Category: General

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RELEASE!

War Mages is out on the Play Store!

Get It HERE

SummonIcon256

It’s been one hell of a month. Since starting over in the 18th it’s been non-stop go go go to get this thing up and running.

Overall I’m really pleased with how well it turned out. I have a lot of little secondary features I want to add to it, but I think I need a week to recover.

It will be an interesting thing to see if the game finds any kind of an audience, I’m not aware of there being a whole lot of multi-player games on a single tablet yet.  However I think that it will be one of those kinds of genres where people can pop down for 5 – 10 min with a friend while waiting for the bus and play a game.

Time will tell.

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Feb 18 – week 3

10 days left.  Basic features are complete.
War mages is a 2 player game played on an Android tablet (7in or greater) where each player enters orders/commands for monsters they then summon onto the gameboard.
The goal is to have a fire elemental make an explosion on the enemy’s summoning circle.

Lots of little UI things left to do along with victory conditions but I’m in good shape

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Reboot

Tough decision made.  The original planned February game isn’t going to happen.

The Bad News

As I rapidly approached the mid-month mark I realized that I had actually made Anti-progress… I had started out with working off of the base Jan game  and broken it to the point where  it no longer had sound, and was actually unbeatable as that would crash it.  And I hadn’t even finished adding a single new feature (other than preparing to get the Spine actors put into place)

Then to add insult to injury I found out about Impire, which comes out tomorrow.  It looks an awful lot like what I want my game to be, except with a helluva larger budget, and that was pretty damn demotivating.

So I moped, and pondered and had a couple beers.

The Good News

At this point I started going back through my mental pile of old abandoned games to see if there was something that I can make work and turn into a game in 2 weeks.  And by golly I didn’t have to go far. My original blog post, in fact.  It’s time to do BombBots over again.. except in a fantasy theme this time, on a tablet, in 2d.  Oh and finished, seeing as I never finished the Second Life version (LUA server implementation problems), or the Torque Version (TGB never solidified into what I needed).  So the goal, is to turn it into a 2 player on 1 tablet/mobile device game.  Who knows.. maybe it’ll work out and be fun.

So the awesome thing is that just being ok with trashing the original idea really got me re-invigorated again.  So perhaps the Drakkheim games this year will just be all little experiments and then I’ll see what sticks before committing to some grand master plan and in the meanwhile I’ll have a chance to build up a good re-usable codebase and master all the tools I want to.

 

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Day 12 – Update

LittleButton

 Time for the weekly update!

Pathfinding!

Lots of new functionality got put in this week. The biggest of which is clearly the pathfinding which.. in all honestly was a pain in the butt but has been rock steady since I got it working.  The map on the other hand..  I must have re-re-rewritten chunks of the rendering for it so many times these last few days.  That and tile picking (still  a wip) have both turned out to be deceptively huge pains in the ass.  The primary cause is that the world coordinate system and visible coordinate system and the map tile grid are all different and finding out what correlates to everything else is a pain.

Luckily I seem to have it mostly sorted out for now.  Well except the map renderer… that’s currently working on a sheer brute force approach, so I’ll have to limit the map sizes in the Jan build.

Other notable features

  • Select creatures (indicated by yellow glow)
  • Buy new creatures by clicking gold wolf button in the lower left.
  • Track, gold, stage and Dragon Egg’s health
  • 2 Monsters (goblin and Orc) and they can move about.
  • Monsters can be equipped with better weapons and armor.

er they say a picture is worth a thousand words so here’s an annotated screenshot.

Jan13

Oh and here’s a couple of runnable Builds:

Windows Pc EXE > Here

Everyone  Runnable Jar > Here

Android…er.. it runs on my devices… however Im having issues getting the deployed APK file to work :-/

{Basic Instructions}

Click on stuff.  There’s no real gameplay yet.

Right Click and Drag to pull the map around.

Let me know if  it works

Next:

The rest of the weekend will probably not be nearly as productive :-/

However next up.   Invaders!  Collisions!  Combat!  Death!

But it’s gonna be close to see if I can get a functional game done by the end of the month.

Can’t say how much fun it will be.

 

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Quick Sprites

 

More goodness to come later this weekend,  pathfinding, creatures.. and hopefully a UI..

But the hosting company had issues for a while so I took the downtime (no website -> no map server -> no debugging) to knock out the basic goblin an orc creatures and an upgraded version of each.

basicGoblinupgradedGoblin

basicOrc

upgradedOrc

Stay tuned 🙂

 

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Dangit.. noted for prosperity.

So a quick twiddle with the new goblin sprite for January

basicGoblin

Gave me a neat mockup of what the January game will look like 🙂

And I was happy.

janScreenshot

Then I added a shadow behind the goblin.

And that looked funny.

So I moved it up 1/8 of a tile and drew a flat plane below it to give a little bit of an isometric feel.

mock1

Well… THAT looked pretty neat.  But now the difference between the floor and the wall looks odd.  How about a little gradient to imply depth and ambient occlusion.

mock2

NOW we’re talking!   But now I’ve got to run those shadows all around.  And Indicate Terrain types.. and calculate all the possible corner scenarios.   (Which I know EXACTLY how complicated it was for ONE terrain type,  Here I’ll be having inside & outside (and possibly other) types as well.

febMockup

But man..  It really gives everything the look and feel of what I want.   Kind of an ‘anthill’ meets Dungeon Keeper feel.  

So here’s the part where I make myself sad.

 It’s not gonna be January.  Absolutely no way.

.. Maybe February (depending on the release of Spine) or March.  April at the latest, because I intend to be adding digging at that point and the map rendering needs to be pretty gelled by then.

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Preparations for the new year

Preparation

14 days to go before start of the http://www.onegameamonth.com/ challenge. (just shy of 1200 peeps now!)   And it’s time to get my head back in the game making state of mind.  So, as I usually do..  I’ve been making lists.   There was a nice discussion on reddit/gamedev about prep work and I’ve gone ahead and created a new user and made sure it’s got access to the tools I’ll need (and hopefully fewer of the distractions).   So here’s a few lists of tools I need etc.

Tools:

  • Photoshop
  • Illustrator
  • Audition
  • Eclipse
  • LibGDX nightlies
  • GIT
  • Magix Music Maker 2013
  • GWT and various browsers.

So having that all squared away it’s time to look at the big picture.  My overall goal, the 10,000′ view, the grand plan, the whole burrito etc etc..

In short I want to walk away with components that I can use in ‘Drakkheim‘ the big dream game that’s been percolating for a couple years and have mastered LibGDX.  So Ideally I can break each of the 12 games down into just using a teeny tiny subset of all the features that I anticipate needing in the long run.

Which, of course, necessitated another list…

Features to Use:

  • Scalable & Draggable Massive Tile Map
  • Spriter / Spine Characters
  • Tile sidescroller pathfinding
  • AI
  • Economic Model
    • food. availability vs taste vs risk + individual’s taste
  • Effects
  • Parallaxing Backgrounds
  • Tile or blend based lighting
  • Line of sight
  • Dialogs
  • Multiplayer?
  • particles
  • multiple scale UI
  • dynamic / generated character profiles and lifespan.
  • music
  • mods / community content
  • extensible data formatting
  • save /load games
  • world generation
  • server/account auth
  • self updating / version check

Whoo.. the more I think.. the more things I come up with.   But that’s a good start.

So now I’m getting a concise picture in my head of what tools I have to work with, which I find make it easier to narrow down something to make into a game.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

It’s either that or analysis paralysis setting in.

Maybe I’ll sleep on it.. or just sit here and wonder just what I’ve gotten myself into.

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Reboots & Shuffles

Been an exciting time here for the last couple months.
The biggest news is the dayjob has changed so now things are looking like the available time for development work is paying off in spades.

I plan on wrapping up 2 projects within the next month.
1- proofSite – a super simple photography solution for photogrphers to present their proofs to clients without a massive complicated web backend and infrastructure. Details on that should be coming shortly, it’s being rolled out real soon to the first couple photographers to beta test.

2- ultraShow – still keeping a few things under wraps about this, but it will be, easy, powerful, and non flash based so it’ll work everywhere. Still not sure on the pricing model for it.

Oh yeah… and More mobile web and android news coming soon.

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Texas in August… yup still hotter n hell.

There’s something to be said for being slowly roasted alive every time you step outside… usually something along the lines of ‘you idiot get back inside, are you crazy???!?’

It also has the tendency to bake the willpower to do extra projects out of you.

So, in short, it’s been real slow going.  Consulting work is in full swing, however.  Lots of new and fun small projects.    Which got me thinking..

And then I had to grab a cold drink…

then I thought some more.

Small projects.  Bite size things.  Sexy, whiz bang, fun things.

So I’m making a list.  Checking it twice. Scratching out things that can’t be done in a week’s worth of the two hours of time I have after the tiny terrible terrific tot of terror passes out in his bed.

First up.  Project Ultrashow.   But as usual, paying work comes first.. so next Thursday looks to be the first day of available freetime.

 

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Happy July!

Whew, it’s Texas summer again.

Had a great 4th, blew stuff up and relaxed with family.

Personal Game Development is looking to have some time to ramp up on Barnyard Bonanza again towards the end of July, just after I finish wrapping up the current slate of consulting work that’s eaten the last 2 months. (a very enjoyable and challenging project, but I’m itching to get back to some of my projects)

Of course I’d be happy if I got more projects as well.  Consulting comes first after all 🙂

Other things in the pipeline:

  • Mobile App development,  HTML5 etc.. interesting stuff, can’t wait to do  more of it.
  • Several pet project websites need refreshes / more content (http://eatingsparrows.com/ http://slick2d.com/)
  • Irismel & BSDDoD! need some more love
  • and SuperSecret project needs a lot of datamodeling and wireframing so we can get started.

 

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Hear that? That was Mayjune.. whoosh.

Wooosh... another month gone.

Where does the time go?

Current development progress… in a nutshell… nonexistant.

On the other hand, paying client work… is through the roof, and it’s actually been a good bit of fun.  Lots of high pressure API wrangling, tight deadlines and awesome cool front end WhizBang UI work and some pretty serious SalesForce.com and Convio Luminate integration into a custom data structure.

Good times, and it’ll pay off the new beast of a work PC 🙂

So, Other than that here’s where things stand.

  • Irismel – Still running on TGB.  basic core is getting there.  A little in limbo as I try and tweak the basic mechanic and find out what’s missing
  • Barnyard Bonanza – LibGDX android app.. is really close.  I just need to implement the bonus games and some animation stuff.  However my G2 Fried itself early may… then 4 days after getting a replacement it did the same thing (screen signal breaks.. probably due to that crazy hinge design) Now I’m using a myTouch   that seems to work but I havent gotten it to behave with Eclipse and the dev tools…
  • However as mentioned above, paying work comes first, and it’s been a really good month for it.  I wish I had more time to do more of it.  (maybe.. some possibilities exist)
  • So in the time I do have, I’ve been working through an anatomy course fromhttp://www.alienthink.com/  And it’s reaaaaally good.  and Reeeaaaaally long.. so far I’m at lesson 39..  I’m keeping a gallery of progress here: https://plus.google.com/.…
  • Slick2d.com – basic site is up but progress is limited to lunch break sized tweaks.
  • Oh and as you can tell… swiftthought.com is Sloooowly getting a much needed update.  However the move away from comicpress means that every old article needs to be manually updated… *yuk*

That’s it for now.

Fun things are coming in July/August I think.

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Goodbye April!

What a month!

Failing motherboards, hard drives, bad ram.  And an attempt at repairing the ol PC wound up eating most of the month.  Then when it turns out that the fixed PC isn’t stable I went ahead and just said screw it and bought a Dell.   It’s a monster of a system and hopefully My PC woes and troubles are finished for the next 3 years.

Then my phone / development test device died.

Yeah .. great.  Luckily T-Mobile’s warrenty replacement covered it.. and they shipped me a refurb replacement in short order.

It lasted until this Saturday when it died in the middle of sending a text.

In the middle of all that I did manage to get a single week’s worth of productive coding.  The odds got tweaked, the individual reels now run independently so they spin in a more convincing manner and two of the four power-ups are in there and working.

The powerup price increases every time you buy them so that balances them out a bit from overpowering everything.

The new template for the site is now active and It seems ok  I did loose the all the splash images for each of the posts though.. not happy about that.   Maybe I can find a way to get them inserted in their proper posts.