Monday, 29 October 2012
Codea
I've been doodling ideas using Codea recently. If you haven't tried it, I'd recommend it. I have some basic code going for touch input, and then ported my flash game engine to it. So far it has been quite helpful!
Monday, 22 October 2012
Progress
I have the platformer basic under way. It's been harder going over the last few weeks and I haven't had a lot of free time. As this is all being written in flash, I'll start posting some test builds when I get a change soon. Well, when there's more to show!
Monday, 8 October 2012
Game ideas
So, we have had a good chat, and my son and I have whittled it down to these ideas:
1) Mario type game - this is something that excites him. He described it as Mario, but I think it'll be more like a Jet Set Willy/Manic Miner type game with Mario elements. He wants the character to be able to jump through platforms. For there to be a time limit. To collect coins and for there to be hazards and "monsters". I think we can borrow ideas from Mario (monsters can be killed by jumping on them as in SMB) and I think they should respawn (a bit like the turtles in the original "Mario Brothers".) It's a nice simple engine to write, the physics are pretty simple and it's a good starter project.
2) Zelda/Gauntlet type game. This one will have zombies in it and will involve the character traversing some kind of "world". More Zelda 1. The details are a bit sketchy past that, except that the played must have a "big sword" and the zombies must splat.
3) Stronny's day out. This game is based around our cat Astra aka "Stronny" (which came about over years of word play by my wife and I and various children misinterpreting her name Astra -> Astron -> Stron -> Stronny -> Jonny). She goes out every morning and returns at around 7pm. No one knows what she does, but the kids are convinced she plays in a stream just out back of our house. The game is basically a one screener where you control the cat. She can climb into the stream (it's a trickle most of the time) and up on the bank. You'll score by catching mice, rats and fish. Every now and again the stream will flood with a tidal wave, which she must dodge and our dog Zara (who loves the cat, would happily chase her all day long) will escape and chase her about the setting. It's a simple one screener.
4) I have an idea for a parody game, which will be a big ongoing project. It involves actual properties, so will never be formally released (past being sent to the author of whose work it will parody.) It'll be a little tongue in cheek and I hope it will be pretty cool. This one will involve actual worlds, scrolling levels and more complex effects and music. I'll design an engine I'll then re-use in other games of a similar type.
I'm planning to use Flash to write most of this. It's simple to start, there are some good free tools and basic engines too.
1) Mario type game - this is something that excites him. He described it as Mario, but I think it'll be more like a Jet Set Willy/Manic Miner type game with Mario elements. He wants the character to be able to jump through platforms. For there to be a time limit. To collect coins and for there to be hazards and "monsters". I think we can borrow ideas from Mario (monsters can be killed by jumping on them as in SMB) and I think they should respawn (a bit like the turtles in the original "Mario Brothers".) It's a nice simple engine to write, the physics are pretty simple and it's a good starter project.
2) Zelda/Gauntlet type game. This one will have zombies in it and will involve the character traversing some kind of "world". More Zelda 1. The details are a bit sketchy past that, except that the played must have a "big sword" and the zombies must splat.
3) Stronny's day out. This game is based around our cat Astra aka "Stronny" (which came about over years of word play by my wife and I and various children misinterpreting her name Astra -> Astron -> Stron -> Stronny -> Jonny). She goes out every morning and returns at around 7pm. No one knows what she does, but the kids are convinced she plays in a stream just out back of our house. The game is basically a one screener where you control the cat. She can climb into the stream (it's a trickle most of the time) and up on the bank. You'll score by catching mice, rats and fish. Every now and again the stream will flood with a tidal wave, which she must dodge and our dog Zara (who loves the cat, would happily chase her all day long) will escape and chase her about the setting. It's a simple one screener.
4) I have an idea for a parody game, which will be a big ongoing project. It involves actual properties, so will never be formally released (past being sent to the author of whose work it will parody.) It'll be a little tongue in cheek and I hope it will be pretty cool. This one will involve actual worlds, scrolling levels and more complex effects and music. I'll design an engine I'll then re-use in other games of a similar type.
I'm planning to use Flash to write most of this. It's simple to start, there are some good free tools and basic engines too.
Monday, 1 October 2012
Catch up
Well, been a while. What have we been doing? I've completed a number of projects, but this year has really been dominated by the "day job". I've expanded the MVC framework to the point where it's a very usable chunk of code. This has been something used in production code. As such, I've gotten away with spending a small amount of my day job working through various bugs and throwing out improvements. The code is now at a point where I'd be happy for other parties to use it, though it has little documentation at the moment.
My son and I have started talking about writing a game. This is a subject that has happened a few times. I'd originally played about with Codea (iPad IDE, focused on Games and graphical applications), but that became too hard to find the time for. But recently, after watching Indy Gamer the movies (god, that is an inspiring film, Jonathan Blow, Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes are now my pet heroes!) I'm not aiming to write the next Braid or Super Meat Boy, but I have a 9 year old inner me (and, oddly a 9 year old son), who desperately want to write a game. Seriously, from the year I got my first computer (Sinclair Spectrum 16K, circa 1984) my friends and I (one specifically) obsessed about making a game "with moving graphics". I got to the point that I could write the basics in Sinclair Basic, and I was pretty happy. Moving to the 16bit era killed that dream. It became way too much for me to be able to do that (and I found girls and teen aged angst more appealing.) But, somewhere deep down, a game is waiting to be written. My son is my key ally. He loves video games and he is young enough to have no preconceptions and wants to throw lots of ideas at the project. I can then filter these and cherry pick his better ideas and my experience. We might make something cool. It won't be anything "big", but I know it will be cool.
My son and I have started talking about writing a game. This is a subject that has happened a few times. I'd originally played about with Codea (iPad IDE, focused on Games and graphical applications), but that became too hard to find the time for. But recently, after watching Indy Gamer the movies (god, that is an inspiring film, Jonathan Blow, Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes are now my pet heroes!) I'm not aiming to write the next Braid or Super Meat Boy, but I have a 9 year old inner me (and, oddly a 9 year old son), who desperately want to write a game. Seriously, from the year I got my first computer (Sinclair Spectrum 16K, circa 1984) my friends and I (one specifically) obsessed about making a game "with moving graphics". I got to the point that I could write the basics in Sinclair Basic, and I was pretty happy. Moving to the 16bit era killed that dream. It became way too much for me to be able to do that (and I found girls and teen aged angst more appealing.) But, somewhere deep down, a game is waiting to be written. My son is my key ally. He loves video games and he is young enough to have no preconceptions and wants to throw lots of ideas at the project. I can then filter these and cherry pick his better ideas and my experience. We might make something cool. It won't be anything "big", but I know it will be cool.
Friday, 17 September 2010
MVC Framework for MS.Net
I've uploaded a little part baked MVC style framework for Winforms. It's in an early state, but it does what I need to do at the moment. Plan is to progress it over the next year. I'm going to start using it for serious projects, and so progress will be dictated by how frequently I hit issues I need to fix or workaround!
Monday, 2 August 2010
iPhone dev - iOS4 breaks things
Okay, I'll admit it. I've been slack. The last version of DoodUrls for iPhone is reeeealy old now. It doesn't work under iOS 4. It's a sad day ;-(
I have not had any time to fix the app. It's not just a simple case of bashing out a few tweaks too. I had a long look at why it was crashing and came to the conclusion that the iOS 4 SDK was not giving me any useful answers! I will have another look in the upcoming weeks, but at the moment I'm very snowed under with real life.
My theory now is, do a complete iOS 4 re-write, using my "all I learned" experience. This is the route I'll travel, I'm not sure when that'll be though. As it stands, DoodUrls seems to have pretty much dried up through lack of content. I might put plan B in to action - plan B is to create my own feed via a group Twitter account. Call it something comparable and have at it.
Watch this space. I suspect it'll all be pie in the sky for the foreseeable future anyway :-(
I have not had any time to fix the app. It's not just a simple case of bashing out a few tweaks too. I had a long look at why it was crashing and came to the conclusion that the iOS 4 SDK was not giving me any useful answers! I will have another look in the upcoming weeks, but at the moment I'm very snowed under with real life.
My theory now is, do a complete iOS 4 re-write, using my "all I learned" experience. This is the route I'll travel, I'm not sure when that'll be though. As it stands, DoodUrls seems to have pretty much dried up through lack of content. I might put plan B in to action - plan B is to create my own feed via a group Twitter account. Call it something comparable and have at it.
Watch this space. I suspect it'll all be pie in the sky for the foreseeable future anyway :-(
I've uploaded a tiny bit of Opensource - a very basic outliner.
The code is designed to be very simple and to create a minimalist outliner - pretty much a one trick pony. What it does it opens up with a "default" outline. There is nothing to do but add items to this outliner. When you open the outliner by double clicking, this outline is opened. When you close the outliner, it is saved. To create a new outliner file, create a new text document and change the file extension to ".meo" The file can happily be empty. The outliner will then open this file when double clicked.
All of this was inspired by the spiffing BeMail client from BeOS. BeMail used the entire file system as an inbox, and messages were just specially formatted files. Double clicking on a file opened the client and loaded the message. This simplistic approach is what I went for.
I'll add new features as I need them, but as it stands - enjoy!
Props to the couple of opensource projects I borrowed some of the code from - nothing I couldn't have got through myself, but I was having a bit of a brain fart this morning.
The code is designed to be very simple and to create a minimalist outliner - pretty much a one trick pony. What it does it opens up with a "default" outline. There is nothing to do but add items to this outliner. When you open the outliner by double clicking, this outline is opened. When you close the outliner, it is saved. To create a new outliner file, create a new text document and change the file extension to ".meo" The file can happily be empty. The outliner will then open this file when double clicked.
All of this was inspired by the spiffing BeMail client from BeOS. BeMail used the entire file system as an inbox, and messages were just specially formatted files. Double clicking on a file opened the client and loaded the message. This simplistic approach is what I went for.
I'll add new features as I need them, but as it stands - enjoy!
Props to the couple of opensource projects I borrowed some of the code from - nothing I couldn't have got through myself, but I was having a bit of a brain fart this morning.
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