My first one week game development challenge is over and Brixtar is... not quite yet releasable, unfortunately. I still need to clean up things a little bit and add in a dozen or so levels before it's playtestable. Even though it still doesn't have sound or a menu system I'll throw something togeth…

Brixtar's almost alpha ready; or possibly beta - I'm not quite sure which is more appropriate at this stage. All the major features are in there save for the menu and the sound, and I don't think I'll be getting that done by the end of the week.

I've implemented the final two power-ups; score multip…

I'm halfway through implementing the powerup system; I suspect the final version won't be as mad as this screenshot suggests!

New features added to Brixtar:

• A rewritten collision detection system. I think it's working better now, although I've noticed a few bugs I still need to iron out.
  
• "Steel" brick…

It's not that easy to draw the GameDev logo, especially in bricks
I've implemented a simple XML level loader into Brixtar, so it should be pretty easy to whip up a series of levels. I still need to implement a couple of new brick types (most likely an unbreakable type and one that needs multiple hit…

I didn't add that much more to Brixtar yesterday. Unfortunately most of my time was taken up hunting down an annoying pointer bug deep in the bowels of the signal system that forms the core of my whole system. I forgot to put reference counting on the memory structure I use to store the function po…

I've got collision detection working, so the ball can now collide with bricks, the walls and the paddle. There's a few small kinks that I'll need to debug (the ball sometimes missed a corner hit due to a flaw in the algorithm) but it's reasonably playable as it is. I've also redid the graphics, goi…

Collision detection is still not working properly. I've implemented a method that should in theory deal with multiple balls travelling at high speed. When given a time interval to update the ball's movement, the algorithm checks to see if the ball can touch a new grid space that could potentially c…

I wasn't feeling that well yesterday - probably a result of pushing myself too hard to finish the Diagonal Game Library prototype by the end of the weekend - so I didn't get that far in my first demo game. Currently all I've got is some sample game objects displaying placeholder graphics I whipped …

Great news - after a mad weekend of coding and a few more hours this morning, I'm pleased to announce that the prototype phase of the Diagonal Game Library is now complete! It's time to say farewell to "Mark Aleph - Prototype Version" and start heading towards the next milestone - "Mark Beth - Feat…

Last update for the day:

SDL_Mixer

SDL Mixer took a bit of hacking with the compiler to get working, but it's linked in and working now. I couldn't find a ready-built linking library for MinGW32 so I had to compile my own; unforunately I've never been able to get those configure files to work properl…