2013 - 5 - 11 / 12:13 am / general
Platforming Ledge Forgiveness
When it comes to making a cool platforming game there's all kinds of little tricks you can do to make your game shine above all the rest. I mentioned jump input buffering in a previous post and how silently helping the player out here and there can make a huge difference in the feel of your game. The topic of this post is very similar to that!
Take a look at this typical platforming scenario. Our player is barreling toward a ledge at top speed, just holding right without a care in the world. They're going to want to jump when they get to the end of that ledge, and they're probably going to want to hit jump as late as possible so that they get the maximum distance out of their jump.
read more
2013 - 5 - 8 / 11:41 am / tools
More Development Options!
Since my last post about trying out a bunch of different engines and coding languages, a bunch more options were pointed out to me by various people through the comments and through facebook and twitter, so here's a quick rundown of these things I've never even heard of or considered until last week! read more
6 Comments
2013 - 5 - 3 / 4:05 pm / tools
Dev Log: What the hell am I doing?
I'm not really sure what I'm doing right now. I'm kinda going all over the place if you can tell from my past two or three weeks of blog posts.
I got back from GDC and I saw what people were working on and I felt kinda crappy about putting all this effort into yet another AS3 game with Adobe AIR. The problem is performance. Flashpunk has a hard time maintaining 60 frames per second because of weird Flash things... it's just not that super stable. Offspring Fling is a relatively simple 2d game and for whatever reason some people with modern computers have a hard time running it at 60 fps and this is extremely frustrating for both them and me.
One day I went through some of my old prototypes. I took a look at Gaiadi, my Ludum Dare game from three years ago (WHAT THE HELL HOW IS IT THREE YEARS OLD ALREADY.) One of the most disturbing things about it was how smooth it ran. The Game Maker run time is actually pretty dang impressive and it runs at a solid 60 fps, especially when compared to flash. This made me actually feel pretty bummed because Offspring Fling isn't nearly as stable (at least in my eyes.) It's one of those moments where I asked myself "am I somehow getting worse at making games?"
So I want to learn something new... but then I've already put all this work into this AS3 framework that I'm using. The amount of friction to start on something new is really tough, because right now in AS3 making things is extremely fast and efficient because I've solved a lot of my issues and have a bunch of helper classes with super fast solutions to common problems across my projects. AS3 just also has a ton of useful libraries that I make use of like TweenLite and AS3Crypto.
read more
2013 - 4 - 30 / 4:28 pm / general
TIGJam 5 Website
The TIGJam 5 site is now live and registrations are open! Make sure to sign up soon if you want to go to one of the coolest jam events of the year.
(Also ignore the glaring typos on that image of the site for now.)
2013 - 4 - 29 / 5:20 pm / general
Birthday Feast!
Had an awesome day yesterday with some of the coolest people I know! I celebrated my birthday by eating an inhuman amount of sushi (all of the sushi in the first picture was just my order.) My friend Ben remarked "I would offer to buy your sushi, but there's no way I'm paying for a Kyle Pulver amount of sushi." It's understandable... last time I ate sushi with Ben my bill ended up being four times the amount of his.
Then my friend Linda made that red velvet cake with the momma from Offspring Fling on it, and it was amazing. The cupcakes we're also red velvet and delicious (although I feel like there was a missed opportunity there to make the cupcakes all babies from Offspring Fling too, haha!) but hey, now that I have a cake of my game, I can finally make it onto Kotaku, right?
about
Hi there, my name is Kyle, and I'm a 27 year old kid with adult powers. I'm making video games and living the indie game developer life in Tempe, Arizona. Here you will find my thoughts, games, websites, doodles, and other stuff like that. I worked on Snapshot, Offspring Fling, and a whole bunch of other games. If you want to get a hold of me use the form on the bottom of the page, leave a comment, or just tweet at me. I try to post three times a week. Thanks for stoppin' by!
spotlight
blog stuff
categories
tags
- actionscript
- air
- alec holowka
- art
- artxgame
- as3
- bill pullman
- blog
- csharp
- depict1
- design
- dev log
- devlog
- diet
- doodles
- flash
- flashdevelop
- flashpunk
- food
- game jam
- gamedev
- gdc
- good times
- haxe
- haxepunk
- id4
- igh
- internet
- ios
- jottobots
- namiko
- ninja slash
- nme
- offspring fling
- paleo
- pax
- pax10
- php
- pipa
- podcast
- programming
- promotion
- python
- sfml
- snapshot
- sopa
- space sushi
- speedrun
- steam
- sushi
- tools
- uat
- verge
- webdev
- winnitron
- yay!
archives
- may 2013 (10)
- april 2013 (15)
- march 2013 (13)
- february 2013 (15)
- january 2013 (3)
- december 2012 (1)
- november 2012 (2)
- october 2012 (1)
- september 2012 (4)
- august 2012 (1)
- july 2012 (1)
- may 2012 (1)
- april 2012 (1)
- march 2012 (1)
- february 2012 (1)
- january 2012 (1)
- november 2011 (2)
- september 2011 (1)
- july 2011 (1)
- june 2011 (1)
- may 2011 (1)
- april 2011 (2)
- march 2011 (4)
- february 2011 (4)
old sites
