 [Game Dev] First screenshot of shape editor for "They Come" |  Tuesday, June 08, 2010, 9:36 PM
Since several weeks I'm working on a shape editor for my procedurally generated images for "They Come". As I already mentioned a few times most of the graphics in the game will be randomly generated based on shapes.
The editor will help me to graphically design those shapes instead of manually typing strange characters into a definition file.
A first version is nearly done. I can already load a definition file, "paint" a shape on a grid, modify colors, watch some random images in the preview window and save everything back into a definition file.
There is still some stuff missing like working on the categories, naming shapes, duplicating or creating them. Saving an image or texture with a bunch of generated images would also be a nice feature. But that's all minor stuff and easy to be added. Looking at my spare time it will still take some time to get this into some releasable alpha version but hey - it's my personal "have fun coding time" 
Feedback, suggestions or criticism is already appreciated. Do you think this could be sold for some Euros? Or isn't it even worth the efforts? I doubt a Paypal "Donate" button would have any effect...
...but earning some money by coding games or game dev tools would feel pretty good 
Cheers,
Tommy | |
| [Game Dev] Minor fixes in more than 10 seconds | Sunday, May 02, 2010, 2:48 PM
I uploaded a new version of "How long are 10 seconds?" to my site. It contains some small fixes and improvements. You can find all information in the readme.txt contained in the zip file.
Mainly code cleanups and simplification - amazing what you can automate with the mbmFramework!
For example the animated main menu screen (rotating and scaling the game title) is all done by the configuration file settings and the general framework code - not a single line of code in my mainmenu.bmx file is required to do this!
Additionally I tweaked the website layout a bit. And because of a bug in TOWeb (by duplicating topics with comments) I lost Matt's comment for 10 seconds. Sorry Matt  Maybe you just add it again or another one. | |
| [Game Dev] 10 seconds are over! | Monday, April 26, 2010, 9:47 PM
Or better - the game is done! It's named "How long are 10 seconds?" and is a little game of dexterity. Mainly it was a learning exercise for me to get used to the mbmFramework for BlitzMax. Additionally I got some beginner experience for my new graphics tool Real-DRAW Pro 5.
Just download it using the quick link on the right or jump to it's game page 10 seconds.
I hope you like the game! Any feedback using the comments is highly appreciated.
I'm thinking about extending it a bit more using the TimelineFX particle engine to get some nice particle effects.
But for now it's back to They Come! | |
| [Game Dev] Slooooow times..... | Saturday, April 17, 2010, 3:43 PM
A whole month passed and it feels like nothing happened! Although I played around with mbmFramework, some graphics tool (Real-Draw Pro), looked at Fruity Loops (FLStudio) and wasted time reading stuff here and there I didn't really progress with They Come.
I started a little mini game which will be finished real soon (tm) to learn more about the mbmFramework. The game itself is already done, right now I'm fiddling around with creating graphics, adjusting menus and info screens and so on. But I hope to finish it this month!
That's pretty much it except my pretty busy real life. I hope to show my mini game at the next web site update and then continue with They Come.
Later,
Tommy | |
| [Website, Game Dev] Logo is done, game continues |  Sunday, March 14, 2010, 5:41 PM
So the logo design is finished and I'm very pleased with it! You can see a small version of it on the right.
I will use this logo more and more for my games and for this website. As already mentioned I plan to rework the site a bit. Let's see how long that takes and when it will be finished 
The logo design itself was done by Susan from Logolane. You can see their ebay offers here: http://shop.ebay.com/logolane/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=25.
I can highly recommend their services to everyone who needs a logo for whatsoever purpose.
On the game development side I managed to port the space nebula generation from the Source code pages from PlayBasic to BlitzMax. That was pretty easy and works like a charm. And it's much faster in BlitzMax compared to PlayBasic which is already a fast interpreted language.
Additionally I started to code a small tool to draw the templates for my shape generator. That will take a while before it's done but should help me to speed up in designing the content for They come. I even thought about offering it as a separate tool to generate random images based on the designed and stored shape templates... | |
| [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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