12/25/10

Happy holidays!

So, it's Christmas, I hope everyone of you is having a great time. Got myself N900, it's a cool toy to play around with, with some great possibilities. We'll see what can be made out of it.

Oh yeah, the roguelike - I've done some experimenting, and the dungeon generation is beginning to shape like I want it to be. Also I've done some tinkering with rules, removed some classes (for being, you know, pretty much useless) or making them specialization for some other class. I've thought about making something like prestige classes from D&D, but I've not dwelled very deeply into it.

I'll make an update about the classes, skills, races and world sometime soon. I hope. :)

11/23/10

Some designing

So, as I learned (and I guess still am learning) from the platformer project, there's one golden rule for these projects - design before implementation. It's fun and all to dive head first coding and throwing in some ideas you might have, but if it isn't designed well enough, you'll end up knee deep in... well, you catch my drift.

Sleepless night tonight, so I decided I might as well do some designing and specifications for the roguelike. Some pretty rough ones, nothing too specific yet, but getting there slowly and steady. I might as well paste them here, I guess someone wants to read them. And if you have any ideas or suggestions, feel free to tell me!
http://www.goodfuckingdesignadvice.com/ proves to be always a good source of inspiration for designing.


11/20/10

+-

So, I've been a bit lazy with updating lately. Sorry about that!

As some of you may know, I've halted the developement for the platformer for now, because I'm swamped with work. And yet for some reason I volunteered for programmer slot in a Unity-project. I guess I'll release the one level platformer some time around January or February. And as it is, I'd like to know some good places to upload code to share, as I don't think its quite convenient to upload all the code here, eh.

So, the Unity-project, or as it should be called, "The Curtain". It is a biiiig surprise. I guess. I'm still not all sure about what it's all about, but I guess we'll find out. Pretty nifty thing, this Unity. Although it does have some problems.

Oh yeah, roguelike! I've been designing the ruleset for it for now and it's getting closer to actual testing phase. Once it's ready I'll release it somewhere, free of course. You are allowed to use it as you will, modify it even if you think it's necessary and so forth. I'll try to make it as usable as possible to be used in tabletop roleplaying games, but being made for computer game, it'll need some modifications for it. Unless I invent some good way to bypass that.

So yeah, that's all for now.

Ps. there's snow everywhere. Yay!

10/26/10

Back again (also, I have Twitter now!)

Hello!

So, we got back from Paris late in the Saturday evening. What a refreshing holiday, I have to say. Although my French was rusty, I managed to communicate with the locals (although from time to time we had to use English). Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Louvre, Mona Lisa, Versailles... we visited a lot of places, but many were left out, like the Catacombs. I feel a whole lot more cheerful and powered up in all ways, which is a good thing, because I'm going to have hellalot coding ahead of me.

10/17/10

Just another generic post title

Soooo.

I finished (finally!) the second deadline version of the platformer. It is ugly and very, very rough. But it works (with some major flaws). For the last deadline all it takes is some smoothing around the edges, little randomization and so forth. When it is done I'll probably get busy with the roguelike, although the gamedev club of ours has a few projects coming up in which I have some interest taking part in. I won't spoil the surprise though, I'll tell you more later (if I happen to become a member of developer team for project).

10/14/10

Disappointment

Sooooo, long time no update. I'll just write some major thoughts right now.

After being lazy for too long I took up the coding again and actually got around to write the code for jumping. It worked (in a way, at least), but when it came to collision detection everything went to hell. I simply failed to make it so, that the blob would stop when it lands on platform - instead it fell happily through. It turned out I had some major flaws in code (especially considering hitboxes and rectangles) and so I decided to ditch the old code and begin writing new (which wouldn't take long, as I had some pretty good tutorials and examples at my hand). I wonder if I get the code ready tonight (it's now three days late from deadline!) and if it is any good for further use. Hopefully so, stay tuned!

9/26/10

A very short yet image-rich update

 I still can't draw, but luckily my girlfriend knows how to use Paint and Photoshop.

I've decided to implement "simple gravity": whenever object is not upon platform, it's speed on Y-axis is multiplied by -1. If I have enough time I'll do something better.

9/23/10

Just another short update

Finally got the gravity working on the platformer. The jumping, not so much. It seems to have some tricky parts, but I guess I'll manage to do it if I can just grab the motivation from somewhere. At the moment the roguelike-project just buuuuurns in my hands and I can't wait to get on to it. But priorization is the first thing to do now, I'll have to work for this damned "blop gets keys, avoids ghosts and loots some sweet-ass treasure"-platformer. Oh, and have I mentioned already that I just love XNA? It makes everything so damn easy. Although I hate the way Visual Studio puts all my wavebrackets on their own lines. It's infuriating! And why are the line number-options so well hidden? It took me some time in Google to find out how to turn them on! Unforgivable.

9/20/10

Just a quick update

So, I've finally got random dungeon generation working, although it could use a lot of tweaking (especially for getting those lovely long corridors!) and making corridors actually make sense. I'll include the source code in the end, so if you're interested you can have a look at it. Next up: including player character into the screen and enabling movement and collisions!

The platformer, on the other hand, progresses rather slow. I've just started implementing some kind of gravity to it, but it seems to be rather tricky from time to time. Hopefully it'll sort out in time. (Also, I suck at drawing so the game will most likely be hideous).

9/12/10

Starting developing games

This year I will start developing some games. The first one is a game made with C# using XNA 3.0 (I yet don't have any idea what it will be like!) and the second one, a larger and more ambitious one, will be made using C++.

But first something little about me. I am 20 year old student in University of Oulu, majoring in Information Processing Science and also taking courses in mathematics. I have pretty much very little experience in programming, thus far I've programmed with Java for about a year and C/C++ for three months. I've great ambition in making games, although I understand that right now these projects will most likely be more than I can chew, but what I've learned about programming in this short time is that one must learn from one's mistakes. And what would be a better way to make mistakes than creating a game?