I just started a new computer game project. I'm writing it in Processing, which is basically Java with an extra layer to get you up and running quickly, and a few tools (color picker, font creator, blah blah blah) and a compiler thing for porting to pretty much any OS, which is nice.
Anyways, I have simple game mechanics set up - a character who can move around and jump - and right now I'm working on tilemap design. This whole thing is basically an exercise in visual design for me, something that's not really my strength. I spent a couple hours the other day setting up a tile editor and like twenty different tiles.
Here's a picture showcasing the tiles I have so far.
As you can see they're all basically glassy, somewhat generic, rounded rectangles. I may or may not get rid of some of them later but I'm being careful to avoid abusing my rounded rectangle privileges.
The working tile is Something With Text, definitely subject to change in the relatively near future, depending on how soon I can think of a better name (or someone suggests a better name to me).
In Medias Res is a game that starts in the middle of things. You are thrust into an unfamiliar environment, and are forced to figure things out. Because of this I'll have to be pretty careful about the learning curve, and unfortunately I can't do any beta-testing before its due for the contest (at least not online, I might enlist my siblings or friends)
Anyways, all I have is an idea so far. I'm going to re-use the sprites from Base 671 (which is dead), so this isn't going to be a physics platformer like every single one of my previous games.
With help from Quigibo, I was able to set up a simple mod engine (it literally is one line of code) so that I can run any no-stub program from within another program. Because of this its a pretty unsafe engine, since the mods can do basically anything they want to. But hey, whatever.
Alright, I've been looking somewhat into Android development. Does anyone do app development? If so, I'd like to start a discussion/argument about which phone operating system is "better" all-around for programmers.
I'll start by making a case for Android dev: 1. Java (Android) > Objective-C (iOS) Objective-C is an incredibly verbose language, as Apple seems to constantly be trying to change things simply to become the standard, even if the changes don't make sense. 2. Android costs less; it only costs 20$ to be able to submit apps to the market, versus Apple's 100$. 3. Android has less apps; from a developer's standpoint, I see this as a plus. If there are less apps out there on the market, you have less competition, and your app will probably do better. 4. Android is a more "open" phone; as an example, emulators such as programs that can load roms for NES/SNES/GB/GBC/GBA/N64 are allowed and in fact plentiful on the Android market. The way I understand it, emulators are not allowed on the iOS app store. Also, with Android you can even have things like Ubuntu for Android. I could be wrong, but I haven't seen anything like that for iOS.
That's the way I see it; correct me if I'm wrong, of course. What do you think?
A friend from school and I are working on a role-playing game. Both of us are pretty heavily interestedin going into the game programming industry as careers, so basically in an effort to get as much of a head start as possible in the indie game industry, we're making games!
Anyways. This is our first project, an unnamed RPG for PC. I'm doing all the programming, in C/C++ and SDL, and my friend's doing level design, art and music. We just barely started doing actual work, and as such don't have a playable demo right now. For the most part, we're planning everything out, in-depth storyline, etc.
The way I'm doing the programming is slightly backwards - I'm getting the menu screen, notepad, inventory, map, and save screen out of the way before I get to work on the meat and potatoes, the tiling engine, etc.
So using Visual C++, the GIMP and my mad skillz (not) I wrote the in-game menu, like when you press escape, the game grays out and this pop-up appears:
Haha this is about all I have to show so far. Well, I take it back - I've actually completed the notes-taking page too, so as soon as I write the Inventory and the View Map deal I can get to work on the actual game.
As I mentioned above, so far we don't actually have a name for the game yet, but we came up with a name for the main character, Zak Leroi. Also, we're trying to come up with a name for our company, so if you have any ideas, let me know
OK, as some of you know I've recently changed my display name to LincolnB (thanks to Deep Thought) The reason for this is, I was going to apply for an internship at Microsoft this summer, and I wanted to show off some of my programming and calc stuff, so I wanted to link to my Omni and Ceme accounts on my resume. However I didn't think the name Butts would look particularly good, so I'm changing it.
On a side note, I can't get the internship because i'm a year too young so, next year!
Please read through that, at least in passing. It really is valuable info, and will help I think to reduce spammy and five-second questions on this site (not that there's an abundance, but there are some)
Anyways, even if you don't read through that whole article, please read through this story (also found on the post):
Spoiler For Spoiler:
Bob pointed into a corner of the office. "Over there," he said, "is a duck. I want you to ask that duck your question."
I looked at the duck. It was, in fact, stuffed, and very dead. Even if it had not been dead, it probably would not have been a good source of design information. I looked at Bob. Bob was dead serious. He was also my superior, and I wanted to keep my job.
I awkwardly went to stand next to the duck and bent my head, as if in prayer, to commune with this duck. "What," Bob demanded, "are you doing?"
"I'm asking my question of the duck," I said.
One of Bob's superintendants was in his office. He was grinning like a bastard around his toothpick. "Andy," he said, "I don't want you to pray to the duck. I want you to ask the duck your question."
I licked my lips. "Out loud?" I said.
"Out loud," Bob said firmly.
I cleared my throat. "Duck," I began.
"Its name is Bob Junior," Bob's superintendant supplied. I shot him a dirty look.
"Duck," I continued, "I want to know, when you use a clevis hanger, what keeps the sprinkler pipe from jumping out of the clevis when the head discharges, causing the pipe to..."
In the middle of asking the duck my question, the answer hit me. The clevis hanger is suspended from the structure above by a length of all-thread rod. If the pipe-fitter cuts the all-thread rod such that it butts up against the top of the pipe, it essentially will hold the pipe in the hanger and keep it from bucking.
I turned to look at Bob. Bob was nodding. "You know, don't you," he said.
"You run the all-thread rod to the top of the pipe," I said.
"That's right," said Bob. "Next time you have a question, I want you to come in here and ask the duck, not me. Ask it out loud. If you still don't know the answer, then you can ask me."
Many, many, many MANY thanks to TI-Over9000, without whose genius I couldn't get that cool looking spinny thing. I based this whole thing off of his algorithm he posted the other day at http://ourl.ca/15395
By the way, this isn't a legit project, just a little proof-of-concept I put together last night after seeing TI-Over9000's thread DIGICTCH is the executable, and ROTATSRC and BSPRITES are the source code.
For a compy project, I need a 640 by 480 bitmap of some note paper. Seems like it would be simple but I suck like crap at art, so I'm asking here. It's for a "Notes" section, where the user presses F6 or something and a text entry form comes up, and this would be the background.
An Exercise In Futility, or just Futility, is a calculator game I wrote in Axe for Cemetech's contest number 8. Futility is an Arcade/Platformer Survival game, and as that denotes the goal is to survive as long as you can, throughout a host of other game elements, including various Arcade games going on in the background you need to avoid. My apologies if the App version doesn't work - just transfer the program FUTILITY.8XP to your calc's archive.
So I decided to make my very own (extremely hard to see) disco-caster for my Flashlight Demo thread. It was actually really easy, from what I already in the the flashlight demo.
(in retrospect I went a little crazy on the psychedelic wall effects)
Hey, I spent the last coupla days messing around with the idea of raycasting, and came up with something that, while looks very different, is in reality moderately similar to a first person view type of game.
I'm not really planning anything big for this. If you want the executable, or the source, or an explanation (kind of a headache), just let me know and I'll hook you up.
For the longest time, I have wondered about Pt-Mask and how the heck to use it effectively, but after an IRC discussion with Runer112, I think I have it! I hope this clears up something for someone else who might been in the same position I was.
Runer112 Pt-On() has two colors Runer112 black and trasnparent Runer112 Pt-Off() has two colors Runer112 black and white Runer112 Pt-Mask() has 4 colors Runer112 transparent, white, gray, and black Runer112 Pt-Mask()r has 3 colors (and a sort of color) Runer112 transparent, white, black, and xor
Runer112 I don't know if I have any example sprites around here... Runer112 but let's just do something simple buttsfredkin k Runer112 [00000000FFFFFFFF][0000FFFF0000FFFF] buttsfredkin right Runer112 that would draw a sprite Runer112 first two rows are transparent Runer112 next two rows are white Runer112 next two are gray Runer112 and last two are black
buttsfredkin so correct me if I'm wrong here buttsfredkin 00 = transparent buttsfredkin 01 = white buttsfredkin 10 = gray buttsfredkin 11 = black buttsfredkin ? Runer112 yup, that's how Pt-Mask() works
Runer112 and it draws it all in one call buttsfredkin and you give it a single pointer to a 16 byte sprite? Runer112 instead of having to do two separate calls for drawing a normal grayscale sprite Runer112 yup Runer112 and that 16-byte sprite should be formatted as 2 8-byte sprites buttsfredkin right
buttsfredkin what about Pt-Mask()r? Runer112 although r normally denotes back buffer/grayscale Runer112 in this case it means the opposite Runer112 only because Pt-Mask() was added first Runer112 so that works a lot like Pt-Mask() without the r buttsfredkin alright Runer112 except it only draws to the main screen buffer, so only for black and white
Runer112 00 = transparent Runer112 01 = black Runer112 10 = white Runer112 11 = xor
Hey so I've been experimenting with Zedd quite a bit, and I think I've come up with a fairly solid foundation for a game. It's not much yet, but here it is:
For Cemetech's contest #8, I'm going to make a platform game. It'll be 8*8, with a scrolling tilemap, and I have a whole bunch of ideas (none of which are yet implemented). So it's still in more of the brainstorming phase, but I wrote the collisions and movement engine the other day.
For those of you who recognized it, it's the same engine I posted in saintrunner's Seeker thread I loved it so much I decided I'm going to make a game out of it! I'll try and get a tilemapping/scrolling example set up during physics tommorrow, and hopefully get a screenie posted.
Spoiler For Previous Update, with screenshot:
UPDATE:
Revamped the graphics, and threw out that weird jumping bean looking character. I think I like the new look
UPDATE:
I've changed the focus / vision for the game to a Survival type of game. Basically, the goal is to survive as long as you can through different conditions, as things get progressively harder. I have five different modes working, I might be able to get a new screenie later. Also, I've officially changed the title.
UPDATE(a):
Screenshot, featuring different modes - next up to do is set up the obstacles. The way the obstacles are going to work is that it's going to have a classic arcade game (like pong) playing in the background automatically, and you have to avoid the ball and paddle. Stuff like that.
FINAL UPDATE:
I finished this game the other night. Not much explaining I'm afraid, but I'm working on a fairly in-depth Readme.txt for when I'm allowed to release this. I made a few screenies for your viewing pleasure.
Show Posts
so, next year!
I loved it so much I decided I'm going to make a game out of it! I'll try and get a tilemapping/scrolling example set up during physics tommorrow, and hopefully get a screenie posted.
