Category: Personal Development

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]

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 120.5 (current year) = 529.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 63 (current year) = 773 / 1000

I’ll be in crunch at the day job for at least one more week.

For this past week, I made sure that the name Minimalist was replaced with Walls everywhere, including the documentation. I also worked on making the sound effects easier on the ears. One of the complaints from Ludum Dare #11 was that they were too harsh. DrPetter from #ludumdare said that the files are just too loud but seem fine otherwise, so I tried to make them quieter, but then they seemed to be too quiet. B-(

it’s always kind of hard to decide on an overall master volume for a game – you don’t want to scare people with blaring noise, but still it’s inconvenient if they have to pause/quit and go crank up their volume settings

Which is probably why I would outsource my audio work to someone who knows what he/she is doing. B-) I did manage to get it to a volume that sounds right to me, but I notice that there is static when the game is played on my laptop versus my desktop…even though the wav files sound great in Audacity on my laptop! Maybe I’m not using SDL_Mixer with the right settings? I tried changing from 32 bit to 16 bit samples, but it didn’t seem to help. Any ideas?

[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) + 119 (current year) = 528.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 63 (current year) = 773 / 1000

Ugh, I’m still in crunch at the day job, and it looks like I’ll be crunching for some time.

Still, I managed to update the main title of Walls so that it no longer calls itself Minimalist, and I added a copyright notice to this screen as well.

[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) + 118.5 (current year) = 527.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 63 (current year) = 773 / 1000

I’m still in crunch at the Day Job, and so there is very little time left in my week to do much else. Still, I managed to work on Walls a little bit, although I would like to implement more than one feature or bug fix a week.

[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) + 117.5 (current year) = 526.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 36 (current year) = 746 / 1000

I spent part of my week making the goal look obviously different from the obstacles in the game. If you’re wondering why I bothered, you should read Game Design for the Color Blind Player.

I spent the other part of my week in crunch at the day job or resting from it.

[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]