Making a game in 48-hours is a great way to spend a weekend, it is a short window of time but generally enough get something small created and, sometimes, polished. For the past few Ludum Dare events I have been participating with a team, usually a musician and an artist, but for LD34 the team was of 5 people, 2 artists, a musician and a designer, with of course myself being Read the rest of this entry »
LudumDare 35: Elemental Shift
April 29, 2016Working on Artificial Intelligence in Racing Simulations again!
January 16, 2016I have started working on the Artificial Intelligence in Racing Simulations project again, still using Live For Speed as the base physics simulation because it is fairly accurate and reasonably accessible. Here is a short recording of the artificial driver, Jared, driving at Fern Bay Club in the XRG. A fantasy car similar to a low powered rear-wheel drive sports car.
The second version/iteration of driving logic was written last year, March 2015, but my PC at the time was getting outdated and overloaded as it tried running everything it needed, plus AIRS logic could use some optimizations. I lost motivation after writing “Driving Logic version 2” (DLv2 for short), since it didn’t behave as well as I had hoped.
The driver got faster than DLv1, and learned Read the rest of this entry »
Goodbye to 2015
December 31, 2015Looking Back
I have managed to lose the list of goals I set out for during 2015, my old racing team forum has now disappeared and all the information was lost. A bit unfortunate since my yearly goals have been kept there since 2009. I know that my financial goal for my student loans was not only met but exceeded! I failed at my writing and reading goals, although I did read a handful of books and wrote a lot of documentation for Read the rest of this entry »
Ascending Roots
December 16, 2015LudumDare is game jam or competition of sorts, though there are no rewards and winning isn’t about placing first. Thousands come together during a single weekend to create nearly 3000 games! I was joined by four other fine developers during the 34th LudumDare event and we together spent 72 hours creating a Read the rest of this entry »
ZoomCarWorld3 Renderer Updates
September 22, 2015Ever since I ‘upgraded’ TurtleBrains to use the OpenGL 3.2 Core context, ZoomCarWorld3 has not been rendering. For awhile it would actually throw errors and crash, until all the legacy OpenGL causing those errors was disabled. Last weekend the mission was to Read the rest of this entry »
Choosing A License
September 4, 2015One of the most difficult decisions that keeps sliding back on the TurtleBrains todo list is picking a license.  It has been said that I’m being unrealistic, so perhaps I want too much, for wanting to get nominal proceeds back from my efforts.  I’ve been on http://choosealicense.com/ quite a bit and the two that stand out are MIT and GPLv3 for slightly different reasons.
MIT seems to be less restrictive to those that want to use TurtleBrains, they are not forced to disclose their code, and perhaps more programmers would give TurtleBrains a try.  But it also falls down in that programmers could ignore any closed/purchasable license that may allow me to retrieve any financial benefit, even minimally.
GPLv3 seems restrictive and possibly scares many from using TurtleBrains to begin with, and if nobody uses it why would anyone want to purchase the closed license?
Ultimately I’d like to see $25-50 for a project that plans to have an install base greater than 1000 users, and/or projects that are selling while using TurtleBrains.  I want this to be a minimal amount of money more like saying “thanks for giving my project a boost” and aimed at projects that have or are planning to make monies.
Which is why GPLv3 with a purchasable closed license has been on my mind, until someone was mentioning few would considering using TurtleBrains at that point.
Any opinions? Advice? Help!? It is appreciated.
Post-Mortem: Burden (LudumDare #33)
September 1, 2015Burden follows a woman’s journey through her past, as she is chased by her traumatic and guilt-ridden memories of the plane crash that killed her family. She was the only survivor.
The game was made for LudumDare #33 as a Jam entry.  A team of three with less than 72 hours, Jeremy “mmango” Bell doing audio, Daniel “MechanicalLife” Akesson doing visuals and myself doing the programming. Read the rest of this entry »
#1HGJ Entry – Chess
July 4, 2015
Here is a game I made in a single hour for OneHourGameJam the theme, and thus title is:Â Chess
Working on a game in an hour is a great way to learn the weaknesses about your development pipeline, be it in coding, art or audio.  The result is almost always a project that will get thrown away, seriously it took 60 minutes to make, but the experience is certain to teach you something and sharpen game development skills.
The game has nothing to do with the game of chess, or theme.  The plan was to have the blue squares become pawns and then have other pieces behind them, but 60 minutes was not enough time.
#1HGJ Entry – Teamwork
June 13, 2015Here is a game I made in a single hour for OneHourGameJam the theme, and thus title is:Â Teamwork
Working on a game in an hour is a great way to learn the weaknesses about your development pipeline, be it in coding, art or audio.  The result is almost always a project that will get thrown away, seriously it took 60 minutes to make, but the experience is certain to teach you something and sharpen game development skills.
Things learned during this hour:
- Although the template_entity helped a lot, I need to make use of the Entity Behavior System better.
- Fixed a bug with the EntityManager, which is always a benefit.
- I believe a TileSystem, and appropriate entity behaviors could make richer experiences.
Converting TurtleBrains to OpenGL 3.2 Core
May 21, 2015TurtleBrains development began with OpenGL as it should help allow TurtleBrains to remain fairly platform independent, at least across personal computers; Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, the first batch of target platforms. At the time I did not realize I was using Read the rest of this entry »