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posts dated from: august 2013

PAX Eve

PAX Eve
I made it safe and sound to Seattle after nearly losing my mind to the anxiety of flying and traveling in general. I usually like traveling when I'm actually in my new location, but the entire process of getting there makes me pretty crazy. The packing before the trip makes me freak out as if I forgot everything important, the airport security makes me freak out with the weird x ray scanners and pat downs, and the act of flying in a plane is probably the worst since I get pretty bad adrenaline rushes from the turbulence which causes me to panic...

But hey! Here I am in sunny Seattle, Washington getting ready for one of the craziest events of the year.

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Behold the beautiful view from my friend James's apartment. We're only 10 to 15 minute walk from the actual convention center where PAX is, so it's a pretty good set up for 4 days of madness. I'm taking every precaution not to get sick, but it really does seem to come down to luck of the draw (but your odds of sickness increase based on how little sleep you get.)

If you're out at PAX then I hope I get to see you and or meet you! I'll be hanging around the indie mega booth or the PAX 10 for most of the time, so if you see some dude with blue and blonde hair you should totally say hello.

I hope everyone has an awesome and healthy PAX! LET'S DO THIS.
pax yay! good times
Posted August 29th 2013 5:14 PM (Events)
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Doodle Post

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doodles
Posted August 28th 2013 9:20 AM (Doodle)
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Gravity Ghost Website!

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Gravity Ghost is now up for pre-orders! A lovely game by one of my house mates Erin Robinson. She needed a fancy pre-order page so I returned to the war zone of HTML and CSS to make some magic happen.

The big screenshot of the site is a little wacky because of some of the parallax scrolling and background positions that I used. Certain elements stay in place when scrolling, and some scroll with some parallax, it's very fancy. I also made use of a lot of the artwork directly from the game for a majority of the elements on the site. I think it turned out pretty well! Check out Gravity Ghost!
webdev yay! igh design
Posted August 26th 2013 11:57 AM (General)
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Dev Log: Ogmo Integration

Dev Log: Ogmo Integration
I'm starting to put together a quick example game for my C# SFML framework during the Ludum Dare weekend of jam madness, and part of this will be Ogmo Editor integration, YEAH!

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Loading XML seems to be pretty straight forward so far in C#, but I do miss some of the XML features of AS3. Right now in that image I'm just loading a grid collider and a tile map from the XML data in Ogmo, and the green box is a player that can run around and collide with the tiles.

For this example project I'm just going to make a quick and easy platforming and collecting game. I want to make it as complete of an example as I can, and not just a single level room. Multiple levels, menus, saving and loading, stats... I want all that kinda stuff in this example so people can see a sort of "complete" game made with my framework.

I'm hoping to have this done fairly soon, but on Wednesday I'm taking off for PAX and I don't think I'm going to be working on anything during those four days of insanity.
dev log csharp sfml
Posted August 24th 2013 1:35 PM (General)
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Dog Face No Space

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Oh my GOD I am now a Twitch emoticon! YEAH! If you type DogFace into any Twitch chat you get my beautiful visage.

Why DogFace? Well, it's a pretty long story, but it has something to do with me adding a tribute to FrankerZ on Steam. When I added trading cards and emoticons to Steam through Offspring Fling, one of the emoticons I added was a tribute to FrankerZ, a Twitch emoticon used heavily by the speed running community. I added it because I love the emoticon as much as the speed runners do, and since Offspring Fling had a speed running element I figured it would be awesome to reference the speed running community with an emoticon. (Also, I chose :dogface: for the Steam emoticon because a lot times people in Twitch chat try to troll new users by typing "FrankerZ = Dog Face (no space)")

At first there was an issue with me using an emoticon that looked like FrankerZ, so I had to remove it, but then after some more communication and help from a Twitch admin, Horror, I was able to get the okay to use it on Steam. After the dust had settled and the twitter outcry to free FrankerZ was over, Horror figured it would be pretty funny to wrap up the story with putting me on Twitch... so there I am! DogFace on Twitch is me, and :dogface: on Steam is my tribute to FrankerZ and the speed running community. All's well that ends well!
yay!
Posted August 23rd 2013 4:24 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Screen Scalin'

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Look out, it's a 6mb animated gif! Another thing off my task list was scaling the game window to different resolutions. I wanted to keep the same stuff on the screen as I scaled the game window up and down (since I imagine people will want to play games at varying resolutions) so what I'm doing right now is just scaling a render texture to the size of the window. I guess we'll see how horrible or okay this approach is soon enough.

I've been trying to figure out the best way to start making assets in terms of their resolution. Right now my idea is to just pick a resolution that the game will natively be in, like 1920 x 1080, and just make all assets as if the game is being played at that resolution. Scaling that resolution up to 2440 x 1440, or down to something like 720 x 480, doesn't seem to be that bad. My only concern is keeping text readable at low resolutions, so I might have to do some extra work to maybe change fonts or text sizes depending on the resolution.

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For Snapshot, we just chose a virtual resolution of 1600 x 1200 and made all assets as if the game was being played at that resolution. This seemed to work out okay in the end, but we did spend a lot of time at the beginning of the project trying to figure out the best solution for this issue. If I were smarter I'd be doing something like having assets for different resolutions and loading the right one depending on the resolution but I have no idea how to do that for now so I'll go for the short and simple approach!
csharp sfml dev log
Posted August 22nd 2013 3:40 PM (General)
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