Animation Editor October 5, 2007
Posted by Jesse in : 4E6 , add a commentSo, I’m getting started on a 4E6 entry. My biggest gripe (and it’s minor) with XNA as it exists now is the difficulty in working with the standard .Net Framework to build tools. Apparently this will all be cleaned up with XNA Game Studio Express 2.0, but it’s somewhat annoying now.
However, while you can’t yet drop an XNA game window onto a .Net form, you can create one separately. So that’s what I’m doing.
That’s my dead simple animation editor. You draw boxes around each frame you want, and then set the frame’s origin. (In this case, I mean pivot point for rotation.) This information will be saved out into an xml layout that I’ve already built into the content pipeline. I’ll be building a simple sprite editor next, then follow that up with a level editor.
Four Elements October 4, 2007
Posted by Jesse in : 4E6 , add a commentAnother six months of silence. I’m an excellent blogger, huh?
Soon after writing that last entry (the mammoth one that I just modified to prevent it from taking up the whole front page), I got a job offer to return to a company I had worked for previously. I’d regretted leaving the job almost immediately after I did, so going back was pretty much a no brainer. So once again I work for Veil Interactive, which is a branch of the Koplar Communications tree. The reason this might be of interest to anyone reading this blog is that World Events Productions is another branch. (A sibling company, I suppose.) They’re the company responsible for Voltron, and they work upstairs from me. That’s pretty neat, in my opinion. I’m not sure what the blog policy is around here, though, so I probably won’t be writing about work very often.
So, once again my game development time got swept away while I was busy worrying about life.
And while I don’t have a ton of free time now, I do want to continue working toward someday finishing something. Anything would be nice. Lucky then, that new motivation has come along. GameDev’s 6th annual Four Elements contest.
I get to pick three of the four elements, explosions, crystals, ponies, and accountants, and create a game using them. My current thought is to build a game similar to Galaga, set underwater. After destroying (explosions) the enemy seahorses (ponies) you can collect the treasures (crystals) they leave behind to purchase upgrades. Something like Titan Attacks would be amazing, but I think I’ll target something that requires quite a bit less work. 
Finally, I should mention that I wrote a few entries in to my dev-journal on GameDev, about the development I’ve done recently. I’ll probably mirror them here at some point.
Fun design work April 13, 2007
Posted by Jesse in : The Amulet , add a commentGame design was never more fun for me than when I was in elementary school. My friends and I would constantly pass back and forth our level designs for Ghosts ‘N Goblins and Castlevania. (I’m sure our teachers found it quite annoying.) It’s hard for me to imagine the huge number of hours we spent on those drawings. My friend’s mom even helped us find mailing addresses for Capcom and Konami in our Nintendo game manuals, and we mailed our levels off to the companies. It seems most likely to me that they were just quickly discarded, but it’s nice to think that they might have been forwarded on to the original Japanese developers along with other fan mail. Those were fun times.
And I got a small taste of that feeling again a few days ago. I’ve been mulling ideas for what kind of game I could write to enter the MyDreamRPG contest and I think I’ve come up with something pretty neat. It’s a platformer with lots of rpg elements. And just like twenty years ago, I’ve gotten swept away doodling up maps, writing stories, and coming up with special powers for my imaginary heroes.
One Year Dream Game Contest + TorqueX experimentation April 3, 2007
Posted by Jesse in : Game Development , add a commentJay Barnson over at Rampant Games (See footnote 1) posted today about a contest that was announced on MyDreamRpg.com. (Most of the info seems to be written in forum posts. Take a look here.) The gist is, you’ve got one year to write a game (possibly restricted to an rpg, though the rules don’t seem to indicate that), and you could win $10,000. There are a couple of catches. You must use a GarageGames engine (TGB, TGE, TGEA, or TorqueX). Also, the winner isn’t necessarily decided by who made the best game, but instead by a point based system, where points are scored by categories like the following: (copy/pasted from the forum I linked to above)
Points awarded for monthly status updates
Points awarded for game update blogs on GG site
Points awarded for creation of game associated website
Points awarded for GUI design
Points awarded for concept art
Points awarded for cross-site promotion and hype-building (fanbase/community)
Points awarded for adherance to design in final result
Points awarded for launch process and response to player feedback from alpha phase
Points awarded for community response to the final result
Points awarded for game documentation
Points awarded for originality
Points awarded for sound design
Points awarded for backing up smacktalk
It seems pretty interesting to me, and I intend to keep an eye on things as they develop. It looks like there’s already twelve games signed up.
Tonight I spent some more time playing around with TorqueX. It seems the bugs I was running into have already been taken care of. A GarageGames employee posted a rather simple change to a text file they overlooked, and the tile system is working again in the editor. A second similar change and I got particle effects working too. I also learned that I was only looking at a small part of the documention. It turns out there’s one file on TGBX documentation, which covers the editors, and another, much larger file on TorqueX, which is more about code. I haven’t gone too deep, but the docs seem solid, and it was enough that I was able to slap out a TorqueX version of my Pong clone pretty quickly. I can easily see how using TorqueX will save me alot of time over starting from scratch with XNA alone. There’s gonna be alot to learn, but I’m having fun so far.
Footnote:
1) - Jay’s blog is my favorite blog to read. He has all sort of wacky stories about his experience playing and developing games. I get excited every time my RSS feed client notifies me that he’s written a new post. I highly recommend going through his archives if you have some spare time. It’s good stuff.
The Return April 2, 2007
Posted by Jesse in : Game Development , add a commentIt’s been a long time coming, but I’m back.
It’s a shame things worked out quite the way they did. Right after writing the reviews for Mr. Robot and Kingdom Elemental, my number of readers shot way, way up. And then the crazy overtime at work kicked in, and I haven’t written anything since. So the readers went away.
Similarly, the amount of comment spam on the site has gone up, but it doesn’t appear to be slowing down. For the first few weeks I was deleting it manually, but it became too much for me, and I installed a Wordpress plug-in to handle it for me. It claims to have caught 580 spam comments since turning it on. Wow! I can’t even imagine how much spam big sites get. Anyway, if you try to post a comment, and it doesn’t show up, it was probably flagged as spam by the system. I got the contact form working again, so feel free to shoot me a message if that seems to be happening to you.
Unfortunately, all of my game development projects were forced to be put on hold during the day job overtime period. This includes the work I was doing with Froghaus on their title Asparagus. It looks like they’re making excellent progress, though, and I look forward to the release sometime later this year.
I did finally get to do a bit of coding for myself, though. I spent some time this weekend researching Microsoft’s XNA. (XNA is a framework for writing games that will run both on Windows and on the Xbox 360 console.) Microsoft has put out some video tutorials for getting started, and they’re quite nice. I recommend checking out the Creators Club site for more info on XNA. (The video tutorials can be found under Education | Tutorials.)
It seems like pretty cool stuff. For my first attempt at learning the framework, I wrote a Pong clone, complete with a very simple AI, Xbox 360 controller support, and some sound effects. Next up, I checked out TorqueX which seems fantastic, but there’s a couple of show stopping bugs that prevent me from using it much. (It’s still in beta, though, so I’m not really complaining. The bugs had already been reported in the forums by other users, so hopefully they’ll be fixed, and I can play with it some more.)
I’ve got a couple of indie games I’d like to write about, and I intend to keep toying with XNA, and writing about that. Hopefully I won’t go three months without writing a real post again. Thanks for sticking with me during the downtime.
Switching continued December 6, 2006
Posted by Jesse in : Game Development , add a commentAfter writing yesterday that I was considering switching my development platform back to Windows from Linux, I discussed the idea with some friends and colleagues. Basically, the conclusion I’ve come to is that I don’t have any compelling reasons not to make the switch, but several good reasons to do so.
So, last night I began the process of moving everything over. This isn’t a terribly complicated process, as I was already setup for dual booting, so I just needed to make the necessary files available to Windows. I found a really neat program that lets Windows access ext3 file systems, and that made things really simple. (Since this specific machine works as my dev system, game system, and DVR/entertainment system, I have alot of files. It was almost 83 gigabytes of data. Ouch! TV shows take up alot of space.)
Tonight I need to setup my Subversion repositories and install all of the software libraries I’m using. Then I can get back to work. I’m really excited.
Switching to Linux (and back?) December 5, 2006
Posted by Jesse in : Game Development , 2 commentsAbout two months ago, I converted my development machine into a Linux box. A few of my friends have told me repeatedly how much they love theirs, so I was really curious. Additionally, I was having a problem with my Windows installation, so it seemed like a perfect time to give Linux a shot.
I installed Ubuntu Linux, and most things have been really nice. I love apt-get and Synaptic. (Tools for easily installing programs with all of their required dependancies.) If something isn’t in the apt-get repositories for me to snag, I can generally grab an installation package or source code archive from a website and getting things installed is only a few keystrokes away. For most programs that I’m used to having around, there are free versions available that are almost as good at the originals, and in some cases, the free versions are even better.
But there are two important things that I’m not sure if I can live without.
Games
By looking at some of the past entries in this blog, it should be really obvious that I love video games. And there just really aren’t that many games that are built natively for Linux, so I’m stuck trying to play games in wine. (Wine is a program that can attempt to run programs created for Windows.) Sometimes wine works great. I’ve gotten World of Warcraft running at almost exactly the same speed as it was in Windows. But most of the time, it doesn’t even come close to working. Most games crash out with incredibly useless error messages. A handful will run but can’t seem to get any input from the mouse or keyboard. Or they have no sound, or put out static. I have a huge list of indie games that I’ve wanted to try out, but I couldn’t because they wouldn’t run in wine.
Visual Studio
I’ve tried KDevelop, Anjuta, Eclipse, and a bunch of unmemorable products, and nothing comes anywhere near Visual C++. The projects are almost always built around a makefile that you manage yourself instead of working through the IDE, and the debuggers aren’t nearly as nice. Lately I’ve spent almost as much time fighting my tools as I have developing new features. It’s really a pain.
So I’m not sure what to do. I’m really, really happy with my Linux box, but I don’t see anyway not to just go back to using Windows most of the time.
Getting back to work December 4, 2006
Posted by Jesse in : Game Development , 2 commentsIt’s been a little over three months since I’ve written any game reviews or updated the blog here. That’s far too long of a gap.
During that time, I’ve changed day jobs, which has been a somewhat stressful process, and it has left me little interest in spending my nights and weekends working on game development. But things are settling down now, and I’m getting back into the swing of things.
Unfortunately, the Annie project has completely fallen apart. Back before the job change, the artist who was working on the project became too busy starting his own company to work on the game anymore. The idea may be revisited in the future, but for now, the game is on hold.
I have a new game concept, and I’m actively developing a gameplay prototype of it. I’m hoping to have that distributed for feedback within the next week or two, and if that goes well, I’ll start turning it into a real product. I’ll post some news about that as soon as possible.
Recent Developments August 31, 2006
Posted by Jesse in : Game Development , add a commentI added a few affiliate links in the games section. The plan is to put up games that I found to be worthy of immediate purchase, so if you see something there, I’m giving it my highest recommendation, even if I haven’t had time to write a review. I’m not really looking to turn TPN into a games portal or anything, so if I start making more money than it costs me to keep the site up I’ll see about lowering my commission percentages.
Microsoft released the beta version of XNA yesterday. Development on TPN games had pretty much stopped since the announcement, because I feel that the xbox 360 (and more specifically the xbox live arcade) would be the perfect platform for my games. Now this means I get to go back to work. I’m extremely excited.
Current TPN Projects:
The Annie Game.
An action puzzler similar to The Adventures of Lolo or Professor Fizzwizzle. I currently have a playable prototype (complete with programmer art). My first order of business will be to port it over to XNA. (I was originally referring to the protagonist as Annie, though I think that’s likely to change. Until I come up with a new concept I’ll just refer to the game as Annie.)
The Mummy Project.
This game will be more of an action game than a puzzler. You control a mummy and have to guard a tomb against treasure hunters looking to rob the tomb. Meanwhile, you need to find magical objects in the tomb to give to a wizard who has promised to restore you to life. It’s still just in the planning stages, though I think I should be able to use alot of code from Annie, since they’ll both be 2D games viewed from the same perspective.
