GBGames
Check it out! The squad car is chasing the getaway car! This is actually about 200% of the size. You can control the squad car, but I also set both cars to follow the border of the game screen so I can see what it looks like when it runs on its own.
Oh, uh, what happened to the roads? Yeah, they’re coming.
After getting some boilerplate code down, I took a break to have lunch:
Peanut butter, cinnamon, and raisin sandwich, plus some blue corn chips and hummus, washed down with Tutti Frutti flavored Jaritos. Also, some carrots (not pictured).
I spent lunch and the hour after trying to nail down a specific direction to take this project. Here are my design notes:
I’m still hoping to get basic game play by dinner today. We’ll see how ambitious a goal that is.
I woke up this morning kind of groggy. I had to sleep on the couch because my cats left me a smelly surprise on my bed. I guess they didn’t like being locked out of the office. B-(
It snowed a lot last night. It’s very white out. I need to drop off my laundry at the laundromat, and I also want to go to the pet store to purchase Nature’s Miracle enzyme cleaner. Darn cats.
Anyway, breakfast!
I’m afraid I probably won’t do well in the food competition this time around, but we’ll see.
I’ve also been thinking about my project. Perhaps it won’t be a simple puzzle game because then I would need to design puzzles. I was thinking it could be an action game in which you play the role of the getaway car trying to outrun the police, but then I would need decent AI and it might end up being a clone of Pac-man. I’ll think a little bit more about this game.
I liked the idea of the police strategically blocking certain roads so that the criminals can’t get away. Road Lockdown is my current name for the project, but it might change. B-)
From this mock-up, you can see the red getaway car of the criminals as well as the squad cars blocking the roads. I think I’ll keep the road images for the final game, and the cars seem to have come out fairly nice, I think.
I think I’ll go to sleep now. Tomorrow morning I have a lot of coding to do.
So the theme is Roads. According to the voting results, it was the only one with a positive number of votes overall, and yet the IRC channel is erupting with people surprised that it was the theme that won out.
What are some ideas?
– Building roads between cities to facilitate commerce.
– Managing traffic congestion.
– Planning/Acting on The Road Ahead for your life.
– Maintaining a small town’s roads.
– Transporting materials along a long road.
– Find your way without a map, searching for a lost road.
– Strategically shut down certain roads to guide a getaway car to the police.
There are plenty of ideas, and I’m sure I’ll come up with more.
Ludum Dare, the 48-hour solo game development competition, will start tonight at 10PM CST. You can check all of the action at the main competition blog.
The theme voting had been separated into four rounds. The winning theme will be announced at the start of the competition, and we’ll have 48 hours to make a game based on that theme. There are currently 16 themes in the running.
As always, I’ll be cross-posting between the official Ludum Dare blog and my own blog. I’m looking forward to this weekend. It’s always fun, and it is easy to learn new things when you are focused so intently for two days straight. Be sure to check out my tips for participating in Ludum Dare if you plan on participating!
Last time I barely managed to put some game play into my submission, and while I got compliments for my approach, I got a lot of comments like, “Too bad it wasn’t a game.” My goal for this competition is to have the game play established within the first 6 hours of work. I’ll probably go to sleep at the start of the competition, so Saturday should see the basic game play before I stop for dinner if all goes well.
Good luck to everyone who enters! Let’s make games!
[tags] game development, game competition, ludum dare, indie [/tags]
For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 130.5 (current year) = 539.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 63 (current year) = 773 / 1000
I spent a lot less time working on game development than I wanted to over my vacation, but I hope a daily routine will help. Also, by Friday, Ludum Dare #13 will begin, so I will be working a significant number of hours this weekend.
I’m still working on cross-compilation scripts. I want the ability to build GNU/Linux AND Win32 versions of a game without the need to reboot into Windows.
[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]
For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 126.5 (current year) = 535.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 63 (current year) = 773 / 1000
It’s been over a month since my last Thousander Club update. Yeesh. I’m still in crunch at the day job, although it is winding down quite a bit. I keep expecting it to be over, but there is always one more issue found that I need to fix.
In the past week I’ve worked quite a bit on trying to cross-compile a single .cpp file for both GNU/Linux and Windows. And I’ve succeeded! It seems easy once you know what you’re doing, but if you don’t, good luck finding decent documentation on the topic. I keep finding information on building your own cross-compiler, even though most distros seem to have them available. I rarely find information on what you need to build an SDL app for Windows on your GNU/Linux system. The best documentation on the topic is currently at http://icculus.org/~dolson/sdl/, but even then I found most of the useful information is in the scripts rather than the documentation about the scripts.
As for testing it in Wine, I keep encountering problems, partly to do with the fact that I’m using an older version of Ubuntu and Wine. Wine still has some really weird issues. For example, there is a bug in Wine that prevents cout/cerr from being called more than once. WTF? This issue and the inability of the older version of Wine to work with SDL_mixer make it very hard to test my Win32 version of the app while I develop it.
And cross-compiling has its own issues. I found out that arguments to main() aren’t optional when cross-compiling with SDL. Otherwise, you get an undefined reference to SDL_main, which is a non-useful error message that is luckily easy to search for online.
Otherwise, I’ve been a little more productive in the past week. I also intend to learn to use mxmlc and other freely available Flash development tools. So far, ActionScript seems confusing. For instance, when you use the EMBED tag, you are telling it what resource to use. Let’s say you want to load an image called example.jpg. You would EMBED example.jpg, then create an Image object…but you never explicitly tell the Image object to use example.jpg. It just does. Weird.
For this coming week, I’m going to try to stay away from Flash/Flex, and try to get Walls closer to release. With what I’ve learned in my experiments with cross-compiling this past week, I think I should be able to release both GNU/Linux and Win32 binaries very soon. I’ll be writing up my own cross-compile documentation soon.
[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]
Gregg Seelhoff announced that he attended Meaningful Play 2008, an academic conference ” that explores the potential of games to entertain, inform, educate, and persuade in meaningful ways”, and he posted his notes.
I’ve been thinking about the kind of games I wanted to make, and rather than create short-term sales product that will be thrown away within a week, I’d like to make games that matter. Games that stick around long after you’ve played them, like a good book or a good movie. I really liked the idea of an entire conference dedicated to meaningful play, and I hope I can attend the next one. There were some good nuggets of information that Gregg managed to report, such as who plays games at Pogo.com and for how long, but I especially liked reading the following on what kinds of serious games received good reviews:
An acceptable game (threshold 1) succeeded in the areas of technical capacity and game design. A good game (threshold 2) passed threshold 1 and, additionally, succeeded with aesthetics, visual and acoustic. For a game to be great (threshold 3), it had to pass both previous thresholds and also succeed in the final two areas of social experience and storyline (“narrativity and character development” is too long). Few games reached the final threshold.
Look at that! A prioritized list of what makes up a good game!
It’s unfortunate when you can’t play games because they are made for specific platforms, especially when there is always this emphasis on the ubiquity of Flash. Many of the games Gregg links to were Windows-specific, and they wouldn’t run in Wine. When so many of these games aren’t even meant to be commercially viable, is it still a valid argument that providing a port to other platforms such as Mac and Gnu/Linux would be pointless since having access to a few hundred thousand more players wouldn’t be worth it?
I would have liked to know more about Ian Bogost’s keynote, but Gregg provided some good notes for most of the rest of the conference. I have more than a few PDFs to download and read through.
[tags] meaningful play, game design, game development, serious games, casual games, conference [/tags]
Jeff Tunnell posts for the first time in a long time about how you shouldn’t fear the economy and should start your game business now. Yes, there is a lot of doom and gloom about how the economy is stagnating and people are worried about paying the bills.
But that just means there are less people willing to take the risk of starting their own businesses! Less competition means more opportunities for your business!
But how do you start? I wrote an article about Forming an LLC in Illinois, and running an LLC is much easier than running an S Corporation. If you don’t know the difference, there are plenty of resources online about the different types of business entities.
I also wrote about what an indie developer needs to know about copyright. Copyright laws can be quite complex, so it pays to know at least SOMETHING about them.
Not sure how to even start making games? I also wrote You Can Make Games, which describes how easy it is to get into game development, and the best part? It has gotten even easier since I wrote that article two years ago! With technology like PopCap’s framework (and TuxCap for people who want to recognize that there are people who use Mac and GNU/Linux), libSDL, and freely available Java and Flash web development tools, there should be nothing to stop someone with a computer, an idea, and a willingness to put some effort behind it from making a game.
There are great articles and other resources for running your game development business at GameDev.net. Advice can be found at the IndieGamer forums.
So what’s stopping you? And for that matter, what’s slowing me down?
[tags] indie, game development, video games, business [/tags]