Sep 29 2011

REFACTOR (CONT’D)

I clearly don’t do enough of this low-level blank canvas stuff. It’s taking a bit longer than expected to get going, mostly because I can’t seem to get into a groove. Every few minutes I hit some weird new obstacle and have to go off reading about advanced HaXe features or start sketching class diagrams – and then I get bored and browse the INTERNET. That’s not helpful. 😀

I may have to do something drastic like get a laptop for Fun Times and keep my PC for Work Times. I’m really not very good at this “focusing on work” stuff, especially when I tend to keep browsers open and so on.

But anyway! Right now all I care about is just getting something on screen using the new entity system, advance loop and decoupled renderer. Porting all the game logic and everything over to the new setup is going to be a big job, but I can worry about that after I get something working. Onward!

Sep 26 2011

REFACTOR

I’ve released Vigilance, I’ve been sick all weekend, I’ve been repainting a subframe (more on that later)… it’s been pretty hectic!

Well.. mostly, I’ve been ill. But while I was ill Vigilance went up on Newgrounds, got reviewed on JIG (“a side-scrolling beat-em-up fighter with an artsy, ironical soul, where you kick unconscious people on the ground… to save them“) and is basically taking over the Internet. Top stuff.

So… work this week! It’s about half Fight Back and half… car maintenance.

Sep 23 2011

RELEASE

I met my goal for this week. Vigilance is now out in the wild, this time as a sponsored viral Flash game. Best of luck to it!

And, well, that’s all I’ve got. I’ve had a cold for the past few days. It hasn’t been so bad, but late in the evening I’m finding it hard to focus on a computer monitor! So good night for now, enjoy your weekend and I’ll be back on Monday trying to figure out what the heck I do next.

Sep 22 2011

PLAGUE

I’ve been working pretty slowly this week. Maybe I need to disable Internet access while I’m working? It’d probably help… but I’d fall behind on Twitter… o_O

I’m just hitting some minor snags with this Newgrounds build which I’ll hopefully get cleaned up shortly. I’m also coming down with a cold (a pretty minor one so far, at least!). Good thing I didn’t book Eurogamer Expo tickets, eh 😀 I think that means that finishing off Vigilance is about all I’ll achieve this week, work wise, but I reckon I can live with that.

Non-dev aside: I had a play of Sengoku’s demo last night. It’s possibly the least accessible game I’ve seen in years! What I think happened is that I waged war on a minor island clan, and the ensuing loss of honour meant most of my clan lost all respect for me and started voting in some jerk as my successor until I could recover enough honour and marry off my daughters to some of them as bribes.

I still have no idea if the game is incredibly simple or horrifically complex. Either way, it’s a good reminder of how far tutorials and general player education approaches have come and how much they bring to gaming.

Sep 20 2011

RESEARCH AGREEMENT

Civ 5 is weird! I’ve been playing it on and off for the past few days and it’s… nice? Balanced? But… a bit too balanced, possibly. I haven’t felt like there’s any actual possibility of making a bad decision. In fact, what with the advisors, the recommended worker improvements, opposing civs coming to you to make deals and so on, the game will play itself perfectly adequately if you just follow prompts at random.

And you have to sign “research agreements” now instead of trading research? What the hell is that about? 😀

Anyway, this week, I’m wrapping up the portals build of Vigilance (oh my goodness this has dragged on long enough). I’ll also be starting work on turning those Fight Back screens into glorious pixelly reality, which will be interesting. I’ll finally have to figure out what I want the level backgrounds to look like – that’s going to be tough.

Let’s see if I can get to Friday and be able to say that Vigilance is FINISHED FOREVER. I fixed up some title screen stuff and implemented scoreboards today, so it’s going alright. Onwards!

Sep 16 2011

SAM HAXE’D

Sam HaXe work’s all done! Well, apart from tidying up loose ends and submitting a patch to Sam HaXe-Open project, but that can wait. The result:

Yup! It now supports enough of the SWF format to import the Newgrounds API. I have the achievement system hooked up and everything.

It’s been weirdly nice doing something so technical. It feels like I’ve spent most of my work time this week tabbing between a hex editor, an SWF decompiler and the SWF specification PDF, manually decoding the bytestream in Notepad to sniff out I/O bugs… but it was fun, in a way. I’ll have to do a game project soon which is super complex to program and scratch that tech itch 😀

Getting that API to link properly was the hard part, so I’m already halfway through implementing it in Vigilance. Onward to next week, getting back to games development, and hopefully shipping this portals build!

Sep 14 2011

PODCAST

I got interviewed for one! Against All Expectations – Episode 9. Leo (@limbclock) asks me a bunch about my background, Beacon and Vigilance, what the plan is with Fight Back, Mac stuff, HaXe stuff, Finland stuff… taking in things like the unfortunate name conflict with Chevy Ray’s Beacon (spoiler: totally my fault!) and how Vigilance was partly inspired by an RPG Maker game.

Hell, I’m not going to go on about the Sam HaXe work I’m doing right now. There’s plenty about it in the podcast. 😀

Some interesting stuff kicked off over the weekend. Ars Technica put up this post about contract clauses from game development studios which specify that anything employees create, even in their own time, is the property of the company. (My personal opinion: it’s taking the piss!) I sent this on to Jas Purewal (@gamerlaw) who, being super awesome, wrote up a whole article addressing the legal situation, sharing what developers think on the topic, and giving sensible real-world advice on how to deal with these issues. If you do any kind of software work yourself then give it a read, though I guess it’s written for a UK audience so the legal stuff might not be universal.

Right… back to implementing the SWF spec!

Sep 13 2011

ADVENTURES WITH SAM HAXE

Oof. I was hoping to get some serious work done on the new build of Vigilance on Monday, but it turns out Sam HaXe – which I use to link my SWFs – doesn’t properly import a bunch of things from SWF files, like morph shapes or button objects. That means I plain can’t use my sponsor’s API just yet.

So I’ve downloaded the source and I’m fixing Sam HaXe. 😀 It’ll probably take a few days, as I’ve got to extend how much of the SWF format it understands, and I guess I’ll be writing another technical Flash-games-in-HaXe post after that. There are some pretty good arguments for not using HaXe. I’m really looking forward to Fight Back and getting to actually use HaXe’s strengths!

Sep 09 2011

FRIDAY?

Man! It’s often helpful keeping a three-posts-a-week schedule, but sometimes I just don’t have anything to post. Today is one of those days. However, the reason for it is a good one: Vigilance now has a sponsor!

I’ve spent the past two days working on the necessary changes for the sponsored version. It’ll be out shortly once those are done, hopefully next week. Then I’ll finally get to close the door on Vigilance and get on with overhauling Fight Back, which should let me post a ton of new pictures and music tracks and videos with new cool stuff for months. 😀 Sit tight!

Sep 07 2011

FUTURE VISION

I’ve spent two days adapting Fight Back for higher res and I still haven’t touched any of the code! I’ve just been mocking up new gameplay and menu screens in GIMP, trying to get a handle on how the game will look.

Menu wise, I’ve decided to break things up a lot and go for a clean, simple layout that’s a bit like Rez:

I’ll probably put some soft-focus stuff on the right, like ship schematics or something.

In-game – ignore the actual detail in the background, it’s a quickly filtered snap from Google Maps just as a placeholder 😀 The ships are higher resolution but the same size on screen, and I’ve put in the new dual energy bars instead of the old heat bar:

If I end up targeting Flash Player 11 or download, I may end up doing 3D backgrounds for this.

The next job on this project is to go into the code to decouple the rendering from the game logic. This is going to be messy, but when it’s done I’ll be able to drop in all these new assets no trouble – and probably still support the old resolution, if I feel like it!

It’ll be interesting seeing how Flash copes with doing about 8 times as much work. The higher resolution means there are six times as many pixels to draw each frame, and that shot above has one graphics layer more than the original – for vignetting. I think I’ll probably end up targeting Flash Player 11 just because it’ll hardly run on low end PCs otherwise 😀