 [Game Dev] Twitter, graphics and They Come | Wednesday, November 09, 2011, 9:42 PM
Just got me a twitter account to follow some people and their tweets mainly. I plan to use it occasionally for some own game or game development related tweets.
But honestly, don't expect too much activity on Twitter from me 
Seems to be like a personal no-go similar to IRC 
They Come is now in the same state it was before migrating over to Marte Engine. I can now proceed with the development. During the migration I detected a smaller bug in Marte's Entity class regarding rotation and scaling. I will commit it soon into my devtommy branch.
I decided to buy some space ship graphics to progress faster and have more positive feedback for myself by using space ships without finishing my random space ship generator. I will see how that works.
I bought them over here.
Additionally I found a great 2D graphics tutorial using Inkscape. The guy who teaches you how to draw cartoony game graphics is some well known Indie game graphics artist and you can find his blog here: http://2dgameartforprogrammers.blogspot.com/. I can only recommend to have a good read! It all looks pretty easy to follow.
Later,
Tommy
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| [Game Dev] Huh? What? Where am I? | Tuesday, November 01, 2011, 9:12 PM
More than a month without any update - that's tough! But real life kept me busy and I did basically nothing on any game or tool...
Just yesterday I fired up Eclipse again (at home of course, not at work) and looked at my "They Come" project - now completely migrated to our Marte Engine. It's not fully working yet but I feel that I'll start tackling that right after this post
Another interesting bit of information is over at the java-gaming.org forum where all those crazy Java game developers hang out.
Kev Glass, mastermind behind Slick and other cool Java libraries, is working on his great casual roguelike game named Legends of Yore.
The great thing about it is that he is coding it with Java and using one code base he deploys the game as an applet, a downloadable application, an IPhone app, an Android app, a Flex/Flash app, a HTML5 app and pretty soon on HP's WebOS too!
How cool is that?
Just today he explained how he does it over at the java-gaming.org forums in this thread here.
A very interesting read and I would love to get my hands on his API he named "TouchAPi". I'm definitely willing to throw some money into Kev's direction - he earned it anyways for all his efforts regarding Java game development 
Would be nice to deploy even to platforms where Java does not officially run (like IPhone or Flash)...we'll see if something works out some day.
But now I think I'll get my Marte version of They Come into a running state so that I can continue with the game development.
Later,
Tommy
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| [Game Dev]More news about GameMaker:HTML5 | Sunday, September 25, 2011, 8:00 PM
It's out now for a few days but the developers of YoYo Games already released two updates with lots of bug fixes. They are even active in the community forums over the weekend! Pretty impressive and shows how dedicated those guys are to their new product!
It took just a few days for some members of the GM community to come up with solutions for
- GMHTML5 games on Facebook here,
- connections to databases like MySQL for online highscores, achievements and anything else here,
- URL protection to help against ripping your games and running them on other sites here,
- creating calls to JavaScript to allow integrating APIs like Kongregate's here,
- discussing callbacks from JavaScript back into GameMaker here.
Oh boy, that sounds all very cool and promising! I'll definitely don't regret my purchase and I'm looking forward to all the possibilities this product seems to offer so easily
So although I still think the price of 200$ for the final product is too high I'm convinced this product will spread dramatically because it simplifies web game development so much!
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| [Game Dev] GameMaker:HTML5 is in beta! | Friday, September 23, 2011, 7:58 PM
Over at YoYo Games you can buy(!) the beta version of GameMaker:HTML5 now for a reduced price of 99$. I don't know if they still offer it but for a short time beta customers will get a coupon code which reduces the price to 79$. The price for the final product will be 199$! This is pretty steep! Many competitors are cheaper. I think the beta price is justified but 200 bucks for the final product? Hohum 
But if you have a look at the demo games here or here you'll see that they all run pretty smooth and without issues (at least for me).
So what do you get? Basically it's pretty similar to the original Windows based GameMaker including a sprite editor, a room editor, the complete functional game engine with objects, events, paths, timelines, sounds and fonts and a particle system and much more.
But instead of generating a Windows executable for your game it generates HTML5 Javascript and html and resources folders that you can upload to any website and thus present your games in the web. You can convert older GameMaker games (which might need some minor manual fixes) to bring them into the web too. The current beta version also offers the generation of a Windows executable.
The IDE changed a lot and it seems the project files are now separate resources (like images and sound files) plus a bunch of XML files which is pretty cool because it finally allows usage of a source control system like Git or Subversion and team work!
Additionally the HTML5 version of GameMaker seems to be a subset of the Studio version to come which will also allow to create games for the Mac, the iThings and Android. The YoYo Games people even promised a discount for HTML5 owners that will buy the Studio version.
So if GameMaker is your cup of tea and you're interested in creating web games (or you're just looking for a cool RAD game dev tool for your web games) you should have a look. | |
| [Game Dev] Migrating "They Come" to Marte | Sunday, September 11, 2011, 2:41 PM
Last night I started to modify the existing code of "They Come" to work with Marte Engine. I think it will be finished in a few days and then I'll continue adding game content again. To cite Starcraft 2: "Hell, it's about time!" | |
| [Website] Social buttons are gone | Saturday, September 10, 2011, 9:17 PM
Today I removed the social buttons on my site. Why? I live in the German state Schleswig-Holstein. And the data protection officer announced to sue every website owner in Schleswig-Holstein who shows the Facebook "Like" button. Can you believe that?
Why? Because this single click "Like" button allows Facebook to track the web sites you're visiting. Already while the html page containing the "Like" button is loaded due to some Javascript code involved. If your Facebook cookie is still "active" (you didn't logout from Facebook) Facebook can associate your web travels with you! If you're no Facebook user they still can track your web travels and associate that with your IP address!
But instead of blaming Facebook or starting some legal issues with them our data protection officer forces web site owners to remove the "Like" buttons.
I do agree with his arguments and I don't like what massive amounts of data Facebook collects with their "Like" button and even the profiling that's possible with it for Facebook users. But I think it's unfair to sue us website owners instead of Facebook...
Anyway, the buttons will be removed. You can still like my postings but you have to use the comments or back track links to tell other people about it
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| | [Game Dev] Marte and the games... | Monday, July 11, 2011, 9:04 PM
I'm still working on Marte's particle classes, adding usage of Pedigree's particle system and Slick's standard emitter class. Progressing nicely.
Just a few minutes ago I had a nice simple approach for in game achievements. I will start that class as long as the idea is fresh and juicy and add it to our Marte Engine
Back to the past will receive some more levels and moving platforms (horizontal and vertical) real soon. Conveyor belts are to follow. Also I will add some spikes I think. Best to be placed next to conveyor belts
And finally I need to migrate They Come over to Marte Engine. I want to continue the game!
Okay, off now, back to coding and then it's bed time...
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| [Games] I survived Steam's summer camp sales! | Monday, July 11, 2011, 8:55 PM
It's over! Ten days of daily torture from Steam. New offers every day, bargains to check at 7 pm german time, hoping that they either offer only games I'm not interested in or games I am interested in with a high discount. Terrible.
I bought only one pack, namely King's Bounty. It's some turn based rpg fantasy adventure game similar to "Heroes Of Might And Magic". It was a bargain for 6 Euros so I couldn't resist.
I hope they keep me alone for the next few months until they start another sale.
But wait? Didn't they introduce the "Deal of the day" recently? Oh those money vampires...
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| | [Website] TOWeb V4 is available! | Friday, July 01, 2011, 10:39 PM
TOWeb V4 is out! Okay, this information is a few days old. But I was a bit reluctant to buy the new version. On a first sight it didn't offer too many interesting new features for me.
So I mumbled and grumbled and looked at WordPress and looked at Joomla and bought a Joomla book and read through my older WordPress book and hesitated and investigated and on and on.
Tonight I decided that the efforts to migrate my website to another system like WordPress or Joomla is too much effort right now. And the only real advantage those systems offer is that I could add content dynamically online with just a browser. No need to publish the site from my PC to my host.
I think I will start to pester the TOWeb developer to speed up the uploading process (still uploading too many pages that didn't change at all).
Cause that's the main issue that currently hinders me to update this site more often. Adding new stuff simply takes too long.
On the other hand the new version 4 of TOWeb does offer some nice gimmicks on the second sight:
- unicode support,
- easy embedding of Google maps and YouTube videos,
- improved image zooming,
- social sharing buttons,
- improved slide show for images,
- better color chooser for theme colors,
- support for visitor polls,
- star ratings for paragraphs,
- optimizing image file names (no longer automatically generated file names),
- attachments and new form fields,
- automatic translation with Microsoft Bing (not sure how good that is),
- improvements on the e-commerce version (which I don't own, but wait until I start selling my games )
So I bit the bullet and bought it. Now let's start that email for the TOWeb developer
Later,
Tommy | |
| [Game Dev] Progress everywhere! | Friday, July 01, 2011, 10:17 PM
It was a bit quiet down here, right? No worries, I was busy!
I completed version 1.1 of Back to the past. Jump over to the page and download it.
What's new you ask?
Here's the list of changes:
- reduced bullet damage on player
- added test mode for editor
- removed wall jumping from mage
- added more infos on title screen
- fixed laser beams that could leave the screen
- in game messages (for respawning for example)
- description and script adding to levels inside editor
- simplified level 2
- added "greebles" to tiles, randomly placed on them
Hope you like it!
Additionally I worked more on Marte, minor issues and I started adding support for Slick's particle stuff. First test cases and new code available in my devtommy branch over at Github: Marte Engine.
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| [Game Dev] Fifth place! | Saturday, June 04, 2011, 3:58 PM
Yes! The Slick Competition 2011 is over and I made the fifth place! Which means I won a license of "Magicka", some cool wizard action co-op whatever magic shooter with lots of humor
I'm very happy with the result. Given that around 30 people announced to join the competition only 9 managed to send in their more or less finished entries. So my fifth place is right in the middle. Which is absolutely okay because my game Back to the past isn't finished at all. A lot of features had to be dropped, graphics and sounds stayed in their placeholder beauty and code wise I'm sure there's more than one bug left...
But anyway, judging went well and I got a price
Right now I'm still enhancing the game, the built in editor and the graphics and will release a newer version "real soon" (TM).
Later,
Tommy
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| [Game Dev] Back to the past is free to download and gets it's own page! | Monday, May 23, 2011, 9:53 PM
I created a separate page for Back to the past. There you can read more about the game, learn the controls and see some screenshots. Additionally you can of course download the game and the source code! So why not just have a look?! | |
| [Game Dev] Slick competition 2011 is closed now - voting starts! | Tuesday, May 17, 2011, 8:45 PM
So the competition is over and the voting is just starting.
It seems there are 9 completed entries including mine which isn't really completed. Let's say it's in a playable state
As you can see I haven't setup a page for the game, there's no official download or play link to the right which is the perfect sign that I don't consider "Back to the past" being finished.
There's still tons of stuff I wanted to get in and I wanted to be in the game in a better shape...
You can download it from this topic in the Slick forum and while you're there (and in case you're a member of the Slick community) you could join the voting
Download the game here and vote
The other competition entries look also very nice and I'm a bit afraid I won't win a prize. But I learned and used a lot of new stuff (A-Star, scrolling jump'n'run, Marte improvements and so on).
Now back to normal mode... | |
| | [Game Dev] Slick game competition is go! | Friday, March 04, 2011, 9:48 PM
Okay, the announcement is here, the themes are listed as are the prices and the dates! So what are you waiting for?
Jump to the forums, sign up if you still haven't and join the contest by posting your theme, game title and stuff in this thread!
I decided to give it a try - let's see how far I'll get in the next two months (starting mid of march).
See you at the competition |  | |
| [Game Dev] Marte Engine 0.2 is available! | Friday, February 25, 2011, 11:20 PM
Gornova was pretty busy over the last few days and while I'm still proof reading the tutorial pages on our Marte Wiki Gornova already wrapped it all up for a nice download, tagged it and here it is:
Marte Engine version 0.2 is out! Yeehaa!
So don't hesitate and get it while it's hot! Because we won't stop here - we already have planned features for 0.3 and more to come!
My suggestion is to have a look at Marte and then join this competition and create your winning entry and go home with some dollars and a cool game named Magicka and of course your cool game to be presented on some blogs and on the world wide web to please many many people
See you at the competition (I just hope to squeeze some minutes out of my long long working days and busy weekends!) 
Oh, by the way: we need a logo for Marte. As Marte is a synonym for Mars, the ancient greek god of war, one of our ideas was an ancient greek helmet plus the name as a logo. Anyway, if some graphics addicted person reads this and can't resist to create a cool logo, feel free to contact us
Cheers,
Tommy
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| [Game Dev] A Slick competition ahead! | Wednesday, February 23, 2011, 9:56 PM
Some guys (mainly Gornova and TheMatrix154) over at the Slick forums are planning the second Slick game coding competition! You can enter as long as you code the game using Slick and any other library you want (for example our Marte Engine, hint hint ).
Marte is especially recommended because the first tutorials are finished which should get you started in minutes!
Currently the allowed themes and the time frame are still under discussion but at least some prizes are already known: 5 Steam keys for the game Magicka and even 100$ via paypal (offered by Heldenhaft) to be split on the first few winners!
So there's no reason not to join and try to win, I think! Just jump to the forum thread (link on top of this post), read through it, vote Yes! and jump the train and join the best competition that's currently available
I know I'm terrible low on spare time but that's definitely a competition I want to enter. Let's see, depending on the competition time frame, some vacation and what else it might work (TM).
Later,
Tommy | |
| [Game Dev] Development time shrinks and Game Maker activity grows | Monday, January 31, 2011, 8:19 PM
Real life sometimes strikes hard. Due to some job commitments my spare time is going down to nearly zero and this includes game coding time too. This will last until June. I'm confident that I'll manage to browse some stuff and keep up to date but I can't give any estimate right now how much time I'll find to work on Marte or They Come or on some tiny fun competition games in between.
Now for some good news: over at Yoyo Games the guys of Game Maker started a new discussion forum to talk about upcoming changes for Game Maker 8.1 (and even 9 maybe). This is pretty cool as it's really the first time (as far as I can remember) that the Game Maker creators involve the community to talk about planned changes or even ask if the planned changes do make sense or if a huge part of the community disagrees!
That's a really great approach I think and can only help to improve Game Maker. Given the recent news on their Glog (Game Maker blog) they managed to port their new C++ version of the runtime to the PSP, the IPhone and IPad and to Android! Also the complete development environment was released for the Mac.
Unfortunately Yoyo Games decides which games are ported to PSP, IThing and Android and be released under their label. Of course the developers will receive royalties, they'll get help on porting and pimping their games for a better commercial success on the new platforms. BUT you as a game developer cannot decide, bribe or simply pay for the service to get your game released under Yoyo Games' or any other label on a platform of your choice...maybe that's a way for them to make some more money - offering paid porting services...
Competitions seem to be pretty popular right now: there is the monthly competition at http://www.experimentalgameplay.com, then NAL started a compo over at http://www.gamejolt.com with the theme invention and there is another competition over at http://www.tigsource.com with the theme Versus where you have to code a game that allows two (or more) players to compete with each other.
So if you have more time to spend than I do and are in the mood for joining a compo, feel free
Later,
Tommy
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| [Website]Color and frame changes | Sunday, January 02, 2011, 9:02 PM
Currently I'm experimenting with the colors and the frames of the topic boxes on the right. I also created a new banner which finally contains the logo of Right Angle Games.
Things. Take. Time. | |
| [Game Dev]Transparency, scaling and rotating in Marte is done! | Sunday, January 02, 2011, 8:51 PM
I just finished the code to have rotating, scaling entities in Marte that can change their transparency or alpha value.
It's in my devtommy branch on the Marte Engine github. Feel free to have a look.
While I was coding the test case I also added some simple TextEntity which can just display a text. No rotating, no scaling, no transparency (yet).
But it was helpful in the test case to add some words onto the screen.
Next will be a quick enhancement on the ResourceManager. You will be able to specify a base directory for your resources and can then shorten the filename of the loaded resources to just the filename and the base directory will be added by the ResourceManager. Less typing is good.
I still got no nice looking sprites for a platform shooter, only some Ari Feldman spritelib sprites that could do as placeholders but I'd prefer better looking ones. We'll see.
Next stuff for Marte will be some entities to wrap Slick's ParticleEmitters. This should allow us to render particles at any depth (z order) on screen and easily keep track of them. It would also allow us to specify collision boxes for the emitters which is also nice to have in a game.
Gornova improved the build script and simplified deploying webstart versions of your game and also added proguard for code shrinking! Great! | |
| [Real life] Happy new 2011! | Sunday, January 02, 2011, 7:37 PM
A bit late, but who cares
I wish a happy new year 2011 to all of you!
2010 was pretty exciting with me getting a new job, my daughter starting at university and all the usual crazyness of real life!
So let's wrap it up and see what 2011 will bring
Have fun! | |
| [Game Dev]Marte improves | Tuesday, December 28, 2010, 11:04 PM
I just finished to code rotating and scaling of entities. Transparency (alpha) is next. Gornova and me are now using github's issues to plan and keep track on our tasks for Marte. Gornova is currently working on the build environment to simplify creation and deployment of a Marte game.
I'm really looking forward on improving this game lib - it's not only fun to code stuff for it but it's even more fun to create games with it!
Next on my personal "Marte games list" is a scrolling platformer shooter thingy - currently I'm looking for some sprites that can be used freely.
If anyone knows some links to some free sprites for a running shooting cool looking guy and some theme fitting enemies and platform tiles - tell me!
Or if you are a graphics artist and would love to see your sprites in a game (and distributed with Marte maybe) - you know where to find me | |
| [Games] Games, games and more games | Tuesday, December 28, 2010, 10:50 PM
Holy cow, those Steam guys drive me mad! They started their "games throw away" at Thanksgiving and now do a christmas sale! How is any computer games player supposed to resist? You simply can't!
I already bought two of their indie packs during Thanksgiving and now I already had to buy two more games (Super Meat Boy and Lego Batman - yes, I admit it: I love those Lego games and of course the Lego bricks themselves).
And then Notch, the Minecraft guy: Why did he have to announce the beta and the price increase, hm? Nice marketing, man! So I had to buy Minecraft while still being alpha, right?
And finally Christmas presents: My son got Starcraft 2 as a present. So what's the proper job of a good dad? Right, get his own copy for christmas to play matches with his son! Good for my boy that I suck at RTS games - gives him a good feeling to win against his dad
I just hope that Steam offers only games that I'm not interested in for the rest of this terrible christmas deal time. I'm just afraid they won't  | |
| | [Game Dev] New version of Star Cleaner! | Friday, December 03, 2010, 10:27 PM
Based on the feedback in the Slick forums here I updated my latest game Star Cleaner a bit.
What's different?
- Fixed a frame rate issue with the game (yes, I should know, the main method is not called for applets. Sigh.).
- The dim effect from day to night and night to day is much smoother now.
- You can also see the light of the stars while the day/night transition happens. Looks great.
- Double jump only works if you jumped before and not if you simply fall down from a platform.
- If you skip a level by pressing 'N' your score is reset to zero because you are a cheater who just wants to look at all the levels
What didn't change yet?
- Still no background music.
- Still those annoying beeps and blips for the sound effects. I cannot use some sounds that I bought years ago because I can't distribute them with the Marte Engine due to copyright issues of course. Any free(!) recommendations where the license of the sounds allows distribution in some open source project?
Have a nice play and give some feeback if you want!
Good night,
Tommy
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| [Game Dev] Marte and Star Cleaner are go! | Thursday, December 02, 2010, 7:56 PM
I merged all my Star Cleaner sources with the current Marte Engine source code and passed the stuff over to Gornova.
He spent the last night and committed everything into the github repository! YES! So if you want to take a look at the source code of Star Cleaner jump over to the github repository!
Now I'm waiting to get some developer acccess to Marte Engine's repository to commit stuff myself without Gornova having to do all the code merging.
And then we'll start enhancing the code base even more. Seems our heads are full of similar ideas so we will play around in the dev branch I think and test things out
What a fun time
I'm also planning to adopt the source code of They Come to the Marte Engine as soon as I go back to work on it again.
Later,
Tommy | |
| [Game Dev] Next is Marte! | Monday, November 29, 2010, 10:07 PM
Who's Marte you ask? It's Gornova's game engine based on Slick and Flashpunk that inspired me how to code Star Cleaner.
So Gornova and I decided to throw our stuff together and create one library or class collection to simplify game development in Java with Slick (although Slick itself already is pretty easy!).
At the end you will get Worlds to populate with clever Entities that can be added or removed from the world, that have a builtin depth ordering, collision detection based on entity types, alarms and more. They can wrap around the world (asteroid clones, here we come!) and more!
Star Cleaner will then be "recoded" using the Marte engine and become part of the Marte distribution. I will also improve the code based on the feedback in the Slick forums to make it look even better and behave better
The github code base for the Marte engine can be found here: https://github.com/Gornova/MarteEngine
And as Gornova said in his blog: Power of open source! | |
| [Game Dev] Star Cleaner is finished! | Sunday, November 28, 2010, 12:19 AM
Yes, it's done! Deploying the game as an applet was unbelievable easy! Thanks to Kappa for his great Slick and Applet tutorial here and to the LWJGL people (I think the applet support is also done by Kappa) for this technology supporting OpenGL in an applet. And of course thanks to Kev for Slick, thanks to Gornova for his Marte Engine ideas. Also another thanks to Noel Berry and his Advanced Platform Engine here. It was very easy to port the main stuff over to Slick.
Now jump over to the StarCleaner page and have a play!
Good night,
Tommy
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| [Game Dev] Nearly done with Star Cleaner! |  Friday, November 26, 2010, 10:32 PM
What fun! The last four days I only spent around an hour each night at the game so I call this day 5
If I imagine that school kids or students can spend most of their day working on a game I think it's just fair to calculate those 4 hours as one single day...
Anyway, what did I complete?
- Lighting is working, including some dawn phases and day and night phases,
- clouds are in which slow your horizontal movement down,
- crows are in where collision restarts the level,
- moving platforms are in which can carry the player,
- spikes are in where collision restarts the level,
- message signs and windows are in to give you hints about the level,
- sun and moon are in and work as level portals,
- title screen is in,
- hud for showing score, remaining bonus time and remaining stars is in.
Phew, that's quite a bunch! But the core framework based on all these Flashpunk and Marte Engine ideas works pretty well and simplifies stuff a lot.
For example I show you the source code of the crow:
package com.rightanglegames.starcleaner;
import org.newdawn.slick.GameContainer;
import org.newdawn.slick.SlickException;
import org.newdawn.slick.geom.Vector2f;
import com.rightanglegames.starcleaner.entity.Entity;
public class Crow extends Entity {
public static final String CROW = "crow";
private int frame = 0;
private int nextFrame = 500; // change frames every 500 msecs
private int frameCount = 0;
private float speed = 0.1f;
public Crow(float x, float y) {
super(x, y);
depth = 20;
name = CROW;
this.addType(CROW);
sheet = RessourceManager.getSpriteSheet("crow");
currentImage = sheet.getSprite(frame, 0);
wrapHorizontal = true;
setHitBox(4, 8, 32, 24);
}
public void update(GameContainer container, int delta) throws SlickException {
super.update(container, delta);
frameCount += delta;
if (frameCount >= nextFrame) {
frameCount -= nextFrame;
frame++;
if (frame > 1)
frame = 0;
currentImage = sheet.getSprite(frame, 0);
}
x += (speed * delta);
}
}
Pretty simple, isn't it? The collision with the Player is a one liner.
Now for the remainder list which needs to be done until Tuesday night:
- add sound and maybe music,
- add a handful of levels,
- wrap it all up in a jar file,
- prepare the web page on my site to contain the applet,
- get the Slick applet stuff to work on my site - I hope that TOWeb doesn't play tricks on me
If all works well that should be doable.
Of course all that implies that I won't get distracted by Steam's "Black Friday" and their "Thanksgiving" bargains. I already bought the "Indie Story Pack" with 5 cool games for 4,5 Euros and I'm afraid I'll also have to buy one or another indie pack they'll release over the weekend...
Finally I'll attach a new screenshot of Star Cleaner showing the lighting stuff (still with debug rectangles and such).
Have fun,
Tommy | |
| [Website] Before I forget... welcome to all BlitzBasic coders! | Tuesday, November 16, 2010, 10:24 PM
And thanks to all you BlitzBasic forum readers for jumping over here and looking at 10 seconds!
My usual (slowly growing) number of hits is around 200 to 300 a day. But on Sunday it jumped up to 2800 and yesterday on Monday it reached more than 4500 hits a day! And most of them were coming from http://www.blitzbasic.com.
Reason was that matibee, the creator of the mbmFramework, posted an article in the BlitzBasic forums that his great framework is now free to use.
And obviously he mentioned my game 10 seconds as an example game including the source code (which is true so jump over to the 10 seconds page and get it!).
Seems there are still a lot of people reading the BlitzBasic forums and interested in BlitzMax! Thanks for that and welcome here! Hopefully you don't mind that I'm currently working with Java and Slick
But the one or two long readers of my blog know that I tend to change programming languages once in a while...
Again, welcome and feel free to roam around my site, grab the games and stuff that's for free and put comments into my blog if you can't resist
Cheers,
Tommy | |
| [Game Dev] Shine on you crazy lightmap | Tuesday, November 16, 2010, 10:14 PM
Unfortunately not yet. Still working on it. Day 4 it is. I got the animations to work, collecting stars is working and some simple blend effect (also an Entity on top of all other entities) at the end of the level is done.
I needed to fix the depth ordering of entities which was called before new entities were added to the list. So the depth order of entities was messed up...
And right now I'm working on the light map stuff - just quickly typing these words, waiting for my next cup of tea (2 minutes in hot water) and then it's back to coding.
One issue I realized after porting the ActionScript platformer code base to Java was the dependence of the code to a 60 FPS frame rate. Rats!
But that's the default behavior of Flashpunk - running with a target frame rate of 60 FPS. So I decided to bite the bullet and finish this game with a given FPS of 60. Luckily this is just a oneliner in Slick.
If anyone wants to modify the code to run delta based please raise a hand or post a comment - I'll send you the source code
Anyway, time to get my cup of tea and continue coding - as long as I can stay awake (max an hour from now on...).
Good night,
Tommy | |
| [Game Dev] Jump! | Sunday, November 14, 2010, 8:14 PM
This sunday afternoon I spent three hours "off time" and continued work on my platformer game. I took all my code, removed stuff from Gornova's Marte Engine code (the State and StateManager) and added quite a bit of ActionScript 3 code from Flashpunk's entity code and Noel Berry's Advanced Platform Engine here.
All this is nicely controlled by some WorldGameState class that I wrote which allows me to do all of my high level entity stuff in any StateBasedGame inside Slick!
To my surprise it worked nearly immediately (only one 5 minute bug search)
What I have got now is a jumping and walking player figure, collisions with solid blocks, gravity, friction and acceleration. Missing is the dealing with proper animations (right now I just show one image for the player) but that's pretty straight forward.
I guess I will add some convenience stuff and a new Entity subclass to deal with ParticleEmitters so that I can create an EmitterEntity which renders at any Z or depth value inside my world.
Final thing missing is the lighting stuff to simulate day and night and the glowing stars and moon and sun...
Nice end of coding day three of the platformer competition game. Not sure if I'll make it in time but there are still two weeks left...
Later,
Tommy
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| [Game Dev] Starting with Star Cleaner |  Tuesday, November 09, 2010, 11:09 PM
So I came up with a game idea and a name for the "Night and Day" competition over at http://www.experimentalgameplay.com. I kind of wasted one evening thinking about using Game Maker for creating my game because I knew that there are tons of platformer and lighting engines available for Game Maker. But I quickly realized that that just wasn't my cup of tea. And just in time Kevin Glass, the master mind behind Slick, came up with a cool solution and even working example code for nice lighting done in Slick! So again Slick is the weapon of choice for this game. Also I wanted to test some applet stuff on my website for a very long time. The "Star Cleaner" game could be a small and fun test game for that. Especially because LWJGL, the underlying OpenGL wrapper of Slick, improved their applet support a lot in their last releases!
The rest of the night (and thus my first official working day for the game) was spent with Real-DRAW Pro 5 to create some lousy programmer's art. Playing around with Real-DRAW's different painting styles I decided to go with some "crayon" style. The great thing is that you can apply those styles even after your drawing is done. And it's non destructive so you can try out any other style immediately. Absolutely great!
Tonight (second working day) I looked at the Slick Platformer example and at Gornova's Marte Engine and threw some of those classes and code fragments together with my own existing stuff from SpiderTrap and They Come.
Just two hours later I have entities with updating and rendering, a level loading class combined with my XML based RessourceLoader class and all nicely integrated with Slick's state based game classes.
Here's a first screenshot to the right (just click on it for a bigger image).
The next nights (earliest at the end of the week) will be spent with adding platform movement code, jumping, collisions and stuff like that. Sounds like fun
Do you think the graphics are okay for a seven day overall time competition?
It's bed time now, so have a good one too!
Tommy
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| [Game Dev] Another month, another competition... | Tuesday, November 02, 2010, 8:45 PM
over at http://www.experimentalgameplay.com! While last month's competition theme "Boys and girls" didn't interest me at all the November theme "Night and Day" got my brain immediately storming
I think I've got a pretty nice idea for a game - but there are two issues left:
- spare time to join a competition,
- I'll have to wait until someone (Kevin to the rescue!) shows me how to implement some lighting with Slick...because my game does require lighting given the above theme!
I'm soooo keen to code this small game
I'll keep you posted.
Later,
Tommy | |
| | [Game Dev] Are you looking for some cool game coding competitions? | Tuesday, September 07, 2010, 10:15 PM
Right now there are two cool game coding competitions going on:
- over at http://www.experimentalgameplay.com you have seven days during September to code an endless game. Yes, you read it right: create a game that never ends, always looks cool and attractive, can be interrupted and continued any time and still should be fun to play . I am looking forward to the end of September to see what game ideas popped up there!
- Google seems to be interested in Game AI and is doing coding contests in that area: http://ai-contest.com/. This time the task is to create some bot logic to play (and win) a round of Galcon. Galcon was a winning LudumDare entry a few years ago and is now a great single and multiplayer strategy game running on your Windows, Mac or Linux PC or on the IPhone, IPad, Android and several other devices! The great thing is that you can download starter packs with source code to enhance your bot and test it in some "arena". Even better: those starter packs are available in several programming languages like Java, C++, C#, Python and so on! And the compo ends November 27 so there is quite some time to get started and finish your winner bot!
I'm pretty sure I won't join any of those competitions but maybe you're in the right mood for a good challenge?
Have fun,
Tommy | |
| [Game Dev] Porting is progressing very well | Tuesday, September 07, 2010, 10:08 PM
Most of the game code of They Come is ported to Java and Slick now. Only minor issues are missing. I will add them when they are required.
At the moment I'm redoing the shape editor for the game. That's pretty easy with Netbeans. The built in GUI editor (named Matisse) is definitely one of the easiest and most versatile GUI editors I've ever used! It's pretty bad that there is no comparable GUI editor for Eclipse which is still my favorite IDE.
All available ones are crap or not free for commercial usage and very expensive. The best implementation seems to be the "remake" of Matisse inside of MyEclipse. But MyEclipse requires an annual fee of 60$ to keep it operational!
Anyway, I'm expecting the shape editor to be usable in the next few weeks. Screen shots might be shown earlier - but no promises here | |
| | [Website] Playing around a bit... | Wednesday, August 11, 2010, 8:04 PM
I've changed the layout to a fixed width of 1024 and also modified some other settings like colors, horizontal menu (again) and my logo for the side frames.
More changes are to come, starting with the Links page because links on buttons are so outdated | |
| [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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