Game Development

So I’ve been out for quite some time, and this is just a quick update. First, I have tones of unread, thus answered emails on my inbox. I haven’t managed to go through that lately. I usually scroll to see if there’s a really urgent one, I will eventually read them all. I decided to quit my current job, my last day is October 31st. I couldn’t glimpse a very promising carrier there and I practically staggered learning-wise for the past months due to the type of work we develop so yeah, that’s it. ...

So I’ve been working on my new game and I’m doing some tweaks here and there on the engine. Mainly with the rendering section, trying to squeeze as much as possible, thus maintaining an acceptable framerate. It’s not like I’m doing a heavily graphic game but I like to know that It can be used even on slower pcs and that I’m not using more cycles than necessary. This past week and after reading a bunch of stuff and keynotes from John Carmack about Rage (60FPS ftw) I decided to measure my own stuff. ...

If you are coding, no matter what it is, games, software, websites, you should be using a code revision control of some sort. Are you using? Cool. Is it Git? Smart choice, so you probably don’t need to read the rest of this post. For the rest I’m giving some help on how to start from scratch. First of all I recommend some reading on Revision Control so that you understand what I’m talking about. ...

First of all I think this is my last idevblogaday post for a while. I my math doesn’t fail me this is my 10th post and it’s time for someone to take turn. Actually it’s just the 9th. I hope my words have somehow enriched your knowledge, in case you want to stick around just bookmark my feeds. I keep this fairly updated. Also since I’ve been working on a new game there’s probably news to share in the next 2-3 months. ...

For sound I use OpenAL, it’s free, cross-platform, I’ve managed to get it working on iPhone, Windows and Mac. Setting up OpenAL to play a sound is pretty straight forward, a bit like OpenGL. First you need to create a context. ALCcontext *context; ALCdevice *device; device = alcOpenDevice(NULL, ALC_DEFAULT_DEVICE_SPECIFIER); if (device == NULL) { // Handle Exception } //Create a context context=alcCreateContext(device,NULL); //Set active context alcMakeContextCurrent(context); // Clear Error Code alGetError(); Now for the second part, loading a wav file. You have to open a file, fill buffers with data and then attach it to a source. ...

Holy cow, this is my 100th post. “Insert epic sentence” Depending on how much time you follow my blog or Different Pixel activity you may know that we have an internal Editor called Sapphire Past It was developed over a year ago with the intent of being a “All in one” 2D game editor for our games, built on XNA. It started out pretty well and I’m very happy with the outcome. It served it’s purpose. The problem now is, most of the stuff we need, apart from the generic sprites positioning, rotation etc, are very specific stuff to the game/project in hands. ...

A large percentage of the indie developers have to work on their project at night and/or weekends. In order to pay the bills they have to maintain a day job. There’s no shame in that, many do it, I do it, not everyone can make a mega jump right into fame and fortune with a single project. The rest of us mere mortals have to gradually build a fan base, learn from past mistakes, do better PR, etc. Looking at successes like World of Goo, Braid, Trainyard, it all sounds so easy, everyone quickly makes such huge hype that it seems like they only have to finish the game and they are instantly rich. ...

Render to texture is a very handy functionality. Imagine your game allows for some character customization. You have the body, some different hats, different clothes and other small stuff. Now the easiest way to render this is to just draw it piece by piece every frame. With the proper Z coordinates everything falls in place. But you now have like 4-5 draw calls for one single object. Worse, you might have different textures and swamping textures is expensive. ...

I got this question the other day, how to track individual touches if you are using a couple of fingers for a game? Actually it’s pretty easy if you can access the touch previous position and it’s current position. Let’s start with a small class to store the information class Touch { public: Touch(); ~Touch(); void update_position(float x, float y){ _current_position.x = x; _current_position.x = y; } bool is_same_touch(float x, float y) { if(_current_position.x == x && _current_position.y == y) return true; return false; } protected: CGPoint _current_position; }; Let’s a assume the “move” movement ...

Small side-note first, Vizati is now available for the Super Nintendo, more info. For my third idevblogaday post I’m going to talk about Game Center. Game Center was released only a couple months ago (September or so) but already tons of applications are using it and even more, players ask for it. It’s a way to track achievements, leader boards etc. Unfortunately It’s only available from iOS 4.1+, so some compatibility check has to be done. ...