It’s 45 minutes late, but the map loader now properly imports a level (converted from a Google Docs spreadsheet) into a Javascript array, then selects the proper tile in the tilemaps image to make the level.
Here’s an image.
Now onto actually designing the level and making the game.
NetHack – Plane of Fire (Photo credit: ludios)
Guelph Game Jam #4 just started. I’ll be liveblogging here, tracking our progress on our Rogue-like. It’s Michael Hoyle and Me, along with a touch of art asset assistance from Amy.
The theme of this game jam is Growth.
We’re still trying to figure out how that will be implemented in our idea for a Rogue-like, but our first few ideas are pretty promising.
It’s going to be a tight schedule because we’re breaking my first rule of game jams: don’t build your own engine. Hoyle and I have been building a small Javascript Rogue-like engine for the past week in preparation but there are still a few things left to do. I’ve come up with the idea of taking the first two hours of the jam to complete the features of the engine that we need today then taking the remaining 6 hours to make the game.
If we’re going to do this, we’ve got to be ruthless and pull the plug after those two hours and switch to the game. If we let it slip and say “we’ll do one extra hour on the engine” we’ve lost.
Wish us luck!
Image via CrunchBase
Facebook has recently changed the way it handles my news feed. Because of this, it’s likely that I’ll be reading it less and keeping it around just to post things and check up on to make sure I haven’t missed a message.
Here’s why: I don’t equate friendship with following.
When I’m your friend, I want to keep in touch, maybe hang out, and share something with you directly. I don’t want to see your thought stream.
Don’t take it personally because it isn’t personal. When I read stuff online, it’s usually news. I want to learn something new about the fields in which I am excited, not in which you are excited. If it’s not news, it’s an editorial on said fields. If it’s not an editorial, it’s a tweet from someone who might be generating the previous two examples.
I had spent the last 6-12 months whittling down my Facebook news feed to weed out most people’s/most page’s posts from showing up. The little down arrow icon with the “Hide all from xyz” was my best friend.
Then, a week or so ago, all those settings got wiped in favour of a new “acquaintences” system where you specifically select which group you want to read from.
Here’s why it doesn’t work: I have no clue what people are going to say before they say it, so I have no idea who I would like to follow. But, once they’ve said it, I sure as hell know who I would like to unsubscribe from.
This doesn’t mean I don’t want to be their friend, it just means I don’t want to mix their stuff in with mine is all.
ouya3_gallery_post (Photo credit: Saad Faruque)
My go-to IDE for everything for the past 5 years has been Netbeans, so to switch to Eclipse is something new for me. But, Eclipse is insanely popular, so there’s got to be a good reason for it.
Google seems to love it, too, and it’s always great to be in tune with them. I used to develop stuff for the Google App Engine and it was the same thing as it is with Android this go-around: if you didn’t use Eclipse, it was a bugger to get going. Relying on a third-party plugin from Kenai to access a closed system was just too much of a reach-around and I got out of there.
So, Eclipse. Excited.
Why Android? Well, this recent hullabaloo about Ouya has got me excited. I’ve been toying with game development now for years and after completing a few games in the past few Ludum Dare/7dfps/Guelph Game Jams, I can safely say that the idea of getting my games up on the TV screen with a controller turns my crank.
It was the same thing the first time I played BastardBlaster (my html5/javascript shmup) on the Wii, using the Wii browser and Wiimote. I loved it and wanted to have more.
Playing games on a PC/laptop is just not the same as on a console. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got hundreds of PC games and love them dearly. But, there’s something special about a controller in your hands and a big TV screen in front.
I’m looking now through the Youtubes and Googles for Android development stories, tips, tricks, hints, tutorials, cautions, etc. If you’ve got experience in this area and would like to share your story, I’d love to read it.
Here’s what’s on my playlist this week. It’s virt-heavy. Be prepared.
I took a few hours recently to set my Eee PC 701 2G Surf up as a dedicated emulator machine. I picked up a dirt-cheap 16GB Sandisk Cruzer USB stick for $9 and downloaded an ISO of Mandriva Linux 2011.0.
This thing is pretty sweet! It runs SNES, NES, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, DS, Genesis, MAME, and Master System emulators. Pretty much anything 2D it can handle easily.
Even better, I had a bunch of space left over on the USB stick for mp3s and oggs, so I can listen to some decent music while I’m driving in my car thanks to the audio input jack on my car stereo.
Anyway, watch the video for all the deets.
Syrup Dispensers From Hell is coming along quite well. I’ve decided to use the Legend of Sadness base for the game, which plays and looks a lot like a Legend of Zelda title. Instead of having our hero travel into a cave, he’ll be travelling into a breakfast restaurant to save us all from horrid syrup dispensers.
This time around I’ve got a lot more experience working with Akihabara so I’ve been able to work harder on gameplay and graphics rather than learning how the game engine works. Designing tilemaps for a game, as a programmer, is tough work. It’s not that I dislike working on art or even that I’m not artistic, but what looks great in The Gimp looks like shit when it’s tiled a hundred times.
Doing graphics for a game is basically incrementalism combined with healthy doses of iteration. You tweak a pixel, test it in-game, hate it, go back, tweak another pixel, hate it, go back, and so on.
A neat feature that I discovered today was Akihabara’s ability to scale the size of the game display by a value that is less than 1, meaning that it does not need to zoom to an integer value. Currently I’ve got the game displaying at 320×240 with a zoom of 2.5, making that actual output 800×600.
Well, back to work :)
Image via Wikipedia
The second Guelph Game Jam has just started at the ThreeFortyNine co-workspace. The goal? To make a game in less than a day. We have about 8 hours to design, build, and test our games. Then the last bit of time is spent playing everyone else’s game.
I did this a few months ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.
The theme this time is ‘Monsters.’ The game designer can take that in any way, whether it be about monsters, being a monster, defeating monsters, etc.
As was the case last time, I’ll be live-blogging my progress here and on my BitBuilder game developer Twitter account.
Staying at the Hotel Victoria in downtown Toronto for the last week with my girlfriend Amy has opened us to a ton of new, fantastic vegetarian and vegan restaurants. Google has helped us find them all, but I wanted to take a second to put together a small list in case you’re downtown Toronto for a while and are looking for great places to eat.
I’ll separate them by category.
Pizzaiolo
http://www.pizzaiolo.ca/
There are probably 15 to 20 of these around Toronto, but the one we went to was just a few doors down from our hotel on Yonge St. It was amazing. In fact, it was so amazing, we ordered pizzas there two days in a row. They have a ton of vegetarian and vegan choices and each are made fresh right in front of you. It’s amazing.
Urban Herbivore
http://www.torontoeatoncentre.com/EN/Directory/Stores/Pages/UrbanHerbivore_F018.aspx
Like most food places in Toronto, there are a few locations. The one we went to was in the Eaton Centre, and it was fantastic. I ate the BBQ Tofu sandwich and loved it even though I’m not normally a huge fan of tofu. It was quick and cheap. Like all great vegetarian food, if you didn’t know it was vegetarian you wouldn’t be able to tell.
Fresh
http://www.freshrestaurants.ca/our_history.asp
Fresh was, without a doubt, our favourite. It’s got great style, it’s busy, it’s fast, and the food tastes fantastic. Amy loved it so much she bought one of the recipe books they offer on sale.
King’s Cafe (Kensington Market)
http://www.kingscafe.com/
This is the sister restaurant to our favourite vegetarian restaurant in Guelph, Zen Garden. Great food and amazing Lychee Black tea.