Ending.

Just a quick not to say I am not going to be posting much on this blog any more. I was finding having different blogs was complicating things. Where should I post what and so on. From now on I will just be putting all posts up on marblemice that way I only have to think about content.

Knowing myself I will probably change my mind in 6 months but for now that is the plan.

Design Doc For Next Game Finished

In some ways the title says it all. I have completed my design doc and started coding on the game. I also create a series of milestones which will help chart and motivate my progress.

The idea is pretty simple and take the form of explore a castle to find the treasure. If I manage to get the artwork out it will look like a card game. The cards represent the castle locations. It will also be single player so a lot like solitaire in some ways, thought probably not as addictive :)

Coding wise I am again using CoffeeScript and gvim as the editor. the initial plan is to do the game with some simple graphics and get the game play balanced. Only after that will come the effort to actually make it look ok. I use the word ok because my art skills never get described as anything other than ok...

I am quite looking forward to doing the artwork for the game. Drawing skeletons and stuff like that should be fun.

Biting Off More Than I Could Chew.

After lamenting about how making small games was

1. Not getting me anywhere in terms of visitors
2. Not driving forward the development of my little game engine
3. To be honest not that inspiring although fun to create.

I decide to embark on a larger projects. Instantly I set about setting up directory structures and pondering whether to use something other than the google app engine. I wrote build scripts that will compile my code down to javascript as I change my files.

At no point did I actually plan out the game I intended to make. I kept that in my head. In my head the scope continue to grow and then in the back of my mind the realisation this would take me ages. Suddenly I was no longer coding as the weight of the project bared down on me.

I was full of confidence from the success of other projects and jumped in without much thought. In the past whenever I have done this the project has been unsuccessful.

That is why at the beginning of the year I decided to only take on projects that can be done in 40hrs. Longer projects could be done by breaking them down into 40hr mile stones. This has helped me focus and make sure I worked out clearly defined targets to be aiming for. I seem to have totally forgotten all this when I decided to write a larger game.

I am obviously stopping work on this game, not that there is much of it and am going to figure out a smaller scale game to work on. Slightly larger than the ones I have made so far this year but not quite the "It is going to be awesome but it will take, like, 10 years" type of game.

All is not bad, my skills at using Inkscape increase and I realised I can create, barely acceptable due to my skill level, pixel art using it. Which is an improvement on my art skills of a month ago. Plus I got some limited experience with gimp.

I should also be able to reuse much of my build process code, although it does feel a little over engineered for smaller games but we shall see.

Anyway I am back at the drawing board again in terms of game design. It is time to get imaginative but also make sure it is spec-ed properly.

I am quite annoyed with myself for slipping into the massive game mind step as I had been determined to not make that mistake again.

CoffeScript and JetBrains

As I am sure if has not passed you by, Coffeescript is going to be standard in the next version of Ruby On Rails. I don't use Rails but I think it is great as more adoption of CoffeeScript as it means better support for the language in terms of IDEs.

This is one area that has been lacking, Now I am perfectly happy using gvim but I do sometimes miss some of the features found in an IDE. Refacotring tools would be great for instance.

But it looks like JetBrains is going to officially support CoffeeScript. Take a look here, I suspect having the next version of Rails having CoffeeScript built in has really push the issue for them.

I nearly brought one of their editors about 6 months ago as their JavaScript editing experience is great. At the same time I found CoffeeScript and the conciseness of CoffeeScript won out over the much better editing experience.

It looks like sometime soon I can have both. Yay! I imagine it will take a couple of iteration to get good.

Having said all that I really should take a look at the vi plug in again as it appears to have gained some good features.

My Mind Keeps Getting Stuck In C++ Mode!

I Still seem getting my brain caught up with C++. For instance to extracting the x and y coords from a 2D point class in C++  I might write

const float x= mypnt.getX()

const float y= mypnt.getY()

or

float x,y

mypnt.get(&x,&y)

In coffeescript I really should be writing 

{x,y} = mypnt

but I find myself writing the access functions. It is weird and I am trying to stop myself. Dynamic languages have a different culture to C++ and I have to become better at flipping my brain between the two.

Yes in C++ I would have overloaded various operators to pnt class with lots of function to provide adding and so on making it less common to want to directly access the x and y. In CoffeeScript I have created various functions on the Pnt class to add and subtract and so on. I am just using the Point class as a concrete example that is easy to understand. 

First Art

Here are a few attempts at some art work. I needed a simple brick tile,

My first attempt did not go well. I basically made the bricks too small so once I scaled it down to 64 by 64 pixels the detail was lost. My second attempt faired a little bit better. The effect is a little bit clean for the style I want but it does tile nicely. It will do for a start. I know it is not great and bricks are probably the easiest back ground to make but I am happy with it at the moment. I expect to revisit it.

My first attempt, you can't make out the bricks

Second attempt start to look more like a wall

I also created a couple of other tiles a simple floor tile and a tree. They were really both experiments with messing with the filters on Inkscape.

A tree, not the style I am aiming for

A floor tile, not one to be use a lot as it grates when repeated

On the off chance you want to actually harvest these images and use them then go ahead. I consider these images to be in the public domain. But then I am pretty sure you could do a lot better.

Drawing

So I am playing with ideas for slightly better produced game I want to make. This brain storming is ranging from game play design to art and only tiny bits of code.

I am not very good at drawing so I pondered the idea of hiring an artist to make the images. But then I am not sure what images I need so that is a bit of a no go. Programmer art it is and should the game be successful I will find an artist as I will then know my art requirements.

I can draw a little bit so it won't be stick men style are more an 8 year old levels of drawing ;)

The game is going to be a turn based game with much of the graphics be 2D tiles. This simplifies things for me somewhat with each tile is going to be something like 48 or 64 pixels square I can get by on weaker drawing skills, at least for a while.

My initial thought was to use something like mypaint and produce artistically style images and the scale this down to the right size. In the back of my mind is I might want to have different size tiles sets for people with high resolution screens. The images did not look good even when taking about of my, lack of, artistic skill. I could have persevered as drawing using mypaint is great fun.

Next I moved to Gimp. Not having ever really spent any time with gimp I followed a couple of tutorials and I was on my way. It is quite possible to produce the artwork I needed and almost decided to go with gimp as my main art package. Just as an experiment I decided to try Inkscape for this style of art. 

Inkscape it not the tool I would initially think of for producing artwork of this type (2D tiles for a game) as it is a vector based art program but with the addition of many builtin filters it seems possible that Inkscape and me may just be able to scape by. The plan is to use Inkscape to produce the first round of graphics.

If I am honest I suspect in all this the limiting factor is my artistic skill as any of the 3 tools mentioned here is extremely powerful when put in the hands of a skilled artist and my preference for Inkscape comes more from familiarity than any one of them being better. Each serve their niche very well.

With this done I need to produce a few images so I can get the data side of the build process honed down a little bit.