at children under 13 years of age. We do not collect information, nor do we direct interest-based advertising to anyone under the age of 13 years.

What data do we collect?

We collect data only required by our third party partners required for advertising and analytics.

Advertising

Advertisements from third party ad networks may be displayed in our Games from time to time. All reasonable endeavours are used to ensure that these ad networks comply with all applicable legislation in the provision of their services towards us.

If you click on any advertisements through Our game, the advertisers may use cookies and other web-tracking technologies to collect data, to provide targeted advertisements to you. Some of this may be personal information, and some of it non-personal information. We recommend that you review the terms of use and privacy policy for any advertiser with whom you are interacting before doing so.

The list of our ad networks privacy policies may be found here:

Unity Ads: https://unity3d.com/legal/privacy-policy

AdMob: https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites https://policies.google.com/privacy

Opting out of targeted advertising

You can opt-out of interest-based advertising on mobile applications by checking the privacy settings of your Android or iOS device and selecting "limit ad tracking" (Apple iOS) or "opt-out of interest-based ads" (Android). This will also prevent mobile device identifiers from being collected.

Analytics

The list of our analytics privacy policies may be found here:

Unity Analytics: https://unity3d.com/legal/privacy-policy

Introduction to Mobile Gaming

Location  : 13054, PSN

Time        : Saturday, 10 am

In the introductory class I will be giving an overview of the most popular tool used to develop games.

It would roughly be a one hour session centring around Unity 3D which would give a very illustrative overview on how games are developed.

In the best case scenario, we might even develop a very simple game.

Presently, there is no target audience and it is open for everyone.

Please fill up this form to sign up, only to give me an estimate of how many people might be joining and split the session if necessary.

Sign Up Here

Goa Trip: 4-bed mixed Dormitory, 2-Star Hotel and a 4-BHK Luxury Villa

I had been to Goa twice before, both a one day trip.

First time, it was a solo bike ride from Hyderabad.

I set off from Hyderabad for Murdeshwar, to see the second largest Shiva statue overlooking an ocean.

But after the ghat section, in which I narrowly missed a near head-on collision with a truck coming uphill,

there is a junction which says Murdeshwar to left and Goa to right.

After a brief hesitation, I choose Goa over the Gods.

Though I am pretty sure Thor or Loki or Odin would have chosen Goa and Asgardians are basically Gods.

I stayed at an overpriced resort which I still regret but I was so damn tired after the 700km, no break ride.

Second time, I took a bus from Bengaluru. I choose to stay at Wanderer Hostel in Morjim, calm and less crowded part of North Goa.

It was an amazing Hostel. I shared a 4 bed mixed dormitory with Penny, a girl from US and a girl from Mumbai who was there for a week long

course on parasailing. We cooked breakfast together. 

A bed costing Rs 499/day, amazingly clean Hostel everything was ideal for a long stay.

But it was May, Goa is extremely hot and humid. I ended up staying only a couple of days before escaping to Bengaluru.

My third trip, no longer a bachelor and a 6 day trip.

In two years of marriage, Vaishu and me went on to quite a few trips - Bali, Andamans, Runn of Kutch, Leh, Delhi-Rishikesh and Manali.

The trip we enjoyed the most was Manali - Bhrigu lake trek with Indiahikes. We stayed in tents and met some amazing people.

Hoping to give her a similar experience, I decided we would stay in the same hostel I stayed 3 years back.

But I booked in Backpacker Panda instead of Wanderer Hostel.

I realised my mistake when the taxi dropped us off in Candolim. It was 8pm, Backpacker Pande was shabby and dim lit. 

My heart sank the moment we entered the 4 bed mixed dorm, I wasted a two night advance payment. 

It took a great deal to convince Vaishu, and seeing the place I was sure she would take the flight back and divorce me.

“At least the bathroom is clean”, I told Vaishu who was staring at a dirty wall right beside the washbasin beside the bunk beds.

Low ceiling made it impossible even to sit on the bed. She looked at me with such a pitiful face, that I decided we are going to shift ASAP.

The construction company my Dad works in has a guest house in Goa. Though Vaishu was telling me to call him up since a month, I didn’t want

to trouble dad. He travels a lot and always under a lot of pressure. But desperate times need desperate measures.

So when we went out strolling towards the beach for dinner, I called up Dad. He was out on a camp and wanted a couple of days to sort things out.

Pheonix Bar and Restaurant came to the rescue of our ailing spirit. It was the noisiest place of all and we just walked in.

There were atleast 15 groups and every person was above 60 years, and from The US or Europe. 

We were the youngest there. There was a couple hosting the Thursday special show.

We ordered chilli chicken, fried rice and chicken hyderabadi and played Tambola, some card game and ‘Deal or no Deal’. It was fun.

Vaishu, being the youngest, got to choose who would play ‘deal or no deal’.

The 60 year old contestant won Rs 20 instead of the Banker’s offer of Rs 600 against the weekly jackpot of Rs 12000.

After that we went back to the sad dormitory and slept. It was in the morning that I googled and realised that Wanderer Hostel was the place

I intended to book. It is in Morjim, 18km away.

Instead, we checked into Banyan Tree Courtyard, it is opposite Novatel in Candolim and somehow, love at first sight. 

It had clean rooms, an informal friendly staff and smack in the centre of the bustling suburb. The second mistake I made was to book this modest magnificent place for two nights, instead of one.

In the afternoon we went to Fort Aguda. A fort in the backdrop of an ocean, it is a bliss just to sit and watch the huge walls and the endless ocean.

I would recommend everyone with an iPhone to install Hyperlapse. With everyone so crazily mad about taking photos,

it is an ideal place to shoot funny hyperlapses. Vaishu didn’t have it so maybe next time for us.

It was over lunch that we found out that Dad’s company guest house is near Candolim church, a mere 2 kms away from Banyan Tree Courtyard,

and that it was currently unoccupied and we could go and stay. I had mixed feelings but decided to check out the place anyway.

“Do you feel like slapping yourself on the face”, asked Vaishu as I parked our rented Activa. I was dressed in a loose t-shirt with “Stroke my Ego” written on it,

a torn trousers thanks to a recent bike accident, and was not sure if I was eligible even to step inside the huge 4 bhk ultra luxurious villa inside a small gated community

I mustered up courage and shook hands with Venkatramaiah, the estate manager. 

I would have been happy with just the bathroom, but we got the attached bedroom, the kitchen, the hall, the swimming pool and a huge lawn looking over the backwaters.

Like Tahiti (if you watch Marvel’s Agents of Shield), Goa is a magical place. Saturday night bazar, Calungate beach, Baga beach, Martin’s Corner - way towards the South,

everything is out of the world. We enjoyed every bit of our stay. Southl near Zense Resort, German Cafe, Cafe Chocolatti are a few highly recommended places we frequented.

Deltin Casino, Mandovi River Cruise, Morjim are a few places we missed this time.

I am writing this blog on the last day of my trip sitting in the kitchen of the 4bhk villa eating Chicken-65 I got parcelled from Baga beach an hour ago at 10pm.

Tomorrow, it is back to work, back to Squash and Table Tennis, in Bengaluru, in PSN. I am kind of looking forward to it but I will surely miss Goa.

Considering the season is coming to an end, I think it will be another 8 months till we plan another trip to this magical place. Goodbye Goa.

Rubik's Cube

Rubik's Cube

Making of the the best ever Rubik Cube App

This is not a technical blog but I couldn't help the occasional references :-).

The Beginning

It all started when I decided to learn two things in Unity 3d -

1. Developing an easy interface to look at a 3D object from all angles 
2. Rotations. In gaming, we use something called Quaternions for rotations, traditional Euler angles give weird results including gimbal lock, a situation which has almost jeopardised the Apollo 13 mission. Though we don’t directly deal with Quaternions, rotations need love and care. They can make or break a game.

Rubik The Cube

I choose Rubik’s Cube because it is colourful to look at and cubes are easy to create. After about a month of struggle, the cube was partially tamed to obey my gestures. By this time I was so fascinated by the complexity of the puzzle, that I bought a cube and started to learn solving it. I tried all the apps on the play store and none were any good. I saw an opportunity here.

Vaishnavi Saddapalli

My wife, Vaishu, was irritated with me spending so much time with Rubik that she snatched it and challenged me that she would solve it. I just laughed. 

Over the next few days, after coming back from work, I would start working on the app and Vaishu on youtube watching videos to solve the cube. Three days later, while I was fine tuning my app, she threw the solved cube at me. I was shocked. But I simply scrambled it and gave it back. She went back to solving it giving me dirty looks.

Two days later, she learnt to solve the cube without referring tutorials online and my app was almost ready, well so I thought. I loaded it up on my phone and gave it to her to test. She grumbled saying that the real cube is much better, but I was persuasive. Ten seconds later she threw it back at me, telling me it sucks. I was so angry. I didn’t talk to her all night. This was the first review I got.

The next day, I convinced myself that Vaishu does not play games and hence the feedback. I opened my app and started solving it and I understood. There were problems, some gestures were being misunderstood and sometimes the cube would rotate too fast. It took me two days to fix it but the difference was visible. The cube understood my gestures better. I gave it back to her, this time she played with it for over a minute and handed it back to me saying “its ok”. 

This was a compliment because she is one of the worst critic I encountered till date. Of the 10 places we go out to eat, she doesn’t like 8 where as I would like all 10. 

So I decided the app was ready for beta. I uploaded it on Google Play. Instead of going through the alpha and beta channels, I directly uploaded it on production to save my friends the trouble of becoming beta testers. This was just before our trip to Leh.

Screenshot of version .15

Ranjeet Singh Kaurav

It was March 22nd, Vaishu, her friends and me were going to Leh via Delhi. I took my laptop to Delhi but was debating if I should take it to Leh or leave it behind. The next review from Ranjeet Singh Kaurav decided it.

(WhatsApp conversation)

Ranjeet: “There is no option to quit, and that is a strict no no” he watsapped in the group. 

Me: “What quit? This is not a desktop application to put a cross to close. Just press the Home Button” (angry angry angry)

Ranjeet: “No man, I will not use any app which does not quit”

(Me thinking: what is wrong with Ranjeet? Doesn’t he use apps on cell phones) 

Neil: “Jayanth.. in iPhone we only have the home button, but in android we have a back button to  go back and finally quit the application. Android users use the back button a lot.”

Me: “Oh shit…..”

Being an iOS developer for the last 5 years, I did not take this into consideration! It was 10pm and our flight to Leh was in 8 hours, this was a show stopper but I didn’t want to do a quick fix. So it was decided, take the laptop to Leh.

Trip to Leh

It was a wonderful trip. Leh in March has its own charm. The frozen Pangong lake was not as beautiful as it would be in summer but we could walk on it. That was fun.

My schedule in Leh was a dream come true. I always wanted to freelance and travel. Entire Leh closes at 8pm in March and then I would open my Laptop. By the end of the trip which was filled with sightseeing and coding, apart from just solving the bug, I made a few enhancements too.  But there was no internet connectivity because landslides have snapped data cables.

The moment we arrived back in Delhi, I updated the app and checked the stats. The download count was 7. Though I didn’t expect a huge number, it was discouraging. Even 17 would have been better.

Our flight to Hyderabad was on the next day and Vaishu wanted to shop in Delhi. All through shopping, I was trying to solve the cube with my app but I never could memorise the third layer algorithms so had to pester Vaishu to guide me. It was then I got this idea to put the algorithms within the app. Instead of just making a general help, I decided to do a context sensitive help.

This feature took me two weeks to complete and it helped me learn all the third layer algorithms with ease. 

The downloads, instead of dying out as I had feared, were slowly climbing.  

By April 16th, a month after the release I had 66 downloads and by May 1st the number was 555 with a rating of 4.4.

Context sensitive help

minimised help

Kavindu Nuwandika

Among the majority 4- and 5- star ratings, there were 1- star ratings too. I couldn’t understand why. The app was surely better than 1- star.

All the 5- star ratings were accompanied by comments but none of the 1- star rating had any comment, leaving me confused. One day, as I periodically refreshed the developer console, there it was, a 1- star rating with a comment saying “its too slow and hard to control”. I did not understand. I got very angry. I had spent considerable time optimising the speed with which the cube rotates and this guy just trashed all the efforts. The name was Kavindu Nuwandika and I immediately searched for him in Facebook. Luckily, I could easily find him, the profile picture was same. I sent him a friend request introducing myself. A couple of hours later I got a notification saying Kavindu has accepted my friend request. He was a guy from Sri Lanka. Later that day I had a brief chat with him, but was still at loss to understand why he was finding it slow. I was testing on Galaxy S6 Edge+, iPhone 5S and iPad, if I increase the speed even a little more, it would go haywire! Resigning to the fact that I cannot please everyone, I was about to ignore Kavindu but then it struck me - dpi or dots per inch or rather pixel density. It is a measure of how many pixels are crammed into a square inch. It was important because when users move their finger on the screen, user perceivable distance is measured in inches but what I receive in my program is number of pixels moved. I immediately went back to the developer console and looked at the devices giving me 1 star rating, most of them had low dpi. I revived my very old cracked Nexus S and installed the app on it. Rotation was a pain. With one full swipe, the cube would just rotate a bit whereas in my high end phones, it would complete half a rotation. I cursed myself, and put in some code to compensate for the difference in dpi. Then the cube started obeying my finger even in the old Nexus S. I wrote a thank you message to Kavindu and updated the app. In the following days, the number of 1 stars almost vanished and the number of downloads were still on the rise giving me the boost to continue working on the app.

Learnings from other apps

There were many things I did not like in other Rubik Cube apps, most notable, the UI, inability to reset the cube and inability to checkpoint a particular state. Over the following days, I added all these features while making sure the transition from one version to another is smooth. For example, when I added leaderboards, player needs to sign into Game Center. I hate the pop up which comes up abruptly saying “Signing into google play” so I authorised the player only when the player choose to play LeaderBoard shuffle.

Nia Mikkili

Another friend, Nia pinged me and said she wanted to play 4x4x4 and I realised this was missing. I spent a week refactoring my code to accommodate any cube size. In the next update, I started offering 2x2x2, 3x3x3, 4x4x4 and 5x5x5. I can give more but was not sure if anyone would have the patience to solve a 7x7x7 on an app. I kept it on hold. It is ready but just waiting for someone to complete 5x5x5 first.

Monica Reddy

With all these features I was confident I made the best Rubik Cube app ever. I was receiving reviews increasing my confidence. But Monica, Vaishu’s cousin, gave me the next review, not on Google Play but on my face. “The background is too dull, black is so boring”, she said. I intentionally left the background black so that the attention would be on the cube. I would no way add a flashy colour. I decided to ignore her but then when I opened the app, I grudgingly realised that she was right. I never noticed, the background, it was dull, “like a void”, I told myself and this gave me an idea. “Why not add a star field?”, I thought. It would be subtle and yet cover up the void. With particle effects, I can even move the star field! It sure was an exciting idea.

That was my next update, a range of 3 particle effects and the classic void to choose from. The app got an entirely new look. I was happy. I sometimes just gaze at it :). The following images do little justice to the beautiful backgrounds but something is better than nothing!

Blue Magic background

Simple Starfield background

Pink Flower background

After this change, the number of reviews increased and all positive. 

Conclusion

We often love what we create and critic reviews hurt. If I had ignored the reviews, the negative reviews would have kept piling on and my audience would have been smaller or maybe even none, killing the app. But now whenever I get a rating, it is either a 4- or a 5- star.

I am not sure if I would get a million downloads, but now the number is 25000 and I have the satisfaction of creating the best ever Rubik Cube app.

Cheers :-)

Flash Memory Game

This is work in progress

KuKu Cube

I was feeling quite bored at office and pinged Saloni Sinha, my colleague at Pramati Technologies.

It was then she pinged me a link for KuKu Cube. I took a liking for it instantaneously and decided it deserves an iPhone app.

The boring day got converted to a hackathon and within a couple of hours I had the very initial version of the game up and running.

Kuku Cube starts off very easy and quickly becomes difficult leaving you searching for the odd square.

The App playfully categorises the player's colour perception capabilities. Try out the app and find out your category :-)

Some interesting facts about vision - 

Monochromacy, although it is a handicapped state in human beings, it is normal in owls and monkeys.

The cones in human eye are not sensitive to one particular color channel causing Dichromacy.

Trichromacy, is normal human vision with the ability to perceive red, green and blue colours in the spectrum.

Tetrachromacy, some animals like Goldfish and Zebrafish have an advanced colour vision that they can even perceive ultra violet light.

The Company

It was the first time I was talking to him since we passed out of college 3 years back. He was very excited. He said he had a business opportunity which offers unprecedented returns. I was skeptical. I asked him for details. He said its very confidential and details would be revealed only to business partners. To become a business partner one needs to invest around ten lakhs. All I could do was wish him all the best.

Three months later, I got a call again. He said another slot opened for a business partner. I would have to pass 3 rounds to be able to invest 10 lakhs to become a business partner. Fortunately, there was no entrance fee to attend the interview. I agreed to attend. The only compromise I had to make was wear some suffocating formals.

The interviews were a strange affair. The first round was telephonic. My friend put us in a conference call. It went on something like this -

"We are a conglomerate... buzz bzzzz.... ssssttaaatic... prefer partners to employees because employees work for salary... bzzzz buzz...." call disconnects.

Again I get a call from my friend putting us in a conference call. Why can't he call directly? Is it a ruse to maintain secrecy? I was growing more and more suspicious.

Apart from nonsense information dissipation, the only question he asked me was

"Do you trust your friend so much that if he asks you to jump in a well, will you jump?"

By the end of the interview, I was none the wiser. The Company remains anonymous, the nature of work unknown.

Shortly, my friend called me to say I was selected and a face to face round has been scheduled the following day at 1:45pm and location details will be given at 1:30pm, the general area being Banjara Hills. More secrecy, alarm bells were going off. I had just two things in my mind, find out what is going on and save my friend if this is some fraud.

At 1:37pm the next day, I got a call from a lady asking me to come to a coffee shop!

I reached there by 1:50pm and was met by a rather thin lady. She gave me the impression that she was interviewing a sales boy. As I started talking to her, this impression only strengthened.

Ten minutes of general talk and then she started talking about the guy who would be interviewing me.

"Ateet Sir" was how she addressed him. These were a few phrases she used.

"He got a BMW in one year in this business"

"I cannot believe I am working with a millionire"

"Such high position and so humble"

"I love him, he is like a brother to me, I share everything with him"

I was completely annoyed. She would deflect any question about The Company she was representing. I would have left if not for my resolution to find out what the hell was going on.

Enter Ateet Sir, a North Indian in his early thirties, perhaps from Delhi.

"Tell me about yourself", he says.

"Tell me about your company", I wanted to ask but then decided to play along. I wanted to appear dumb and eager to mint money.

The interview was a total farce. Some of the nonsense philosophy uttered by the lady was repeated by him word for word. The only information I could get was he is into e-commerce. He believes the real estate boom would now reflect in e-commerce and that should be the field everyone should be investing.

He threw in numbers like math was at his finger tips.

"Hyderabad population 2-3 crore, target 10%, 20-30 lakh people spending Rs10 a month"

"40 crore per month, you get 10 percent, so 40 lakh per month"

"Flipkart is still at loss, how are you making a profit?", I asked

"We have a different strategy and we have some exclusive products", he replies.

So I asked him for a website where I could go ahead and shop for some stuff.

"All details would be revealed in the next round", he says.

"I want to shop as a customer and not as a business partner", I repeated.

"There is a process for everything. All details will be revealed in the next round"

For the next round to happen, I would need to have proofs of bank accounts showing a minimum balance of 6 lakhs. He warned me it would happen at a very short notice and not necessarily in Hyderabad.

Clearly, it was a fraud. So how does it work?

There is no dearth of innocent people around. So assuming 10 people invest 10 lakhs per month, that would be 1 Crore and considering 30% profit and negligible operational costs, each person would be getting back 7 lakhs of their money for some dummy work at home. I confirmed this with my friend, he got back 2 lakhs in first 20 days but would not reveal what happened after that. Oh yes, he even went on a field trip to Dubai.

So do they keep raising hopes the so called business partners, ask them to invest more and more until they are broke? Do they keep some people happy by paying them and dumping others saying their work is not good and they lost their investment?

My friend put his complete trust on them, "Ateet sir is God. I would be privileged to spend 5 mins with him", he says.

Can this racket be busted? Or can they survive as long as there are innocent people out there?

The only information I have about The Company is this person Ateet Saraf. Googling I found this seemingly false linkedIn profile
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/ateet-saraf/59/509/346

The photo has very slight resemblance to what he looks like now. Maybe it is at least 10 years old.

EDIT: (on 23rd October, 2014)

The linkedIn profile above is deleted. Here is the photo which was in the profile