I talk about a game! (…again)

About half a year ago (or two blog posts), I decided to quit blogging about my game and only write about (1) things relevant to other developers and (2) whatever else I wanted. As it turns out, I’m quite good at not-blogging. I even went so far as to not-blog about anything.

Going silent was a good decision, though. The confidence I had in my ideas was as weak as my determination to complete them. While I WAS going to create a game, which game that would be changed every week. Did the Internet want to hear about my growing pile of abandoned projects? I doubt it.

In fact, silence was such a good rule that I’m reluctant to break it. For some reason, though, I committed myself to revealing The Game today. Here’s a screenshot, and when you’re done thinking “this doesn’t tell me much” I’ll type some words about it.

Trying to follow Tom Francis’ four points on quickly explaining a game,  I would say this is an adventure game about moving furniture to prevent your memories from being stolen. Truth be told, I don’t know what this game is, but I know some elements that will be in it, such as dialog(ue)-trees, an inventory, managing your psyche, and exploration. There will be a plot, which I have mixed feelings about, but hopefully it will be good.

I think that’s all for now! I have been making excellent progress with my strategy of not saying anything, so I’ll try not to spoil it just yet.

Until next time!

A new year?

Merry Christmas and happy new year, everyone! I know you’ve all read a dozen posts just like this one, so I’ll be brief.

2012 was great. I learned a lot!

2013 will be better, because I’ll be releasing a game! I’ll be coming out of hiding to talk about it before the end of the month.

Thanks very much for looking here. I don’t know why you do, but I appreciate it!

Unweekly Update and the Next Shiny Thing

For a variety of reasons, it’s been a whole month since the last post. I apologize if any of you have been impatiently waiting!

This post will mostly be self-reflective rambling, so if you don’t care to be bored then why not go play some of the entries from the 2012 Christian Developers Network Speedgame Competition?

I participated this year with a couple cool cats under the banner of “TeamBIO”. Our game is free to download and play, of course. This is the first year we’ve managed to get a working game submitted, so I’m pretty excited!

Aside from the speedgame and real life, I accomplished remarkably little forward progress on my game project. This is due partly to a lack of direction and faith in the design, but perhaps mostly to a poisonous attraction to new ideas. Better game concepts. The Next Shiny Thing.

I’ve made no secret of my inexperience coding games. There’s little doubt in my mind that mid-project hesitation is common among new developers, but recognizing that does not help me overcome the decision at hand. Do I continue making what I consider an already well-explored genre? Or do I salvage (almost all of) my code and try something new? I thought I was firmly determined not to dart from project to project, never completing anything. Now I wonder, though. Is this just how indie games naturally evolve?

At any rate, the tumultuous knot of a game that I’m working on isn’t something I care to expose while it’s in its infancy. I know I stated earlier that I wanted to be more open with these updates, and going silent is definitely the opposite of that. Should I care? I’ve learned more about myself and how I think I want to develop games, and it doesn’t make sense to operate on old opinions that are no longer applicable.

I hope to continue blogging about things learned and opinions I’ll regret revealing later. Hopefully future posts will be interesting and the adventure is enjoyable for everyone!

Time-since-the-last-one Update

It’s been how long since my last post?

Well it appears I hit a snag for a while. I’m working through some difficult coding problems (for me, anyway), and I just couldn’t bring myself to post “Sorry! Nothing new this week!”

So what’s happened? Well, I “finished” a shape-tracing tool made in QT. This will let me create shapes for Box2D quicker.

I also started working on another sideproject on the weekends for fun. What’s that, you say? My current project was began as a side-project? Uhm… I suppose that’s true. Given that I am only working on this new game on weekends, though, I hope to maintain focus and not spiral into an endless cycle of starting new projects….

…Oh dear.

Weekly update

…except it’s been more than a week. If you were holding your breath for a new post, I apologize!

I’m learning the QT library so that I can create level and object editors. Here’s a screenshot of the progress!

You may also notice that this doesn’t look like Linux Mint anymore! I finally switched distros – First to Ubuntu on the day of its release, and then to Kubuntu over the weekend (sorry, Unity). I really like Kubuntu so far. Transitioning from Gnome 2 was fairly painless, and I hardly think about the fact that I’m using a new desktop environment now.

If all goes well, I hope to have the physics editor done next week. It’s taking a long time, but I think that’s only because I have to learn QT as well. Hopefully forthcoming editors and tools will arrive quicker.

Next week I plan on finishing and moving on from the physics tracing tool, and I hope to create some new game graphics for scrolling backgrounds. Should be fun!

Weekly(ish) update

This week’s progress was good, but ended on a sour note.

I implemented Box2D debug drawing and view-scrolling. This means that I can have many layers of parallax backgrounds that will look great. They aren’t in yet, though.

The sour note was that I spent the greater part of this week figuring out a really cool feature that it appears I can’t use. The bright side is that I’m releasing the source here so anyone else can use it!

You’ll notice in the above screenshot how inaccurately those boxes conform to the sprites. I decided that instead of defining polygons manually, I would write a function to trace the outline of the bitmap and convert it into a low-polygon mesh for the engine. Today I solved that issue, but found out that Box2D does not support concave polygons and has a default maximum of 8 points per shape.

However, it is working. This is the result of using the function with a tolerance of 10, which I consider fairly large.

31-vert polygon.

Source code after the break.

Weekly update

For those that celebrate it, Happy Easter!

Last week’s screenshot and this week’s won’t look too different, functionally speaking. Some of the graphics have changed, but there are only a couple new mechanics. Namely, you can now shoot and asteroids rain from the top of the screen. Innovation!

A lot has changed in the code, though. I added Box2D physics, movement is framerate-independent, and the component-manager is much more feature-complete. Overall, I feel close to being able to actually make a game here. Did I say that last week?

You can follow me on twitter to see what I’m working on during the week or ask questions.