Game Review – LD30 Game: Icarus Crisis

August 27, 2014

Game Review

Icarus Crisis is a game made for the Ludum Dare game jam, this entry had a maximum of 72 hours to complete, but was done by a solo developer, rojo.

 

Icarus Crisis – rojo (Click to go play)

Icarus Crisis is a complex turn based strategy game, which reminds me of a playing on a table top against the game rules.  The primary mechanic is the chance of dice, but each dice has different chances, and your crew members can gather more dice by exploring around the world.  After each member gets a turn, the gate opens even wider, providing suspense and rushes the strategy to prevent useless moving while still collecting dice.  Be careful of exploring and finding the possible ambush from the formless!

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Game Review – LD30 Game: Drempt

August 26, 2014

Game Review

I had a little free time this evening after work, and since the Ludum Dare game jam just finished this weekend I decided to give back a little since my LD30 was a pretty big failure.  On the #ludumdare irc channel, I asked for a game to review, I can’t actually rate the games, but hopefully this will be better than any ratings received, I know I always appreciate the feedback and comments more than the ratings themselves.

Drempt – DesertRock (Click to go play)

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Introducing TurtleBrains

August 1, 2014

For the past year I’ve been working on a game development framework that is meant to be used on multiple platforms, currently aimed at Windows and Mac OS X, however I have hopes that Linux will be added in the future and possibly even Android/iOS.

I’ve been writing in C++ and have got a solid portion started and working for Mac OS X and Windows, unfortunately little fill on the game development portion.  If you need to write a real-time application using OpenGL, popup dialog boxes, message boxes and other operating system controls – TurtleBrains is working great, which was part of what I desired with TurtleBrains for easy game development tool creation.

Going forward I’ll be working on the game development part of Turtle Brains, a State Machine, Input, Sprites, Entities, Tile System, Particles, etc.  I still have some things to figure out, such as choosing and applying a license, sharing the code, and keeping things consistent, clean and quality driven.  Hopefully this will become usable for making some of my games by about April 2015, or maybe earlier if I can really put some time into it.


Cracked! Post-mortem

May 9, 2012

LudumDare 23 was held April 20th-23rd.  This was the third event I’ve participated in, and was many firsts for me; First collaboration in an event situation, first time using flash/ActionScript and first time not needing to worry about creating the content.  The following is a post-mortem about the Ludum Dare version of Cracked!

What went wrong?

– We never setup source control until the event started.  This did not cause many issues, but was something that could and should have been ready to use.

– The simple tile editing tool created the week before did not work on joekinley’s computer- different flash versions have different security issues with when something can be copied to clipboard or saved to file.  This fought with us a few times during the weekend until we properly researched the issue.

– The editor saving issue caused us lose a bit of time, creating levels that could not be saved.  It also delayed the level creation process until pretty late in the game- and once we finally got there the game did not play as strategically as initially designed.  Multiple possible causes, but no time to to really fix.

What went right?

– Most of the project went very smooth.  joekinley and I were able to communicate effectively and completely avoid dead-locks (keep busy) while we dealt with time-zone issues and sleeping schedules.


Snake: The Hello World Game

April 17, 2012

During a recent time of being unemployed I had some free-time lying around and decided to pick up this ‘new’ engine everyone has hyped up, Unity.  Well I started by looking at a few video tutorials, but showed too many details I already knew and skipping ahead had the chance of skipping something I didn’t, yet needed to, know.  I tried looking at existing projects to learn my way around, but wound up more confused and went back to the painfully slow video tutorials.

However, since my early programming days, I’ve always been better jumping in head first.  So I scrapped the tutorials and existing projects and jumped in to make a quick game, like most people make a quick “hello world” when working with a new language or platform for the first time.  At the time I did not consider myself to be making a “hello world game”, I simply picked the classic: Snake and started developing it with Unity.  It wasn’t until weeks later at a new job when I was testing out a new engine, GameMaker:Studio, that I realized how great Snake is for a simple Hello World Game.

Snake is extremely simple; an object for food, and object for the snake head, body and tail, and two ’tiles’: grass and rock.  Snake head collides with snake body, tail or rock and the game ends.  Snake head collides with food, and a body part is added to the snake while the food moves to a new random location.

It is possible to make Snake utilize nearly every system/piece in a good engine or framework; graphic/sounds/assets (and pipelines), tiles/maps (level design), objects/entities, scripting, collision, input and timing.  This forces you to gain a little experience with each portion while testing out, or learning a new framework.  However I did notice, while talking with a good friend, that Snake lacks the testing of physics.  This may or may not be of importance, depending on your needs from the framework – but Asteroids or even Break-out might be a good choice to include physics.

For now, I will stick with Snake.  It takes a few hours to make, give or take the learning process, and will show the good and bad of the tools, pipeline and editing with a particular engine or framework.


Construction

February 29, 2012

I am currently reworking the wordpress theme to match my current portfolio page, and after doing so, I will combine the two and eventually remove my portfolio portion.  Until further notice www.timbeaudet.com/portfolio/. would be the better place to view current projects and of course; my portfolio.


Animator Project

October 7, 2011

The weekend after Ludum Dare some of my plans fell through so I decided to work on a simple animation project, a major feature I had to cut from my project.  The project was simply joints and bones with simple interpolation between keyframes.  The editor, or lack of, consisted of 10 key frames and a stick man with 11 joints and 10 bones.

After getting the mouse to drag a joint it was clear I needed to make the editor smart enough to keep the joint dragged within the length of the bone as the bones would be growing/shrinking during the animation and messing stuff up.  After adding the limits, it was starting to act how I wanted; although I had to press digits 0 through 9 quickly to see the animation.

While writing the interpolation from frame X to frame Y I came across a bug where I was accounting for an offset I didn’t need to and it resulted in something surprising but cool; stickman into spaceship.


Postmortem for ‘Escape’

September 2, 2011

Originally written August 24th in my LudumDare journal.

I am not sure postmortem is the proper term for this entry, being I can’t be sure the life of the project has come to an end.  Perhaps it has.  Regardless of the lifetime of the project, this post is about what happened, what went right and what went wrong, as I worked on my Ludum Dare 21 entry: Escape.  Sorry, I made the “what happened” a little longer than I expected, skip to the bottom for a true post mortem.

Ludum Dare 21: Start – 1 month:

This weekend started at least a month before with preparation and cleaning my slate for the entire weekend.  I made it clear to family and friends that I would be busy during the weekend.  Under no exceptions, (perhaps a big pay bonus), was I going to go into work; regardless of the circumstances or consequences.  Luckily work didn’t want me to come in, so I didn’t need to worry about consequences.  I had my framework picked; homegrown DirectX 9 engine written in C++, my language of choice.  I was set.  The week leading up to Ludumdare I made a blank project from my template – in doing so I felt I’d automate this process; which took me the full week nights after work.  However, I can now type “CreateProject ProjectName” and out comes an already compiled template project that is at blank screen and ready for development.

Ludum Dare 21: Start – 5 hours:

No lie, there were several ideas floating around my head and was hoping for Castles to be the theme.  I went shopping for some food and supplies for the weekend so I didn’t need to waste time doing so later.  The IRC channel; #ludumdare was insane, I started a G+ hangout that filled with so many people, and I didn’t know them all, but we all shared a passion for Game Development.  Finally, it was time.

Ludum Dare 21: 48hrs Remaining

Theme: Escape.  Thoughts crossing my mind, #ludumdare going insane, I left the G+ hangout and went to my white board, and to cook a meal while I thought up ideas.  I was pretty surprised that I had three right off the bat, each with their own challenges.  One was a turnbased puzzler that would have been easy on the programming side, harder on the content side.  Another I threw away based on scope, it was much too big for a weekend.  The final was a physics based glider falling through a maze like puzzle to the ‘exit’.  Despite being harder with math and level design, I choose the physics based glider on the basis that content would be kept to a minimum.

Ludum Dare 21: 44hrs Remaining

I had created a 2D camera, and sprite class – two things I overlooked on my framework, which admittedly is typically used for 3D projects.  I managed to get the basics going before heading to bed to sleep on my idea before committing completely.

Ludum Dare 21: 36hrs Remaining

Woke up, ate a good meal and planned to work on the physics of the glider until I got it right, so that I could avoid wasting time on level design by setting the physics in stone before a level is started.  The physics gave me some problems, it took awhile to figure out that the equation for lift did not apply it in the correct direction.  That and other strange things.  I spent far longer on the physics that I wanted, and I never got quite what I wanted out of it – but it was somewhat controllable.

Ludum Dare 21: 24hrs Remaining

I spent about 2 hours trying to get a randomized tunnel to generate, and quickly gave up on the basis I didn’t like the outcome of any of the work.  So at this point the choice changed to making a quick and dirty level editor, which actually came out very well.  By the time I went to bed I had wrapped up a level editor that I could play, edit, play, edit in quick succession.  Hung out on G+ hangouts as much as possible, had some good discussions while still getting stuff done.

Ludum Dare 21: 13hrs Remaining

Motivation has dropped quite a bit even though I was on the final stretch.  Time pressure was starting to begin as I realized I didn’t have a level or anything – but I did have my main gameplay mechanic; physics.  To accurately test the level I was about to develop, I needed to add the collision for the game – which was much more difficult than it seemed.  Despite using code I had from another project for line-to-line collision, it did not work.  In the end, debugging proved that I was putting in the wrong lines…  Many hours wasted.

Ludum Dare 21: 6hrs Remaining

A final burst of energy to finish the level, add a score counter, title page and share it on #ludumdare – got some feedback, made a quick and dirty tutorial page – that added a lot to the look and feel of the game.  Removed the level editor and temp map files for the final build.  Tried making some music for the game, but failed miserably.

Ludum Dare 21: 0hrs Remaining

Submitted the project as a jam on the basis I did not share my code.  However, I followed every other rule strictly.

 

Ludum Dare 21: Postmortem; What went wrong

  • This was the buggiest project I’ve worked on in years, I had to cross hurdle after hurdle; physics, line collision, level design.
  • I did not put enough effort into created the game music, or sound effects – and this would have paid off huge in the end.
  • My own expectations were let down on basis of; physical feeling and level design.
  • Although I took a good share of breaks, getting out of the apartment would have been useful.

Ludum Dare 21: Postmortem; What went right

  • The visual quality stunned me, it actually came out looking decent.
  • I made good use of breaks for food, shower, sleep, and thinking.
  • I finished, it was close to complete, and I had a lot of fun.

 

Check out the project, rate it, leave comments and most of all – hopefully it is enjoyable, even for a few moments.


Project Generation Automation

August 19, 2011

During the last several months or more I’ve started several projects, only to abandon them at, or soon after, blank screen.  Mike “PoV” Kasprzak made a blog post about using premake to create a project.  My process had been copy a template directory, with some basic code to get to blank screen, to where I want my new project, rename as needed – create the Visual Studio project and setup everything; include and library directories, debug working directory, post-build events, etc etc…  Two to three hours later I had a blank screen, and rarely had motivation to continue much further.

Enough with that.

I started playing with my “make.lua” premake script first, and my immediate impression was, ‘meh’.  But after an hour I realized the potential it had.  I copied my template directory and used premake to make the project.  During the process I realized it was powerful enough to set include/lib directories, and all the other tedious settings I previously had to do manually.  It also occurred to me that I could use a windows batch file “CreateProject.bat” to automate the process even more.

Quickly CreateProject.bat would copy the template directory to a new location, rename it to the project and call premake to create the project on the spot.  This wasn’t quite enough, I wanted it to build the project in both Debug and Release, and do some find/replace in files as needed for personal preference.  While talking about this automation project with Pekka “pekuja” Kujansuu “sed” was mentioned.  Sed is a stream editor on the unix platform which has find and replace capabilities.  With great help from Pekka and Mike, I was able to get it to do what I needed with renaming.

 

This all took several, eight to twelve, hours but the next, or any future, time I need to make a project, is is a matter of typing  “CreateProject MyNewProject” inside command-line and all the magic happens.  My final step will be to setup a script to add the project to a subversion repository, but that will be a few weeks or whenever I get around to it.  I am amazed at how rewarding this feels.

The files that do the magic are here, although probably needs quite a bit of work to generate a project that would be useful to your needs:

  • CreateProject.bat – This is the main access point that gets the automation rolling.
  • make.lua – This is used by premake to setup the solution and project as needed.
  • build.bat – This is a small bat to build from command-line with VS2010.

Scrapyard Racing! Recorded Laptimes

November 14, 2010

Over the past week I have been making random improvements to Scrapyard Racing!  First I started with some user interface / heads up display stuff, but have yet to finish.  My lack of artistic value is draining me.  I then started playing with the best lap times database, and in-game display/interface.  First I started with populating the database with a bunch of generated users with random personal best times.  Now I have used those records to test the in-game display.  Which I must say is coming along nicely, even if it isn’t yet complete.

In-game Best Laps / Records Display

In-game Best Laps / Records Display

I need to add some navigation buttons, but I assure you I’ve tested it with a few hotkeys at this time.  There are three major additions until I can say the records are complete.  First I need to actually add records from game when the player makes a new personal best.  I also would like to see the ability to search for a friend by their user name to see their time / how much bragging rights you have over them…  The final one is going to remain undisclosed, as I haven’t had a chance to make sure I can pull it off; but it would be a nice feature.

Besides the timing charts, I’ve been working on moving my website around to this new place, of awesome.   I would like to make a video of me editing a track, as well as making a few tracks since I’ve only been testing on the one.  I haven’t done much gameplay wise.  The car is still a tad sluggish, and you still don’t need to use the brakes, but it is easier to drive compared to previous versions, and I think that is a pretty important part.

I may have failed to make my October Alpha goal, but I doubt I’ll fail to release this; the better question is when?  I would love to see it released within 2010, likely near December.  But I assure you, I have a long ways to go, and that is my dream time frame.  I have extremely high doubts on hitting the target.  Enjoy.