I’m taking a few hours tonight to go through the archives and put up some of my finished/unreleased/unfinished game jam projects onto github. Ludum Dare 26 is next weekend and I want to have a simple URL to send people to to try out my stuff.
Tag Archives: game development
Atari Jaguar Dev Journal 001
I’m up and running with BJL, Linux, and a sample “Hello World” app. Special shout out and thanks goes to JagChris for the handy dandy BJL cable.
Next step: add some animation to the screen to get a handle on how that sort of thing works.
On Game Development and Akihabara
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 :)
And We’re Off! Guelph Game Jam 2 Starts Now!
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.
I may have just solved my bug!
It’s compiling, so I thought I’d take a second to update the blog on my progress!
The other day, I blogged about the difference between char and char * in C and how I spent a good deal of time wrapping my head around how concatenations and string comparisons work in C and C++. It turns out that in my initial search…replace I mistakenly forgot to switch some of them back to the way they were written beforehand.
Since BitBuilder uses ELIX and the erroneous concatenations and comparisons were in the ELIX files, I may have solved it by reverting it back to the way they were. Programming is great like that. You learn a lot but it takes time and patience.
Here goes.
Liveblogging Progress on BitBuilder Today
BitBuilder Game Platform Logo
I’m building games today with @hoylemd at Red Brick Cafe and, once we’re done our coffees, back in my apartment living room. Actually, to be truthful, I’m not working on my game BastardBlaster, I’m working on the BitBuilder Game Platform, which is my fork of the Mokoi Game Engine.
It’s a great exercise for me since it exposes me to C, C++, GTK, and git, which I love.
Hoyle is really good at C and C++ so he’s always great at bouncing errors off of and helping out. Will post more as I make progress.
Default Music Now In, Runs in FF But Not In Chrome
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?)
Ack! JavaScript File Access Issues
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.
GitHub repo
If you wanna track my progress on BastardBlaster, my game for the Guelph Game Jam, check out my GitHub repo.
https://github.com/rocky1138/BastardBlaster
The game is GPL and is based on Solitude from the Akihabara HTML5/JS game platform.
And We’re Off!
The proverbial gunshot has been fired and all the developers here at the Guelph Game Jam have started work. I’m included in that list and will be liveblogging my experience, all its ups and downs included.
The theme for this Game Jam is “Big”. Whatever that means is up to you and how you choose to use it in your game is also up to you!
As for myself, I’m thinking Rampage meets Gradius.
More later.