I moved to a new URL! Check it out!

posts filed under: general

Dev Log: December Madness

Dev Log: December Madness
December is looking like a pretty slow month for me as far as development and blog posts go. I spent a lot of last week getting ready to travel back to the cold north east, and spent all day on airplanes yesterday. I'm slowly grinding away at some stuff.

I managed to push a new build of Offspring Fling to Steam for both Windows and Mac. The controller support for the builds has been vastly improved thanks to AIRControl. Achievements are now also working for both versions of the game which is super cool, thanks to FRESteamWorks. Currently the only way to get the new build is through the Beta branch on Steam, which you can access with the password iwannatestosf.

Some small updates are coming to Otter as well, and if I can manage to record a video or two while I'm traveling that'd be pretty neat, but right now I don't think I'm going to have much time for that. As I start to chip away at the project tentatively titled Gaiaden, I'm making a lot of minor tweaks to the engine. I'm still playing around a lot with the exact order of updating and rendering stuff, so we'll see what happens when the dust settles.

Also check out this blurry cell phone photo of a crazy mansion in Albany, NY all decked out for Christmas.

Image
otter offspring fling dev log
Posted December 16th 2013 1:50 PM (General)
No Comments

Dev Log: Just Otter Stuff

Dev Log: Just Otter Stuff
It's been pretty quiet around here lately. I haven't updated too often this past week because everyone on my twitter feed was talking about how amazing the new Zelda game is, so I had to go out and buy it, and then spend the next week completely engrossed in it. If you're still on the fence about it, I think it's the best Zelda game I've played since Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time.

Aside from playing Zelda I've also been chipping away at some updates for Otter.

Image


Right here you can see part of that update. Those red funny shaped objects are actually entities that have pixel colliders on them, meaning that they only collide where those pixels are. I know that pixel colliders usually aren't the best thing to do, and are often expensive on the performance side, but for some low res games they can be pretty handy.

I've also been going through and adding more image manipulation support. I've expanded the Texture class in Otter to allow for stuff like getting and setting pixel colors, as well as saving to an image. These are all basic SFML functions, but for the sake of Otter I've gone ahead and combined the SFML Image and Texture class into one thing.

Images, and soon other graphic types, will soon be able to be constructed from an otter Texture which supports all kinds of new loading techniques such as loading from a byte stream.

Just a few more things on my immediate to do list for Otter before I really start digging into an actual game project, yahoo!
otter sfml dev log
Posted November 28th 2013 9:35 AM (General)
No Comments

Maybe Updating Offspring Fling!

Maybe Updating Offspring Fling!
I'm dipping back into the wild world of AS3 for the next few days and pushing out a small update for Offspring Fling (if everything goes according to plan.)

You see, many years ago when Offspring Fling was being made into a downloadable application instead of a flash game, I wanted to add joystick support. I ended up going with a native extension called JoyQuery that was able to do it.. sort of. It had a few issues, but the game had joystick support for being an AIR application which was pretty awesome.

Unfortunately, JoyQuery caused some issues on some people's computers. The game would run incredibly slow, or the game would straight up crash on some PCs. I think the game doesn't work at all on Windows 8 right now unless you put it in Windows 7 compatibility mode.

So that's where AIRControl comes in. The creator of JoyQuery released it a little while ago, and so far it's looking super promising. Getting it integrated with Offspring Fling even after not touching the code in a very long time was really straight forward. This is also coming from someone who tried to use the new GameInput stuff that Adobe has exposed to desktop applications in AIR. I really tried to get GameInput to work, but I have no clue how it works still, and AIRControl took me less than an hour to get rolling.

Anyway, stay tuned for an Offspring Fling minor update that should fix the last remaining issues with the game related to JoyQuery!
offspring fling as3
Posted November 26th 2013 12:06 PM (General)
2 Comments

All the King's Men Time Lapse



Watch me make All the King's Men at lightning speed. 48 hours worth of screenshots compressed into just 4 minutes of footage. I only took one sleep break in the entire course of the 48 hours, so I was pretty loopy by the end of this.

I recommend watching at 1080p if you can!

All the King's Men was created using Otter, my 2d game making framework built in dotnet and SFML 2.1.
yay! game jam kings men gamedev otter
Posted November 14th 2013 7:06 PM (General)
No Comments

Otter Updates: Effects!

Otter Updates: Effects!
Another round of Otter updates are here! I'm getting ready to go to a game jam for the weekend so I wanted to make sure I was equipped for making rad special effects for whatever I end up making (if I end up making a game, even.)

Image


* Added the Particle entity. It can be used to easily create particles with simple effects.

* Added the Flash entity. It can be used to easily create screen flashes.

* Added the ImageSet graphic. This is used by the Particle entity right now. Think of it as a very very simple SpriteMap. You can render one image from a set of images (a sprite sheet) but there's no automatic animations.

* Added various window options to the Game class.

I have a few more fixes I want to do before the jam starts including a small fix to the Axis class and possibly changes to the StateMachine class to use enums for states, but I don't know if I'll be able to get to those before the jam starts in just a couple hours.
otter sfml csharp programming
Posted November 8th 2013 12:12 PM (General)
No Comments

Otter Documentation

Otter Documentation
Just a quick update about Otter! If you don't know already, Otter is a 2d game making framework that I'm making using DotNet/C# and SFML 2.

I just pushed a first pass at some documentation. This should be enough to at least help some people out with basic questions, but I'm sure it all has a long way to go. It's being generated from the source using Doxygen.

I'm going to be attempting to use Otter for a game jam coming up next weekend, and I can't wait to see either what I can make with it, or what horrible bugs will reveal themselves! I've been tinkering away on two different projects in Otter and so far so good, but you never know until your deep in the trenches of a game jam...
otter csharp programming sfml
Posted November 1st 2013 6:32 PM (General)
7 Comments
« newer posts
older posts »