The post on ld about which tools should be allowed in the competition has inspired me to try and create better tools for making my own games. I typically develop with c++ but when it comes to gui’s and rapid development it isn’t my first choice. So I decided to try throwing something together in c#. Thanks to the tao framework I was able to get a opengl window up in running in a windows forms app. Right now I’m just fooling around and haven’t committed to making anything specific but hopefully this will let me make better editors than notepad in the future.
Just wanted to post a few screens I took while playing around with L-systems. Not sure how much application they have to games but you could make some pretty nice trees or randomized levels with them. I’ll probably try animating some bracketed L-systems next.
I was bored while waiting for a friend at Starbucks so I knocked out a quick implementation of Conway’s game of life. Was really easy to do quickly and it’s very fun to play around with. While playing with it, it accidentally created a glider as well as a giant oscillator. Anyways, here’s a screenshot because I like posting them.
I also did a bit of work on some other games but I really don’t have much to say about them. Going back to writing code for research so my output here may drop off. Also, I don’t think I’ll be able to participate in the latest LD14 because of exams.
It’s been too long since I’ve worked on anything game related so I decided to start working on a city builder. Not sure if it will ever amount to anything or if it will just get filed away never to be seen again like so many of the projects I start. I guess the goal would be to mash it together with a tactical turn based rpg. Anyways, here’s how it looks at the moment.
Wow, it’s been a while since I actually did this playtest but I guess I’ll go ahead and post it. So, I decided to give non-computer game design a try.
The game ended up playing a lot differently than I expected. I think the largest shock was how far off my estimates of playtime were. We ended up playing through the first third of the game twice(because the last 2/3’s weren’t finished yet) and each game ended up taking 45min to an hour which is just under what I would like the total playtime for the game to be. It was also nice to get constructive feedback early on.
Here’s another picture:
What I would do differently:
I would schedule another playtest about a week after the first one. Just from playing games I know that they play differently after you play them a few times and differently again later on when you master them. Also, from writing computer games I know it can be a humbling experience when after you’ve playtested your game to death and maybe had some friends play it, that some complete stranger just doesn’t get it because you aren’t there to hold their hand while they learn. I’d like to see a playtest where I’m not involved in playing the game at all. It’s still in the early stages where every turn I want to tweak the gameplay in one way or another after every move and this came up quite a bit in the initial test.
I still have plenty of prototyping supplies sitting around and I do intend to finish it one day but who knows when that will be.
Doing hardware accelerated vector rendering has been something I’ve been interested trying for a long time so I spared a bit of time to get started with it this week. So far I’ve been able to render quadratic bezier curves in closed paths and ellipses which you can see in the screenshot below.
I’m still working on getting cubic beziers and stroked paths working but so far I’m very happy with the results. Because the curve is drawn using a pixel shader I never have to worry about zooming too far or having my polygon approximation of the curve be apparent which is currently the case with my gravity game. Also if you haven’t seen it check out masagin. Here’s a video if you don’t feel like downloading it, but you should because the video doesnt do it justice.
As far as I can tell he just approximates the curves with polygons and doesn’t use a shader to evaluate the actual curve. It still looks excellent but you can see that the curvature isn’t perfect when the camera zooms in really close on some of the elements. I’m working on parsing svg files at the moment so hopefully I’ll have some more examples soon, including the svg tiger.
Also here’s a zip with a few papers I’ve found if anybody else is interested in messing around with this stuff.
And alliteration in my titles. Made some more menus for my gravity game with some cool transitions. Sol’s interpolation tutorial was helpful but ultimately I didn’t end up using any of the methods he went over. Instead I used a pair of cascaded low pass filters. You can set the damping ratio and frequency and get a range of interesting behavior out of it.
Level select screen:
And the options menu:
And here’s a download link if you want to try it out:
And now I’ll go back to starting more projects I won’t finish and self aggrandizing, but that should be fairly obvious by this point if you’ve kept up with my blog.
It’s really late but I want to go ahead and post this since I never posted last week. So, I decided to add a main menu to the game I’m working on and I went ahead and made a quick mockup.
A few hours later after writing a good amount of code this is what it looks like in game.
The trail on the particle still isn’t quite right but I’m happy with how it turned out and the animation looks pretty slick. I may upload a build later so people can try it out. Also, I’d be suprised if anybody recognizes where I got the name from.
Making better tools
