GBGamesFor this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 166.75 (current year) = 576 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 65 (current year) = 775 / 1000
[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]
Javier Lopez wrote a beginner’s tutorial to write Tetris in C++. NOTE: It seems this link is broken. I’ll see if I can find a replacement. The tutorial is platform-independent, which I like. While some people have complained that the tutorial isn’t very good C++, I’ve yet to see a more comprehensive and complete Tetris tutorial. Once you’ve followed it and written your own, feel free to spend the time to write a better one.
Full disclosure: I’ve never written a Tetris clone.
WHAT?! Haven’t ALL game developers worth their salt made their own Tetris? Didn’t icculus say that it was good for the soul?
I’m not going to say that I’m proud of it, but for some reason the furthest I ever got was to write some notes down. I would think about how to represent the various pieces, but I would get hung up on not easily seeing a general way to do so. I could have hard-coded them the way the tutorial does, but I thought, “Nah, I can do it better than that!”
But then I never did it. And so I never wrote a Tetris clone at all.
For new game developers out there, you have to realize that shortcuts and brute force methods are perfectly fine sometimes. It’s more important to get something working, even if it is working badly, than it is to get it right the first time. Otherwise, you spend years tweaking a general purpose game engine.
Lopez’s tutorial will do more to help someone understand basic game logic than most game engine tutorials, and the end result will be a pretty good clone of the original Tetris. The player isn’t going to care that you didn’t use every bit of functionality that C++ (or any language) provides. You made a game, and that’s all that matters.
[tags] tetris clone, game development, tutorial [/tags]
Wolfire, indie creators of dynamic and bloody fighting game Lugaru (which involves ninja rabbits and wolves), have announced weekly alphas of the sequel called Overgrowth.
To help celebrate and generate awareness for Overgrowth, they are giving away free copies of Lugaru.
All you have to do to have your free copy emailed to you on Christmas Eve is join this Facebook event and join the Overgrowth Facebook Page. Don’t open it until Christmas Day! Make sure you’re a fan of the Overgrowth Facebook Page, and be sure to invite your friends to this event!
If you’re not familiar with Lugaru, here’s a video created to explain the giveaway and show some footage:
Get Lugaru for Free from David Rosen on Vimeo.
Lugaru is available for Windows, Mac, and GNU/Linux. Overgrowth will also be cross-platform. I enjoyed playing through the first game. It reminded me of a much faster paced One Must Fall: Battlegrounds, and I enjoyed the dynamic fighting system. There’s something satisfying about sweeping your opponent’s leg and then kicking them before they can land, especially when you can kick them into another opponent or two. I think my personal favorite move is the knife throw, especially when it stops your opponent from running off to tell the others that you’re around. As for Overgrowth, I hope to get a chance to look at the alpha releases soon.
In the meantime, if you’re as interested in behind-the-scenes game development as I am, then you’ll find the Wolfire Blog fascinating. The developers have been working on improving the graphic capabilities of the sequel’s engine, and I imagine the tool support for modders is going to be top-notch.
[tags] games, indie, [/tags]
A few days ago I attended Chicago for Child’s Play, sponsored by Dawdle.com and Midway Games. If you’re not familiar with Child’s Play, it describes itself as a game industry charity dedicated to improving the lives of children with toys and games in their network of over 40 hospitals worldwide.
There was an MK vs DC tournament, and if you were eliminated, you could buy back in for a donation amount that doubled each round. It started with only 18 people and doubled in size before Round 1 finished. Considering I haven’t played a Mortal Kombat game in years, I think I put in a respectable showing as Batman, even though I was eliminated three different times and only won once. The ultimate winner of the tournament received a PSP.
One attendee uploaded pictures for the event at Flickr.
Besides the tournament, there was an auction for games. I won three DS games, and there were more than a number of Xbox 360 and PS3 titles that went home with some healthy bidders. The mantra that night was “For the kids!”
Game-loving Chicagoans had fun and raised money for a good cause. For the kids, FTW!
I uploaded the time lapse for the past weekend:
For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 165.5 (current year) = 574.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 63 (current year) = 773 / 1000
Thanks to Ludum Dare #14, I put in a lot more hours this week. I’m too exhausted to go into it, but I did manage to get cross-compiling to work just before the competition began, and I’ll be able to provide my own Win32 versions of my GNU/Linux games! I’ll have a post-mortem up soon.
[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]
Here’s the final entry with link:
The binary-only download is about 1.5MB in size.
https://www.gbgames.com/downloads/ld13/roadlockdown-gbgames-linux-r71-test.tar.gz
FIXED SHORTLY AFTER THE DEADLINE: https://www.gbgames.com/downloads/ld13/roadlockdown-gbgames-linux-r77.tar.gz
I’ll leave the old version up in case anyone is worried about cheating, but I managed to fix all of the little bugs that were preventing it from being a real game. I’ll have source and a Win32 version up soonish.
EDIT: Source! (8.3MB)
I finally got the game to include buildings and roads. As you can see, the cars don’t know about them yet, and in fact they drive over them. Now that the game is aware of the concept of intersections and buildings, I’ll be able to randomly place the Bank and require the cars to only make turns at intersections.
Since dinner almost killed me, I decided to have a salad. Romaine lettuce, walnuts, and raisins, covered in lemon juice. Pita chips and tapenade on the side. And of course Orange Juice, still a proud sponsor of GBGames.
I took the time to jot down some notes about how I want to proceed. How will the getaway car find its way to the banks, rob them, and get away? I think if I force the cars to only make turning decisions at intersections, it will not only make things easier on me, but I also think it can look pretty good. I also need to update the bank sprite.
With less than 6 hours left, I need to get a working game as fast as I can.
It’s hard to see from this partial screenshot, but the getaway car has reversed direction after hitting the road block. The road blocks are temporary and disappear after some time, and you place them by pressing the space bar.
Only six hours left to go. I still want the getaway car to rob banks, make turning decisions to avoid road blocks and the player’s car, and, you know, get away. Oh, and I need to put roads back into the game. B-)