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Local Game Dev Community Tips

Local Game Dev Community Tips
This past week IGDA Phoenix held another one of its monthly meetings. We had about 60 something people turn up for the meeting to check out a presentation from one of our local game developers, which is pretty awesome. I'm the co-chair of IGDA Phoenix along with Corey, so we are responsible for putting together each of these meetings.

Our meeting turn out is pretty impressive, especially when new people show up and they tell me that they had no idea that Phoenix even had a game development scene. We're one of the few IGDA chapters (from what I hear) that has consistent monthly meetings, and I believe that we've only actually missed 3 monthly meetings in the past 3 or 4 years that we've been running it.

Since we've been running this thing for a couple years now and it feels pretty successful, I thought it would be neato to share some tips that I think are important to maintaining an active community of any kind!
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gamedev yay! igda community
Posted August 2nd 2013 8:49 PM (General)
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I'm in a Movie

I'm in a Movie


The Special Edition of Indie Game The Movie just came out, and it includes a bunch of extra stuff not in the original release. One of those special things in the special edition is a piece put together about game jams. It was shot at TIGJam in 2010, and I managed to sneak my way into the footage.

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They even used me as the thumbnail for the segment, yay! I unfortunately don't have the capacity to listen to or watch myself on screen, so I have no idea what I say or do in the segment, but I hear it's not terrible.

You should definitely check out Indie Game The Movie if you haven't seen it yet. It's one of the best looks into the wild world of independent game development in my opinion.
yay! gamedev game jam
Posted July 24th 2013 8:14 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Boring Stuff

Dev Log: Boring Stuff
My work with C# and SFML pushes on. I'm also trying out a new thing which is working remotely! I need to break free of the shackles of my bedroom and be more comfortable with working at over locations, so right now I'm making this blog post from a local cafe with my laptop as I work on C# stuff and rant about how Nintendo sucks.

Every time I travel my work schedule get's totally screwed up and it takes me days to get back into a groove, so in an attempt to try and correct this I'm getting used to working in different locations. Anyway...

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Yesterday I added a bunch of structure code to Gaiaden (tentative title!) for combat. My dream right now is to have a bunch of different damage types, armor, shields, and all that kinda crap, but we'll see how much of that makes it into the final game code. Usually that kind of stuff gets cut in the end because it ends up being way too much work that doesn't add a whole lot to the game, but right now I'm letting myself dream big!
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gaiadi csharp sfml
Posted July 9th 2013 3:56 PM (General)
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Hair Post

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An entire blog post dedicated to hair. I always wanted blue hair when I was a kid so today I finally went through with it!

I'll probably get back to actual game development posts soon. Been in a slump since coming back from TIGJam. Travel always manages to throw me totally off from my work schedule.
yay!
Posted July 7th 2013 5:52 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Game Loops

Dev Log: Game Loops
I pretty much spent the whole day learning that certain video cards, or hardware configurations, seem to really hate rendering large textures.

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I've been messing around with some early versions of the background for my new game. I'm composing it from a number of images -- there's the ground, a couple of gradients for water and haze, and a couple of cloud layers. All of my desktop machines seem to have no issue running this (the render time is 1 to 2 ms) but my laptop seems to get very upset about this with a render time of nearly 15ms.

I also discovered that using the SetFramerateLimit() function in SFML is bad news, at least in C# land. I sent my current build to a friend who ran it on his Macbook (running parallels to boot into Windows) and it ran at about 30 frames per second (short of the desired 60.) His Macbook has no problem playing any other Windows games, so this was a bit odd. After messing around in the game for about 5 minutes the framerate jumped to 60 for no reason that we could see. Super weird.

After these weird results I went back to my code and ripped out the SetFramerateLimit() in favor for my own timing code that would limit the framerate. Not only does this seem to just work better than SetFramerateLimit(), but it also fixed the framerate on my friend's Macbook.

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Eventually I will be releasing the full source of my framework for people to laugh at, or possibly use and contribute to. I haven't yet reached the point where I think I can do that comfortably, but I would imagine that sometime this month I'll be ready to show it off. It's very similar to Flashpunk, and is basically a big mash up of a lot of the engines and frameworks I've seen or used. In the mean time, you can also check out #Punk by Jacob Albano which is more of a faithful port of Flashpunk to C# using SFML as the core.
gamedev dev log csharp sfml gaiadi
Posted July 1st 2013 2:58 PM (General)
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Screenshot Saturday: Some Graphics

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Starting to test out some graphics in my engine! I know this looks super hideous right now, but I'm starting to figure out the best pipeline for putting art into the game. I'm used to the old way of Flash where I could just embed everything into my SWF and it would just be one neat file... with C# this doesn't seem to be the best practice. I'm thinking about at least zipping up all my assets for distribution builds, but right now I have no idea how to do that.

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So about a half hour later I got my Gradient graphics class working with parallax and alpha blending, so I was able to add the all important haze layers! This makes the background way less jarring. This is super-temporary art, but it still helps to polish it up some.

Hopefully this starts to shape up into a game soon!
gamedev screen sat dev log
Posted June 29th 2013 5:32 PM (General)
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