 [Website]Logo time! | Sunday, February 28, 2010, 6:02 PM
No, I'm not talking about this old programming language from the past featuring a triangle turtle 
Instead I decided to get a new logo design for my web site.
Over the next months I plan to transform this web site a bit. First it will feature the new logo and the starting page will be remade and feature the games I created and will create in the future.
This blog will not disappear but it won't stay as the starting page - you will have to jump to it using the menu or you will have to add a direct link to it in your browser.
The most adventurous thing for me is that I decided to pay money for a logo design! In the next few days I will receive the first drafts for the new logo and decide which one will be chosen for final iterations. I'm so excited 
Expect to see it here in the near future!
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| [Game Dev] mbmFramework | Sunday, February 28, 2010, 5:50 PM
Recently I had a look at matibee's framework mbmFramework for BlitzMax.
It's a great framework that contains tons of stuff you'll require to give your games the finishing touch.
Some of it's features are:
- cross platform for all BlitzMax platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac),
- multi lingual by supporting multiple languages for your games which can easily be applied to your game,
- funky animation stuff to make your game elements or GUI wobble, bounce and sweep by adding simple animator objects,
- sprite enhancements to ease programmer's life,
- GUI controls for typical game GUIs with buttons, sliders, check boxes and input fields,
- Player profiles, settings and highscore management in prebuilt classes, ready to be used, even encrypted,
- automated application flow resolved with AppModules that you can simply subclass and switch between,
- automated loading process with integrated resource handling,
- particle system that should solve many effect issues with a particle editor for free,
- code profiling, screenshots via hotkey, tutorials, samples and documentation and more that I might have forgotten
Best of all: this framework is free to use for non commercial games and you can buy a commercial license with all of the source code included!
I am currently porting They Come over to this framework because it contains many features that I simply hadn't implemented yet and that I won't implement now but instead use this cool framework.
Great work, matibee! | |
| [Game Dev]Random ships again! |  Tuesday, February 16, 2010, 9:15 PM
Woohoo! Finally I found enough time and energy to port my random space ship generation code from Java to BlitzMax. I even got it enhanced because now I can read the shape and color definitions from a flat file instead of using some hard coded arrays...
The shape definitions can be named and categorized and I can have different shape definitions for each category. This will allow me to use different human space ship shapes on each game start! So I don't just have an endless amount of space ships for one shape but for many shapes! Endless multiplied by endless ships - muhahaha!
Assigned screen shot proves it. The ships are scaled by factor 4, so in game they are much smaller. If they end up being too small I can increase the size of the shapes (and allow more details) or use the scaling factor as I did for this test screen shot.
The used shape definitions will receive some fine tuning to produce nicer ships. Additionally I plan to play around with brightening and darkening the colors to get more than just the 3 defined colors per ship.
Next I will add some boids or flocking code to represent the fleet of little human space ships following their leader mother ship...
Feel free to give some feedback! | |
| [Game Dev] Nothing to see but stuff under the hood | Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 9:18 PM
The last few days were not so busy regarding game development but I worked on stuff here, refactored code there and fixed other things in between.
I really reworked the map generation algorithm and can now pretty surely guarantee the generation of a playable map.
There is still one game element missing but that's due to the fact that I completely forgot it in my overall list and just found it in my design notes
Additionally I'm "wasting" time browsing forums or the internet in general. Currently I'm watching the Assemblee competition over at Tigsource, I'm of course reading most of the stuff on the BlitzMax forums and over at the BlitzMonkeys forum.
Anyway, back to coding - I still have a few minutes left for tonight 
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| [TOWeb] New bugfix release | Saturday, January 16, 2010, 6:57 PM
In general that's not this worth mentioning because a new bugfix release of TOWeb appears nearly once a month with bug fixes and enhancements.
But this time I mention it because it's fixing a problem regarding the generated RSS feeds. I hope you all will get rid of those irritating numbers at the beginning of each topic. We'll see in a minute after publishing the site Keep your fingers crossed! | |
| [Real life] Happy new 2010! | Friday, January 01, 2010, 1:34 AM
So as usual I'm wishing a happy new year to all of you!
It's 1:30 something in the morning, all rockets are fired into the sky, all explosives are exploded, the fingers are frozen, my wife and my kids are in bed (although I'm not sure about my daughter who is celebrating new year's eve in Berlin) and I'm finally sitting at my laptop, drinking the last drops of sparkling wine and will have my new year's single malt in a few minutes
The last year wasn't this great job wise but pretty good considering the rest of it. So I guess the new year can and will get better in certain areas! I hope it does the same for you!
I don't know if you're up to resolutions - I pretty much laugh about them. I make up my personal resolutions whenever I think they are necessary! I don't have to wait until new year's eve or save them until then. Start your personal improvements whenever you are ready to do so!
Having said this: A happy new year to all of you, health and fun and a wonderful year!
Good night and see you,
Tommy
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