Owner: Videogame Biscuit URL:http://www.videogamebiscuit.com Join Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2007 07:06:22 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: I'm an amateur game developer. I publish the progress of the games I'm working on, finished games, reviews of tools and books and anything game development related Site statistics:Click here
Wasabi Defense update 11-13 2007-11-13 15:45:30 Okay, things aren’t going as smoothly as I wanted them to go. The main problem is POV-Ray. I’m using this tool, together with Moray, for creating most of my sprites. I have tried Blender a few times but it’s difficult as hell, and simply overkill for creating pre-rendered sprites. POV-Ray doesn’t work as good as it should on Vista. Rendering static sprites works fine, but animation sequences make the program crash. Only choice I had was rendering each frame manually, wich took me quite long. I don’t think I’ll be using pre-rendered sprites in my next project and just go back to vector graphics.
Anyway, I managed to get the first enemy sprite up and running. It’s a static screenshot, so you don’t see the animation, but the lower part of the ship rotates. Looks fine so far, but I still think it needs some tweaking. The ship will drop fireballs that form between the two spikes that protrude from the bottom.
Read more:Defense
Wasabi Defense update 11-22 2007-11-22 15:15:02 Whew, here’s another screenshot at last! The first enemy is flying around and dropping… well, stuff on the player. They look like flashing balls of light, I haven’t come up with a cool name for them yet. The enemy flies in some sort of sideways spiral and drops its payload in three shot bursts.
Most important thing, however, is that I finally got my gamepad up and running! It took me a while since it’s quite different than keyboard controls. At first I didn’t really want to add gamepad support, since most pc gamers use the keyboard anyway, but then I realized that a gamepad will make this game a lot more fun to play and, most of all, a lot more user friendly. Why that is will become clear later. I really should get a new gamepad, though. The one I have is the most basic gamepad you can possibly imagine. Eight buttons and a D-pad, without analog sticks. For this game the D-pad will do, but other games I have planned will require analog controls, so I&rsqu Read more:Defense
Wasabi Defense update 12-03 2007-12-03 14:50:19 Did some more work on Wasabi Defense
; here’s another screenshot!
Another enemy, a bomber this time. It fires four bombs upwards in a fan-pattern, after wich they fall down. Unlike the purple fireballs of the first enemy, these bombs are able to destroy buildings. Except the landing platform and the launchpad for the hovergun, these are immune to all damage, since it would become a bit too complicated if any of these would be destroyed.
Anyway, I was working on the mechanism for launching attack waves today, and it has become a real mess. A fine example of spaghetti code and I’m just gonna start all over again with that part before it becomes even worse. Also, the display needs to be redone, but that’s a low priority thing. A while ago I wrote a tutorial on how to adjust the font size to the screen resolution and position the text objects correctly. Well, guess what? It doesn’t work as well as I thought! I have tested it with all possible screen settings I could
Doom movie 2007-12-02 10:23:13 I rented the Doom movie
from the local video shop this weekend. Most of the time, movies made from video games suck. So far, the only one I enjoyed was Resident Evil (probably because it had Milla Jovovich). Doom, however, was for the most part another disappointment. First of all, the story was different from the game. And the game didn’t have much story to begin with, and even then they decided to change it!
So what was the game about? An experiment with teleportation devices on Mars goes wrong and opens the gates of hell, sending demons through the portals. What happens in the movie? Some sort of genetic experiment turns humans into zombie-like creatures. Why couldn’t they just stick with the original story? No, they just had to borrow ideas from Resident Evil.
So what elements of the game have been kept? The leader of the assault squad is named “Sarge”, wich was one of the enemies in the game. The BFG is included (it’s called the “Big Force Gun&r
My latest headaches 2007-12-02 06:25:17 Okay, here’s the deal. Getting POV-Ray and Moray to work properly on Vista is a nightmare. Until now, things worked more or less, but not as good as on XP. Creating scenes and rendering them from Moray worked, but I had to close POV-Ray every time before rendering or everything would freeze. Annoying, but not too much trouble. Rendering animations in POV-Ray didn’t work, however. Normally, you set a clock variable, wich you use to create your animation, and then all frames are rendered automatically. Guess what? Doesn’t work! The program crashes when I try it. Only solution is rendering everything frame by frame.
So today I wanted to continue working on my graphics, Moray simply doesn’t work anymore at all! The only thing that still works is creating scenes directly in POV-Ray, wich is an incredibly time consuming process. Unless I can find a way to solve this problem, I’m going back to vector graphics after my current project. With some effort, these can Read more:headaches
Explosion with sparks 2007-12-14 06:17:03 A while ago, I wrote a tutorial on how to create an explosion. Now, we’re gonna add a nice shower of sparks to the fireball. The starting point is the basic explosion from the previous tutorial, wich had one particle emitter for the fireball. Now, we’re gonna add a second emitter for the sparks. Here are the basic settings for the emitter:
And now for the particle graph settings. The idea is to eject a short burst of small, glowing particles. That’s what the following two settings do. The particle life is set to 1.8 seconds, and the emitter will emit 1000 particles per second for 0.07 seconds, creating a burst-effect.
Next, the particle size. This doesn’t change over the course of the particle life, but there should be some variation. For this, the X size is set to 4 and the X variation is set to 3. Since a fixed aspect ration is used, it’s not necessary to set the Y size.
The speed of the particles is set to 20, and the variation to 10. Like the size, Read more:Explosion
Wasabi Defense update 12-08 2007-12-08 09:28:46 Whew, I finally fixed the attack wave code! A few days ago I realized it had become a bunch of spaghetti code and a bug explosion waiting to happen. So I decided to just dump the code I had and start over again. First I took out my notebook (a paper notebook, not a laptop) and started working out some kind of flowchart on how it should work and to my surprise, it took me less than an hour to come up with a working algoritm. It handles game startup and shutdown, tracking lives and score and, of course, sending waves of enemies towards the player. There will be two types of attack waves in the game. Type one is a swarm of enemies that keeps flying around and attacking until they are all destroyed. Type two is a continuous wave of enemies that come and go for a set amount of time.
So now that I finally got this up and running, I can continue working on buildings, player weapons and enemies. For the next version, I’m gonna create a storage tank (base building), a rocket launcher for Read more:Defense
Game engines for indie developers 2007-12-06 14:30:35 Since most independent or hobby game developers can’t afford hi-tech engines
like the Unreal engine, and writing one yourself - even a simple one - is a complicated and time consuming process, Nuclex has made a list of seven engines you should know. Here’s the short version:
C4 Engine
Ogre 3D
Irrlicht
Torque
Crystal Space
NeoEngine
Unity 3D
The author of the article shares my opinion on Torque about the documentation. Now, I’m using the 2D version and I assume he’s talking about the 3D engine. Furthermore, the source code is said to be quite ugly and hard to understand. Of course, since I don’t use the source code, this isn’t really an issue for me, and every time I couldn’t find the answer to my problems in the documentation I could always find help in the forums.
The engine of choice, according to Nuclex, is the C4 Game Engine. The screenshots and features look quite impressive, and pricing starts at $150 for the student license. The standa
New status display 2007-12-22 13:35:11 I’ve mentioned my problems with adapting the status display I built using Torque’s GUI builder to the display resolution before. I fixed the problem by abandoning the GUI builder and going for a sprite-based display. I created a new display background and numbers that look like those 7-segment LED displays. This display automatically adjusts to any resolution or aspect ratio without problems; a million times better than anything the GUI builder could produce, if you’re asking me! Anyway, here’s what it looks like.
Diggnation Live in Amsterdam! 2008-03-09 16:05:18 This is not game development related at all, but it is so incredibly cool that I just have to talk about it. I religiously watch Diggnation
every week. It’s a video podcast in wich Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht talk about the most popular stories that appeared on the social news website Digg that week. [...] Read more:Amsterdam
Wasabi Defense update 03-09 2008-03-09 04:41:29 I have added a new bomber to the enemy’s arsenal. This one flies slowly over the base and drops three bombs. It’s quite heavily armored (takes five shots to kill it), so missiles or the plasma turret are the best way to deal with it.
Other stuff I have worked on are the gamepad controls and [...] Read more:Defense
Wasabi Defense update 03-02 2008-03-02 14:57:37 I’ve got another Wasabi Defense
screenshot! I have added another unit to the base. It’s a static defense turret that fires plasma balls. Here’s what it looks like in action:
It sure took me a while to get this screenshot right! The cannon is incredibly powerful. It instantly kills everything it hits, and it’s armor piercing! [...]
Nine Paths to Indie Game Greatness 2008-02-27 16:19:42 Gamasutra has an interesting article full of tips about making succesfull indie games. It contains nine vital tips. Let’s take closer look at them.
1. Efficiency in design
Gamasutra describes this as “Design around getting the most bang for your buck”. A very obvious option here is multiplayer. A multiplayer FPS doesn’t need gigantic maps, a complex [...] Read more:Paths
, Indie
Wasabi Defense update 02-24 2008-02-24 14:24:22 I finished another enemy in Wasabi Defense
, and completed the attack waves for this level. Here’s a little peek:
The thing that’s about to be hit by a blue plasma ball is the new enemy. It flies around in a random pattern and bombards the enemy with fireballs. I also reused the bomber from the previous [...]
Indie game developer survival guide 2008-02-22 15:54:18 I ordered this book a week ago and a few days ago it arrived in the mail. It had heard about it a lot and read some very positive reviews about it, and many developers mentioned it on forums. Seems like it’s a very popular book. After flipping through it a bit and reading a [...] Read more:Indie
, survival
Wasabi Defense update 02-16 2008-02-16 15:23:23 Okay, here’s another Wasabi Defense
screenshot! I have added another enemy.
Here’s how it behaves. It comes flying in horizontally from either the left or the right, takes a dive and fires a volley of green fireballs, pulls up again and flies away. In this screenshot it has fired and is preparing to fly away. Immediately [...]
Blender hotkey map 2008-02-12 14:00:17 Okay, so I decided to explore Blender
again. Since POV-Ray and Moray don’t work as they should on Vista I need a replacement, and preferably a free one. I had tried Blender before, and while it’s incredibly powerful, it’s also difficult as hell. Dev.Mag, a South African game development magazine, has an excellent series of [...]
Lots and lots of Inkscape tutorials 2008-02-11 14:00:43 For creating vector drawings, Inkscape is an excellent, free application. The Inkscape tutorials blog hosts lots of excellent tutorials on how to draw and create all sorts of great effects. It has tutorials about text effects, drawing shapes and 3D objects. And if you have a tutorial you would like to share with the rest [...]
Naming conventions 2008-02-09 15:00:40 Without proper formatting and decent naming conventions, programming code can become incredibly confusing. And, of course, this is starting to happen to me all over again. A particularly annoying problem in Torque occurs when you use the same name for several things. It has happened a few times before that I used the same same [...] Read more:Naming
Wasabi Defense update 03-13 2008-03-13 16:27:34 The human outpost at Omega Wasabi has grown once more! A new unit has been added: the Kickassium refinery. What does it do? Well… it refines Kickassium, the fuel for the tachyon pulsar engine. Here’s what it looks like:
I had to adjust the height at wich the player hovers a bit, because otherwise he would [...] Read more:Defense
Nine step recipe for good independent game design 2008-03-14 16:35:02 The following series of articles by Damon Brown is a must-read for every game developer, especially if you work alone, like me. The hardest part of developing a game is often not the programming, but the design
itself. Coming up with good ideas is damned hard (not to mention thinking of a name!). And often, [...] Read more:independent
Wasabi Defense update 03-17 2008-03-17 11:25:56 Got plenty of time to work on Wasabi Defense
today, so here I am again with another update and a screenshot! I have given the player a new weapon and created a new enemy. Here’s what they look like:
First of all, the player’s new weapon. It’s another rocket launcher, but this one holds 14 rockets [...]
Wasabi Defense update 03-24 2008-03-24 07:06:53 As promised in the previous post, here’s the new enemy surrounded by shield spheres!
The spheres take the initial blows when you start blasting away at the thing, so you have to take at least a few of them out before you can hit the main enemy. Read more:Defense
Game design principles, practice and techniques 2008-03-27 16:49:22 I ordered this book a while ago and it arrived in the mail last tuesday. It’s not a technical book but, as the title says, about game design
. The book covers three main topics: design theory, design process and design production.
The design theory chapter is for the most part an overview of game genres, both [...]
Overcoming obstacles 2008-04-01 13:38:23 Grey Alien Games has a great article about overcoming game development obstacles. A very useful article, since this can be one of the most difficult tasks you will face. They can bring a project to a grinding stop or prevent you from even starting them. Here are some common problems, possible solutions and my opinion [...]
Problems with comments 2008-04-04 05:00:48 A visitor has notified me that posting comments doesn’t seem to work. At first I thought they were getting caught by the Akismet spam filter (wich does a great job, by the way), but this isn’t the case. I have tried posting comments myself and indeed, it doesn’t work. Not on new post and not [...]
Wasabi Defense update 04-06 2008-04-06 14:07:53 Finally got some more work done on Wasabi Defense
. I added another weapon and another base element. The weapon is a rapid fire cannon that shoots six round bursts, and the base element is supposed to be a fuel rod plant. Here’s what everything looks like:
To be honest, I think I’m on my way to [...]
Sad news 2008-04-11 16:00:53 I wish it hadn’t come to this, but it did. I have to put Wasabi Defense on hold for a while. In one of my previous posts I already mentioned it wasn’t going as smoothly as I hoped, and things have only gotten worse. The graphics are crappy, the code is a mess and it’s [...]
Introducing: Sub Commander! 2008-04-14 12:33:39 So, Wasabi Defense is on hold for now. While I’m figuring out how I’m gonna rescue the project I’m gonna work on the next one, for wich I was already developing a prototype: Sub Commander
! As the name already says, it’s a submarine simulation. It’s based on an old C64 game named Seafox. You are [...] Read more:Introducing
Sub Commander update 04-20 2008-04-20 09:04:46 Here’s another progress report on Sub Commander
! As you can see in this screenshot, I’ve been doing some work on the graphics. No more dummy sprites here, this is how the game is gonna look, except maybe the numbers and icons on the status display. They look ok, but I think it can be a [...]
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