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June 07, 2007
Huzzah for another journal view milestone passed with 50,000 views. I guess this means my journal is in the Silver Club or something.
The MAGIC contest seems to be going well, although I'm saddened by the news of Prozak's mother.
From what I see the games are starting to shape forth, although it's ha…
The MAGIC contest seems to be going well, although I'm saddened by the news of Prozak's mother.
From what I see the games are starting to shape forth, although it's ha…
June 04, 2007
You know you might be a game programmer if when you're ill your idea of "bed rest" involves a laptop and a programming IDE. I wasn't able to get a lot done but I've got the basis app running with some mountains to make a background. I'm feeling a lot better this morning so I hope I'll be able to ma…
June 03, 2007
It's now well into day 2 of the MAGIC contest, and I've hit a fairly big snag for my own game; it seems I've caught some kind of viral bug (which might explain why I was so off colour yesterday). It doesn't seem that serious as the only symptoms I can feel is a reaccuring sense of giddiness, tiredn…
June 03, 2007
I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of activity going on at the MAGIC Game Development wiki; there's a lot of posting and comments and great ideas being formed there. I've decided to also add my name to list of developers on there, even though I'm not officially a "contestant". My user talk pa…
June 02, 2007
If you're interested in joining the MAGIC contest you probably already know what the mystery aspect is. For those who haven't moseyed on down to the contest thread in the lounge, the secret theme is The Tower. That's the kind of contest themes you dream up when you use a pack of Tarot cards for ins…
June 02, 2007
Download Brixtar v0.2 for Windows (732 KB)
Download Brixtar v0.2 for Mac OS X (1.78 MB)
I've got the next version of Brixtar ready. In terms of raw gameplay features it's pretty much the same as the original, except for the following additions:
- Mac OS X support. Brixtar is now multi-platform. My broth…
May 31, 2007
I commented in a thread recently that the book selection algorithm in the Control Panel must be trying to send me a not-too-subtle message by regularly selecting "Game Programming for Teens" as its top pick. After posting that, it has now upgraded to offering me "Unreal Tournament Game Programming …
May 29, 2007
I spent yesterday doing a whole bunch of things that weren't working on Brixtar. I needed a bit of a break to do important things, like realise that the Mozilla Thunderbird logo is actually a postal delivery bird and not, as I had originally thought, an envelope in a bad punk rocker wig.
Not a wig
Th…
Not a wig
Th…
May 28, 2007
Download Brixtar Alpha - Windows Version
I've finally got a version of Brixtar ready for download. It's a bit scrappy around the edges, and I haven't had much time to play test it yet, but it should be a good sample of the game.
Currently I've only got the Windows version ready. There's still a few k…
May 27, 2007
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…
May 27, 2007
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've implemented the final two power-ups; score multip…
May 26, 2007
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…
May 25, 2007
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…
May 24, 2007
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…
May 23, 2007
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…
May 22, 2007
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…
May 21, 2007
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 …
May 20, 2007
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…
May 20, 2007
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…
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…
May 20, 2007
More updates!
Timers
Timers are now up and running. Going with the KISS philosophy I've implemented them as a wrapper data class; game objects can define their own timers for whatever they need. In terms of data a timer is just a long int record of a particular time in clock ticks, which it can updat…
Timers
Timers are now up and running. Going with the KISS philosophy I've implemented them as a wrapper data class; game objects can define their own timers for whatever they need. In terms of data a timer is just a long int record of a particular time in clock ticks, which it can updat…
May 19, 2007
A Big Ol' Screen of Characters
More updates:
- I've written a simple "sprite set" class which acts as a container of sprite identifiers. It's effectively an array of sprite ids, except with an extra function that allows you to specify a block of sprite names that end in incrementing digits, such as mys…
May 18, 2007
A pyramid of stars!
I decided it wasn't worth getting bogged down on throwing in too many features into the spriting code yet - I won't know what I'll need until I need to make a game with it. So I just put in the basic minimum to get working functionality. The game code can set a sprite's:
- type (wha…
May 18, 2007
Sprites are now working under Windows and Mac OS X. It was an ordeal to get the arcane workings of a PNG loader, PhysicsFS and OpenGL to work together in harmony but it's now displaying pretty pictures. I finally got glpng, a third party PNG-to-OpenGL library, to do the hard work for me after I ad…
May 17, 2007
Quick update:
- SDL opens up in a properly titled window now, both on Mac OS X and Windows.
- SDL events can be passed properly on to the rest of my library. Currently only the quit and resize messages are passed on, but I'll add the rest when I write the functionality.
- SDL windows can be resized.
- The basi…
May 15, 2007
It's time for another design brainstorm post. Since I'm up to the SDL video initialisation I need to start work on the graphics module, and this requires at least a basic understanding of how I'm going to structure the thing.
The Old Method
The current methodology I'm using for grpahics is based on t…
The Old Method
The current methodology I'm using for grpahics is based on t…
May 14, 2007
After a lot of frustration I've got my unit test and SDL test projects running in Xcode under MacOS. It's good to know that the only problem with my code was not including SDL.h in my SDL main C++ file and using **argv instead of *argv[]. Oh, and stupidly inserting the SDL header files in my third …
May 14, 2007
Brief run down of newly implemented features in the Diagonal Game Library:
- PhysicsFS is now integrated in. I've stripped it down to only read plain directories and ZIP files, but it appears to be working fine.
- Logging has been ported across from my old engine. I have my colour coded HTML log messages…
May 12, 2007
The contest is now officially MAGIC! I love acronyms made purely for their easy use in corny puns.
It's now only three weeks to the competition starts. Three weeks may sound like a long time, but to me it certainly isn't. I'd really like to have this prototype game library ready so I can whip someth…
It's now only three weeks to the competition starts. Three weeks may sound like a long time, but to me it certainly isn't. I'd really like to have this prototype game library ready so I can whip someth…
May 12, 2007
I've got my kernel a.k.a. game loop running. Most of time on this was writing a templated singleton class that I liked; the actual kernel itself is tiny due to the use of signals. It's just a while loop that keeps sending out signals until a quit flag is set or there isn't anything left that it is …
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