Tag Archives: akihabara

On Game Development and Akihabara

Posted on

Syrup Dispensers From Hell Screenshot

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 :)

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

BastardBlaster Running on iPhone

Posted on

Pretty neat! Still a few graphical glitches. Thanks goes out to my buddy Chris for the screens and test.

Play My Game – BastardBlaster

Posted on

As of this posting it’s a very early version with still much of the stock artwork and enemy types. But, it’s fun and playable. Go Akihabara!

The story goes that you’re a BastardBlaster, conscripted to battle everything in the world that’s annoying. Flat tires, Blue Screens of Death, when you go to eat pizza and there’s none left… the list goes on and on. If it’s annoying, you shoot it.

http://arcade.xandorus.com

 

 

Took a break, had some tea, now I’m back to coding.

Posted on

Ahh, refreshing tea from Bon The Place (my fav tea store, ever.)

Got the game working in Chrome since I decided to simply host it locally with Apache at localhost. Just makes thing simpler since Chrome seems to run the game a lot faster than Firefox (my laptop is a beat up piece of … but it’s still kickin’ so I really can’t complain, I guess.)

Will post more progress and I make some.

Default Music Now In, Runs in FF But Not In Chrome

Posted on

Got the game loading and playing in Firefox, but doesn’t even try to load in Chrome. I have no idea why. It seems I’ve spent about twice as much time debugging as I have developing. For this stuff to work, that has to change.

I’ll reiterate: Chrome NEEDS a javascript error console! (or am I dumb and I just can’t find it?)

“Not Well Formed” Is a Red Herring

Posted on

I couldn’t figure out why my HTML5/JS Akihabara game was not loading and thought the error in the Firefox JavaScript Error Console “Not well formed” had something to do with it. Turns out that if Akihabara cannot find the audio files for your game, it hangs on loading and there is no error in the console to that effect.

I threw the OGGs and MP3s in the directory and we’re off to the races. Still get “Not well formed” but the game runs. Who knows?

 

 

Ack! JavaScript File Access Issues

Posted on

20 minutes blown trying to figure out why I couldn’t include JS files from ../ in the <head> tag. *sigh* Chrome needs the Javascript error output window that Firefox has.

Almost have the game loading, however. Making progress.

Note for anyone who is working on an Akihabara JS game: making a directory inside the unzipped Akihabara directory then trying to include the Akihabara files by ../akihabara/*.js does not work as JS in the browser cannot access stuff outside of its own domain.