New game...

New game, called Dary’s Legend, a roguelike, dungeon crawling type. This is what I’ve been working on lately, and … well not much more to say. I’ll try and do posts with relevant stuff regarding the development of the game from now on. Going back to coding now…

March 16, 2012 · 1 min · 48 words · David Amador

Where do you like games to store their save data?

Quick question. I’m trying to decide where my next game should store their save files so I decided to make a poll. Personally I think that C:/Users/$USER$/AppData/Local/ is a total idiotic thing. Starting on Windows Vista there’s a pre-created “Saved Games” folder but most people seem to miss it since it’s not on the “My Documents” folder. There’s also other possibilities which many games I own use like ...

March 3, 2012 · 1 min · 129 words · David Amador

Some thoughts about indie dev

1 – You either are, or you aren’t. People can go and , “I’m an aspiring indie game developer”. You are either doing games or not, period. If you are starting in development with your own money then you are one. People tend to think they are indie developers when money starts rolling in, well think again, cause money may never come. 2 – It’s a jungle out there There’s not a safe path on becoming a successful indie developer. It’s not like following another’s path will get you there. That’s why giving advices is just that, it might work or not. ...

February 23, 2012 · 3 min · 454 words · David Amador

Engine, video player and tools, tools tools!

So these past 2 weeks I’ve been adding some “bits and bytes” to the engine. Taking a rest between some more complex game mechanisms I decided to start doing a video player. After a bit research I decided to choose theora, but a bit skeptic, I’ve used it before on a game company I worked at and I remember being a tiny nightmare, specially because of YUV->RGB(A) conversion and because of video/audio sync. ...

January 29, 2012 · 3 min · 532 words · David Amador

How to Restore the Windows 7 MBR (Master Boot Record)

So I had this crisis where the MBR got broken and Windows would not boot. This can happens for many reasons, maybe you tried to dual boot your PC and something went wrong. Anyway where’s a quick tip on how to fix it (You need a Windows 7 DVD of course)! 1 – Boot your computer to the Windows 7 DVD 2 – Select your language and click next. 3 – Click the button for “Use recovery tools”. 4 – Then select “Command Prompt”. ...

January 21, 2012 · 1 min · 177 words · David Amador

Find/Replace in Visual Studio using regular expressions

Usually Find/Replace gets the job done for what I need, although sometimes using “Replace All” can break more stuff that it fixes. But today I had this function I wanted to get rid of and simple change it with a public variable. So I had something like this. object->setLayer(/*BLABAL BLA CODE, */); I want to replace it with something more simple object->Z = /*BLABAL BLA CODE, */; So using Visual Studio Find/Replace in regular expressions mode I used this as a search string ...

January 14, 2012 · 1 min · 207 words · David Amador

post mortem of another year

Another year has gone by, not quite what I was expecting developing wise, like putting another game out there, but things never turned out as planned. Still over the last year I’ve gradually saw out little Different Pixel brand reaching more and more places which can be very helpful in the future and sure hell is nice to see work recognized. From the top of my head I recall Kotaku article on the Xbox360 release, we finally managed to release the Xbox360 version, which was the first one we made. Being a semi-finalist on Dream.Build.Play 2011 and the coverage on Destructoid. ...

January 1, 2012 · 2 min · 410 words · David Amador

Basalt code swarm

I discovered code swarm a while ago and decided to test on my own repositories. This is a test on Basalt, and although I’ve been working on the engine since January 2010, only in 2011 did I placed in on a repository so a bunch of stuff is added right on the beginning. This is the result.

December 23, 2011 · 1 min · 57 words · David Amador

Revert To The Old Tweetdeck

If you use Tweetdeck you probably already know they screwed the new version (1.0) and you want to revert back. Unfortunately since they are now part of Twitter I had a hard time finding the older build and decided to share it. And that’s why you are here too probably, here it is: Tweetdeck 0.38.2. Don’t forget you need Adobe Air installed. Edit 29-12-2011 Some user have experienced a “This application cannot be installed because this installer has been mis-configured. Please contact the application author for assistance.” ...

December 20, 2011 · 1 min · 166 words · David Amador

november progress

So as I mentioned a few weeks back, since November 1st I quit my job and I’ve been mainly focusing on our next game for Different Pixel. After a month, I think so far progress has been good. I’ve been able to work almost entirely on the game itself instead of the engine because most of the stuff is stable enough since Vizati. It’s kind of rewarding now and instead of reading tons of docs of other engines each time something doesn’t work right I usually know where the problem may be and can fix it, as good as I can at least. A few glitches here and there but so far so good. ...

December 7, 2011 · 2 min · 341 words · David Amador