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posts tagged with: gaiadi

Dev Log: Shootin' Stuff

Dev Log: Shootin' Stuff
As I spend most of my time visiting family in the cold north east of the U.S., I still have some down time to work on my next project. I've been trying to flesh out the feel of the moment to moment game play which will involve a lot of enemies, shooting, and explosions. Eventually there will be a system to build islands and structures, and then some kind of overall goal to complete for each challenge, but for now I am just focusing on the details of combat.

Right now this is what it currently looks like in animated gif form:

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I've been playing around a lot with hit freezing the action for when enemies are hit and destroyed, and still not totally sure if I like it or not. I think I might reserve it for larger enemies and more significant events and explosions, but it is kinda cool. I also threw damage numbers onto stuff just to see how it would look and surprisingly it makes shooting things magically more satisfying. In the final build of the game I'll probably have the option to turn it off.

I've also been updating some things in Otter as I work and I'll most likely save a lot of it for one big push with a lot of changes. It doesn't look like I'll be able to get any video tutorials recorded, so it may be a little while before I make another one of those.

Trying to keep up with my usual 15ish blog posts a month, but I'll have to go double time from here on out to hit my goal!

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!

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.

New Game Mockup!

New Game Mockup!
Now that I'm doing all this stuff with C# and SFML, some people have been wondering what exactly it is I'm doing with it! I have two games that I want to try and make with my new C# knowledge. They're both previous game jam games of mine, and here's what I want to do first:

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You may recognize this from the game I made for Ludum Dare 17. It's actually available for download in my games section -- just scroll down to Gaiadi and download it to give it a whirl. Gaiadi is just a prototype, but now I want to turn the concept into a fully fleshed out game.

I've been trying to get this project going for a long time now, and I think attempting it in a high resolution will be pretty fun ... as long as nothing goes horribly wrong! This is by no means a guarantee that I will be releasing this game any time soon, but just what I'll be focusing on for the next big chunk of time.

As for my metroidvania project in flash from Global Game Jam... that's not 100% dead, but right now I am putting it on hold to focus on this.