Category: Art

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Day 27 – Weekly Update

Another long week.  I’m finding as the game gets tighter and tighter I’m spending more and more time re-doing things that don’t work.  While they make the game better, it’s not ‘fun’.  Mainly it’s actually pretty depressing to throw away hours and hours of work.   This is the part of the project where I guess  I usually get bored/frustrated and stop.  But Not this time.. This time I’m too damn close!  New Playable builds available here:  https://drakkheim.com/january/play

So what did get accomplished?

Bug Fixes

Lots and lots of bugs  and glitches. Revisions to prevent button click through and proper input handling seem to have been the biggest culprit.  The most common rendering bug / crash bugs centered around parts of the rendering loop continuing even if the monsters, enemies or any of the other arrays change size to 0 or trying to access things after starting to switch to the victory / loss screens.

Game Balance

So as of last week.. it wasn’t any fun.  Because once you discovered you can stack units and stack 3 or so units they’d instakill anything they encounter.  So the player winds up making a stack and then just sitting back and not doing anything.  This was because monster combat is resolved first.  So I changed that.  Even though stacks can still instakill most things, the attacks are calculated simultaneously.  This  suddenly meant that you have to constantly manage your monsters.  Which lead to a HUGE Problem.  How do you select a monster in the middle in a stack.    That leads us to ……

InGame UI Changes

Drakkheim-Jan27

A major revision to the in-game UI made it much easier to keep track of your monsters.   The only downside is that you now are limited to 20 monsters.  (I’ve never even come close to that, so this shouldn’t be a problem.   I also was able to tack on simple little health indicators beneath then portraits.  All of a sudden things were a million times more fun. Then a quick tweak to the map renderer means that I can now reserve the bottom part of the screen to prevent sending creatures to whatever is beneath the UI.   This alternate method of selecting units has a second unexpected benefit,  It’s playable on Android again!!!!  ok so no android build today, due to a some more event click through issues… but that should be fixable.

Tack on some interface sounds and things feel much more crunchy.

Base Levels

The base levels are in place.  Still need to tweak the hell out of them

 

Particle Friday

so over at http://www.reddit.com/r/onegameamonth someone started a particle Friday event.  The intent being, blow off development and put in place some gratuitous particles.  So I did, on the home screen, there’s now Fire.

Whats Left

Ok.. seriously.. with 4 days left..  too much.   So the real question  What Essential things are you missing?

That list, luckily, is much shorter.

  • Combat Sounds
  • Level tweaks and balance
  • Right Click / Drag issue that can cause monsters to go to unintended places.
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Day 20 – Update

Whoa… so very very very close to being a real game.

This week I got, victory and failure implemented.

Graphics, monsters, particles, a revised UI backend and fun stuff

here’s a video from a couple days ago:

and Since then there’s been particles added, healing aura around the dragon egg and the beginning of playbalancing implemented.

Windows EXE:  https://drakkheim.com/files/Drakkheim-jan-20-alpha.exe

Mac / Linux Java Jar : https://drakkheim.com/files/drakkheim_jan_20.jar

if you want to try em.

Here’s the victory and defeat screens if  you don’t want to find em yourself..

defeat victory

Other than that This is my remaining to-do list for the Jan release:

  • Final Levels
  • Sounde Effect – UI
  • Website
  • Web to Game – Round Methods implemnted
  • Win Screen
  • Title Screen Image
  • Allow to play custom level
  • Optional Goals
    • Sound Effect – monsters
    • Revise in game UI Look and feel
    • Make Android Playable
    • Implement Music

Yeah.. that’s totally doable!

Ok Very very tired now and not very coherent.

 

 

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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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Day 5 – Progress Update – MAP!

Drakkheim-Iconlogo

Well It’s been a good week for progress 🙂  I’ve got the html based web based level editor, saving to the database and shooting JSON encoded levels to the game proper.

The game loads screens and their assets based off of manifest files that are easy to update and maintain.  The ‘loading’ level shows a progress bar and fetches the needed assets for the next screen and makes screen transitions clean, simple and easy.

I’ve knocked out a basic Logo and Title Text  (seen above) and the core tileset is mostly there for the features I need in January’s Game.  As indicated above, the January game’s subtitle is ‘Invasion’ .  Focusing entirely on building and defending your dragon’s egg from the invading heroes.   I hope to have 4 levels to choose from by the end of the month. (and hopefully make it so you can play your own level from the editor)

Day5-SummaryThe game runs at a nice 5,450 FPS when not vsync’d on my desktop and a nice smooth 60fps  even on my POS T-Mobile myTouch phone.  (not sure how to unlock vsynch on android :-/  so i don’t know how much leeway I have)

Right click drags the map about on PC and a two finger drag on Android.   Overall I should be able to manage fairly massive levels without much overhead as it’s never looping the entire array just the elements to be displayed.  But the biggest bottleneck is probably going to be pathfinding…. shit I hate A*..

Which brings me to the next week’s goal..  Monsters and pathfinding.  (no animation this month)   Buy a goblin and tell him to go to a spot.   Maybe basic combat/collisions.

 

http://www.onegameamonth.com


 

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Aaand we’re off.. Day1


 month1day1

And away we go.  Looks like 2,600 devs have signed up on www.onegameamonth.com now.  Which is pretty cool.

Jan editor

So I got the basic website up and running over at Drakkheim.com and a rudimentary level editor is up and running and saving and loading from the database. https://drakkheim.com/jan/  Here’s a screenshot.

Yeah.. ok so not real exciting.

Ok I was working ahead over the holidays 🙂

Made some progress on the basic tileset, however I’m keeping January’s game very simple and more of a focus on getting the basic framework set up.

On the graphics front, it looks like a couple guys are developing an animation tool called Spine.

It’s very cool.   And it will support LibGDX right out of the box.  Which is perfect since that’s what I’m using.   I backed Brashmonkey’s Spriter spriter animation tool and hoped to use it.. however they’re running behind schedule and there’s no real progress on a java implementation and frankly I don’t want to write one.

goblin_spine

So  Spine.. as soon as they launch their kickstarter and whatnot I intend to start using that for the character graphics.  In fact here’s a screenshot of a simple goblin figure I’m working with.

So hopefully that’ll be the big update in march 🙂

Other than that I’ve got the basic Game app working, a good start on getting an asset loader implemented and a loading screen that caches the assets and handles the scene transition.  And last but not least, I’ve got it pulling in a level by shortcode in as a JSON object.

Ok now I’ve earned an hour of FarCry3..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Summer Heat

It’s over 100F outside again.

There’s just something about the summer here in Texas that just completely sucks the drive out of you. Even if you spend the day indoors in an office, just walking to the car and driving home, by the time 8pm rolls around any desire or motivation you’ve got left is a shriveled little mass of ambition that’s trying desperately to get into the shade and take a nap.

However, you’ve just gotta work through it, right?  Right??

So in the fine tradition of starting more projects…

There’s 2 new things in the works.

1 – Some really cool web/app/mobile/ fun in a techy sort of way.

That currently looks something like this:

2 – Something to get me away from the computer more and let myself switch gears completely.

That currently looks something like this:

Finally:

You’ll notice a new look for the site.. a slight decrease in the emphasis on games, and a bit more on development and consulting work.

Oh and a quick update on the Barnyard Bonanza Development,  It’s been real slow due to the really cool bit of consulting work that’s eaten every spare waking hour for the last 40 days.  However it looks like the launch has been pushed back from Jul 28 to some time in Feb.. So  I’m taking a deep breath and re-introducing myself to the codebase.. It appears that there’s been a significant couple of updates to LibGDX in the meanwhile so I may decide to tackle that, but seeing as I’m using large chunks of the Scene2D api that’s been completely rewritten.. I may just cross my fingers and skip em for the initial release of BB.

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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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Barnyard Bonanza – Week End Update

 

Woo good Week!

New Beta 6!

  • Better Odds manager (you can see it by clicking the puzzle piece on the Main Menu)
  • Reworked tons of the Odds and Money manager backside so money should be handled better.
  • Implemented adMob ads 🙂
  • Got a good start on painting the home screen .. then did it again as photoshop crashed. (FML)
  • Made the loading screen handle screen changes and stuff magically.
  • Reels are generated a bit more realistically and auto re-factor every 100 pulls
  • Started getting sound fx implemented .. not working on desktop .. sometimes on android.. :-/

Here’s Some screenshots, a link, and a QR to the apk

Download the latest beta (006) here https://drakkheim.com/temp/BarnyardBonanza006beta.apk

Next up:

  • Turning sound on/off :-/
  • Get the Powerup Buying working
  • Maybe a mini game!
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Midweek update!

Man are we on a roll this week!

Another beta,  new features behind the scenes..

  • Asset manager implemented
  • Loading screens.
  •  The beginning of the Powerup Shop
  • Better animation
  • Various internal re-shuffling
  • New UI Buttons

Here’s a screenshot and a link and a QR code for the beta

Barnyard Bonanza beta 5 Screenshot

If you have an Android device you can play with the Beta here:

https://drakkheim.com/temp/BarnyardBonanza005beta.apk

 

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Nother Week, another beta.

Not too much progress this week. Lots of playtesting though.

Some more UI tweaks and special effects and Particles (coin fountain based on amount you win)… however Photoshop crashed and I lost a revision of the UI buttons.. so technically this is a version behind.  But it now oficially detects running out of money.  Also removed a symbol from the lineup which should increase loosness of the game but still the payouts are… way too generous (ie you really have to work at loosing).

New buttons for “Cashing Out” and “powerups” are on-route, along with a Main Menu, Bonus Games and other goodies.

As always.. If you have an android device.. I’d love to hear any feedback.

www.swiftthought.com/temp/BarnyardBonanza004beta.apk

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Android Deviations

Oops, meant to post last week’s Screenshot Saturday.

As pennance here’s 2 screenshots from the in progress Android game, that’s coming along nicely.

(yes Irismel is taking a little development break while I work on some of the mechanics in spreadsheet and paper form. The RTS elements weren’t working right. Now I’m leaning towards something a bit more Tower defensish)

 

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Tools tools tools


So with an absolute lack of time to make any kind of forward progress until we all get settled into the routine of the new house, things are taking a little sidetrack from the ‘milestone milestone go go go!’ mentality for a bit.

That means two things.
1.  Character sketches, concept art and little paper mockups. Ie anything I can do not in front of the development pc.
2.  Tools development.  Little things that I know I will be needing, but don’t need to be dependant on the whole application to function.  Things like getting http://editor.irismel.com to export maps and support the little things I will need in my map editor, like monster spawners etc etc.  Also all the little widgets (button classes, text dialogs and so forth) and asset & option managers that I plan on eventually releasing
as a standalone jar file to help other java Slick developers.  I’ve got the javadoc of what I have so far up at iristool.irismel.com.

So lots of little things but no real time to sink deep into the development mindset for now.  But I should have some pretty pictures and scribbles up before too long.

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More UI work and little things

Yesterday was a down right beating and tonight is pretty much just simple recovery.

I got some basic Tool Tips in place for the various pc heroes health bars ,functions to manage and intialize them  and some general cleanup and organization of the whole game and level initialization process.

You know, it is kinda odd how many game tutorials, engine demos, books on programming etc etc that totally ignore the fundamental importance of getting the foundation right.  The basic core logic, update loop, memory management, debugging, maintaining player data integrity and all those un-glorious details even though utterly essential get just a few words here or there.   The best book I’ve found that goes into all those nitty gritty details is this Game Coding Complete,  By Mike McShaffry.. some of the content is out of date ,but oh my god .. it covers all the icky dull essential things that you NEED to know. [edit.. I only have the 1st edition.. he’s now on the 3rd]

Now a Lot of us are using 3rd party engines these days… (‘Im using TGB, Slick and flash mainly) .. and it’s easy to shrug it off thinking that it’s ok to rely on the engine to make the decisions about all the nitty gritty and dull as hell details.. and for the most part you’d be right.  However….  When it breaks, or you push it too far, or you try and do something ‘not according to best practices’  and you’re lucky enough to have access to the source (thanks GarageGames and Coke&Code!) you can understand HOW it works and how you want it to work and arrive at a functional compromise.

Anyway I’m straying from the topic at hand and I’m still trying to formulate the whole ‘Why you should build your own engine and never use it’, blog post.

So consider that a preview of sorts.

Oh yeah and I knocked out another GUI mockup.