Thanks to the help of some friendly internet folks I finally got a process to get Otter up and running on Nuget! You can check out the latest main build of Otter all wrapped up as a Nuget package right here.

I know that it was in demand for awhile now but for the longest time I just couldn't figure out the process needed to get Otter up there. Now you can enjoy all the luxuries of the Otter game making framework without having to go download files and move them around and all that junk. Just install the package from Nuget and you're good to go!

Also somehow the name Otter wasn't taken already?

Itch.io just released their brand new Refinery tools to the public and I immediately jumped into them head first. After just a little bit of set up I was able to get their new magic up and running for Super Sky Sisters. I have a set up now in Visual Studio in which I can select "Itch" as my build target and push F6 to build and deploy the game to my beta testers on Itch.

So using Visual Studio 2013 (and probably other versions can do this as well) here's how to set up your game to publish on Itch with just the push of a button!

Last night I spent an hour or so talking about explosions! It was an internet talk that I gave from the comfort of my room to the fine folks at Warp Zone in Louisville Kentucky.



All the materials from the talk can be found here if you want to follow along with the animations and video footage.

It was a lot of fun to put together the talk, and get to share my excitement over particle effects to other game developers!

Okay apparently it's been like three months since I've posted about Otter updates, and there's been a lot since then. I guess since my life was in chaos for the past few months I slipped up. Oh well! Here's a quick breakdown on changes and fixes to my C# game making framework thing.

* Fixed a bug with rendering a BoxCollider with a width or height of 1 or 0.

* Fixed a rendering bug caused by changing the font size of a RichText object at runtime.

* Added flags for Sound and Music to check if they're currently playing audio. Sound.IsPlaying and Music.IsPlaying will be true if they're playing back audio.

* Added Color.Shade(float) which will return a color from black to white with the specified float. For example Color.Shade(0.5f) will return a gray color where 0.5f is set for red green and blue.

* Fixed a bug in Input.CharToKey() (a key was missing...)

* Fixed a bug in CollideEntities where an Entity could collide with itself.

* Added Collider.Overlap(x, y, px, py) which will do an Overlap test with a specified point (px, py) Very useful for doing UI stuff and checking for a point overlapping a collider.

* Fixed a bug with LastPressed and LastReleased timers on Button.

* Added Util.ListCombine<T>() to take a bunch of lists and combine them into one list. I don't know if this is already a C# thing so whatever.

* Added Color.FromBytes()

* Added Axis.Reset() to totally clear an Axis's input state.

* Added Button.Reset() to totally clear a Button's input state.

* Fixed a bug where Gradient wasn't blending with its Color.

* Added DataSaver.FileExists().

* Added Particle.ActiveCount but I'm not totally sure if this works as intended.

* Fixed a bug where creating a Text object would not accept an SFML.Graphics.Font.

* Added MouseDeltaX and MouseDeltaY to get the mouse movement since the last update. Mostly used for locking the mouse inside the game window.

* Util.GetFieldValue works for static fields now.

* Added Scene.CameraFocus which if set to an Entity the Scene will then follow that Entity.

* Added Rand.IntXY which returns a vector2 of ints.

* Reworked EventQueue component into EventStack and EventQueue.

* Added GraphicList which is a Graphic type that is a list of graphics.

* Added Anim.OnNewFrame() which is invoked whenever the current frame of an Anim changes. Useful for tying code to specific frames of an animation.

* Huge debugger api changes which uses attributes now instead of RegisterCommand with CommandTypes. Check out the example here to see the new style.

* Added a bunch of stuff to the Debugger like tab auto complete and parameter help when typing in a command.

* Entity.UpdatedOnce is now public (private set.)

* Scene.RemoveNextFrame(Entity) will remove an entity with a one frame delay.

Wow that's a lot of stuff! I'm really happy with the new debugger API that uses all kinds of crazy reflection stuff now instead of a bunch of RegisterCommand method calls.

If you've been using Otter then you should drop by the official slack sometime and hang out with your fellow otter lovers!

Did you know that Otter supports tweening? Now you do! Tweening is one of the coolest things in the world in my opinion and it's one of the easiest ways to create sweet effects and animations in games.

(I don't know what's up with the end of this gif so whatever.)

Otter makes use of the Glide tweening library by Jacob Albano. It has a similar syntax to TweenLite from the AS3 days of using FlashPunk, and since Otter is based off of FlashPunk having a syntax similar to a flash tweening library makes a lot of sense to me.

Check out the full source code of this example on the Otter example page!

I've been making some good progress on my latest prototype over the past few days. I got a quick GUI system working in the game but then quickly realized that my approach was pretty bad. After reading up on some articles written about making simple lightweight GUI stuff for video games I scrapped almost all the code and rewrote it.

My first approach was just having each GUI Entity operate independently and that worked for a bunch of simple cases such as a single drag and drop item, or a button that does something when it's pressed. However doing things beyond that, such as multiselect, and having different GUI elements pass info along to one another, requires a different approach.

The approach I settled on for now is something I've done briefly before with a quick prototype a few months ago. I'm now electing to use a single "controller" class as the base of the GUI system. The controller has a list of all the GUI elements it's in charge of, and almost all of the logic for the system is handled inside the controller.

A controller has a list of child elements that it controls, and each element can also have even more child elements added to it. The controller is the only element that receives input from the game, and anything resulting from that input is passed along to the appropriate element on the list of children.

I still have a little ways to go on a few things. I want to be able to get modal elements working so that I can do things like message boxes that have to be cleared before continuing and interruptions when important things happen. There are still a few bugs to sort out with clicking through elements and dragging stuff around, but so far I feel like my progress has been pretty great and I might have something playable way sooner than I thought!