 [Game Dev] It's competition time! |  | Thursday, June 12, 2008, 10:58 PM
The nice guys over at Underware Design are doing their annual game making competition. This time it's all about heroes, treasures, princesses and adventure! Create a platformer game with PlayBasic and win one of the many prizes! There are more than 1400 US$ in the prize pool!
All the details are available here!
I couldn't resist and decided to join the fun - so it's PlayBasic coding for a while 
Should you decide to join the competition you could have a look at my Game development pages and at my Space Invaders tutorial part 1 to learn more about PlayBasic and its nice game creation features!
Great performance, easy sprite and effects handling, support for many sound and music formats and tons(!) of demo and sample codes!
There's a free Learning Edition available to get you started and if you're fast you could even be a "CleverCoder" (this is a hint!) and get a 25% discount of the bargain price of 24,95$.
What are you waiting for?
Come on and beat me in the competition |
| [Real life] Envy me! | Tuesday, May 27, 2008, 9:25 PM
Yup, it finally happened - I bought a new PC and it's up and running (many, many thanks to Jürgen who helped me assemble it!) - yeeeehaaaa!
It's an AMD dual core (2.3 GHz) with 2 GB RAM, a 500 GB hard disk, DVD burner, a Geforce 8600GT graphics card and a marvelous 22' widescreen TFT!
Compared to my old trusty Celeron this machine is faster than light
And it's all black: a black Sharkoon midi tower, a black Logitech keyboard and mouse. That's the way I like it, aha, aha!
And of course I'm still running Windows XP and not Vista but I left 40 GB on my hard disk unformatted to install some Linux (Ubuntu?) on it.
My brother's website is finished, my daughter's PC (my old Celeron) is also up and running, now I just need to prepare the last PC for my son and then it's coding time again!
Later,
Tommy |
| [Game Dev] Things. Happen. Slowly. | Sunday, May 11, 2008, 9:59 PM
So the nice guys at lwjgl.org finished a first beta of LWJGL 2.0 with improved applet support. And Kev immediately added it to Slick. Cool stuff!
My code fragments I slapped together in those 5 minute sessions over the last few months finally fit together so that I have a piece of software that starts and renders something on screen.
This was definitely the motivation kick I needed to get along with it.
The last few weeks I was torn and thought about giving up on They Come but now that's over!
Expect some screenshots starting in the next few weeks.
Cheers,
Tommy |
| [Real life] Stress is nearly gone... |  Sunday, May 11, 2008, 9:39 PM
So I built my Cajon (see a picture of the half finished state on the right) and it was a lot of fun. Two days carpenter work and a cajon drum crash course! And the course ended with a 10 minute open air concert we gave in some nice park in the center of Hamburg 
And I also did the kajak trip on the Elbe with my middle son which was also absolutely great! We had perfect weather, sunshine and no wind, nice people to join us and no one fell into the water!
Finally we had a nice birthday party for my little boy with picnic in the garden, a lot of children party games and some amazing magic tricks at the end 
My new PC is nearly bought Tuesday I'm trying to get all the required parts and if they have everything in store the machine will be assembled on the same evening! Yay! My friend Jürgen is going to help me - will be the first time that I don't buy a "standard" PC but just all the components 
Life is getting better again! |
| [Real life] Bzzzzzz... | Tuesday, April 22, 2008, 12:36 AM
I am busy. Busy, busy, busy.
No game dev at all 
Work is pretty time consuming and tiring at the moment. And so is real life with family and house.
Aaaand I'm currently redoing the website of my brother. Completely redoing it.
I already spent five evenings with it over the last two and a half weeks! But the end is near
I mean the end of me hacking all this stuff in. Then it's review time with my brother. And then it's hacking again. More stuff. More pictures. More slideshows. And then review again.
And I must not forget my little son's birthday. Of course I need to do some little magic show at the end of his party to amaze all his little guests
But of course this needs some preparation and exercises. Kids are cruel if you fumble and ruin a magic trick...
Anyway, there are some more nice things I'm looking forward to:
- I will buy a new PC in the next few weeks (I guess after my son's birthday),
- I will build a Cajon (some kind of drum kit in a box) this coming weekend,
- I will enjoy some kajaking the weekend after with my middle son and finally
- it's our twentieth anniversary and my wife and me are taking a weekend off! YES!
Later,
Tommy
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| [Game Dev] Pixel ships! |  Tuesday, March 25, 2008, 9:05 PM
Finally an update! It's been pretty busy lately (as usual...) and I got only minor things done. But the pixel ship generation is nearly finished. I can pass String based templates into the random generation class to generate anything from space ships to asteroids or satellites. The generator code just needs to know if the generated object is mirrored or not. With the strings I can define which cells are always solid, maybe solid, always empty or an always solid cockpit part (for different coloring).
I just need to add some nice coloring but that's all "done in my brain already(tm)" since I found the algorithms to generate some smooth 256 color palettes to use for drawing nice ships
Next thing on my work list is to get a basic random scenario generated so that I can start a dummy game and add functionality and game logic.
XML based scenarios and campaigns will come later - currently coding that is too boring and doesn't show enough progress.
Next graphical challenge will be generation of planet graphics. I want to base my stuff on some code from Phil Hassey again. We'll see.
If anyone has an idea how to procedurally generate faces of humans and aliens for the ingame advisors you can hire please tell me |
| [Game Dev] They Come - but when? | Monday, March 03, 2008, 9:42 PM
Long time no update!
What have I done? I looked at some nice pixel generation routines for robots and space ships.
I am so fascinated by this stuff that I want to create my game graphics based on these ideas. Let's see where this leads to
So while I'm still coding the XML parsing stuff for the configuration files I'll also start with the pixel generation routines.
I'm back to Java and Slick, just in case anyone is wondering
The update of the Space Invaders tutorial with PlayBasic was fun but still Java feels (and is!) a lot more comfy!
Kevin, mastermind behind Slick also uses some new kind of tiny Webstart like mechanism for his new game Mootox which is pretty cool. It allows to create downloadable versions of your game which are able to update themselves over the web! Of course he coded it (his motto: If you need something have a look around at the web. If you don't find it, code it!). I bet he did it in one or two nights! I sometimes feel so slow
So there are a lot of areas to play around - that should keep me busy and happy for a while!
Oh, and Niels/Juggler, whenever I mention again that I'm thinking about changing dev tools - just give me a friendly slap, okay? |
| [Game Dev] Space Invaders Tutorial is done - again?! | Monday, February 18, 2008, 11:42 PM
I reworked the tutorial once more, based on great input from Kevin Picone, the mastermind of PlayBasic.
As I said in the previous post here: Have a nice read, I'll go to bed now
Space Invaders tutorial part 1 |
| [Game Dev] Tutorial is done! | Monday, February 11, 2008, 12:10 AM
Just finished my Space Invaders tutorial part 1! You can have a read, I'll go to bed now!
Cheers,
Tommy |
| [Game Dev] Still ongoing tutorial update | Sunday, February 10, 2008, 10:09 PM
Sigh, a week's gone by and I am still not done with the tutorial update.
Real life and real job leave only few minutes for game coding time...
Anyway, if you can't resist, jump over to the Space Invaders tutorial part 1 and have a little read.
Collision is not in, although all preparation is done. Maybe I finish it tonight, but maybe not... |
| [Website] | Sunday, February 03, 2008, 11:05 PM
I just switched from my hoster's visitor counter to some free one.
Advantages: Instead of tracking unique visitors only I can now track all visitors of my site, also frequent visitors.
But this new counter does not just count page impressions (so hitting "Refresh" on your browser won't increase the counter). Instead every visitor who comes back after 3 hours will be counted again. I think that's an "okay" timeframe to give me a better impression how many people get lost in the internet and land here.
Just to let you know...
Cheers,
Tommy |
| [Game Dev] Tutorial update time | Sunday, February 03, 2008, 10:56 PM
Recently I've been revisiting the Underware Design forums, creators of PlayBasic.
I detected four things:
- my version of PlayBasic was totally outdated,
- my Space Invaders tutorial part 1 was also totally outdated and doesn't even compile with the current version of PlayBasic,
- the new features of PlayBasic like pixel perfect collisions, native linked list support and a new virtual machine with hardware acceleration made an update of my tutorial not only necessary but promising
- a quick look at my website statistics showed that still around 100 visitors each month read the tutorial!
That were enough reasons for me to justify an update of the Space Invaders tutorial part 1.
It's currently a work in progress but it's a lot of fun and the new features simplify coding life a lot!
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| [Game Dev] | Wednesday, January 23, 2008, 11:05 PM
Some more tiny bits of coding done but still the progress is slow...but hey, I'm just a bedroom coder (indeed I'm a living room coder) and I don't get paid for it
Maybe I should add a Paypal donate button and see if anyone wants me to hurry up...
Recently I played Frozzd, the winning game of the Yoyogames winter competition and I like the game play and the graphics style a lot.
I would guess most of the graphics were made with some vector drawing tool...
Anyway, the game is a wonderful example of what can be achieved with Game Maker.
Have fun,
Tommy |
| [Game Dev] Any progress? | Friday, January 18, 2008, 10:45 PM
I coded a bit more. And I played around with stuff. The last two evenings I played around with Express Animator which is a tool to create SWF animations or 2D animations in general. Currently it misses some functionality to be useful in game development but it's just version 1.0. Let's see how that tool progresses...
And today my friend Niels borrowed me his Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet over the weekend - that is fun! Inkscape worked immediately with it and drawing with such a tablet is cool! I scribbled along and enjoyed it very much - now I need to get 70 Euros to buy my own one |
| [Game Dev] Return of the code? | Sunday, January 06, 2008, 10:55 PM
Don't be too optimistic - progress on game development can still be considered "on hold". I coded two or three hours the last week - and that was a vacation week!
Coding took place with Game Maker - I am jumping back and forth again
At least to be fair I have to cancel some statement regarding Game Maker I made end of October...
Of course you can create persistent objects which are existing as long as you need them. So data containers or stateful objects are no problem for Game Maker...
I don't know how long this Game Maker period will last so I'll just keep my mouth shut. I will let you know as soon as some positive result can be presented - either in Java or in Game Maker...
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| [Real life] Happy new year! | Sunday, January 06, 2008, 10:44 PM
Okay, okay, it's already nearly a week gone but anyway - a happy new year to all of you!
This new year's eve was pretty nice - I wasn't sick! And although I missed by new year's single malt at 4 am it was a good step into 2008.
Let's see what this year has got in store for us
Cheers,
Tommy |
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|  | |  | | Pimp Kevin! | Kevin Glass is not only the creator of Slick!
He also codes great little games which you need to play!
I show a little collection here, visit his homepage for more!
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