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Day Forty

Okay, it's Doogie Time. I spent three hours working from home today. Apart from that, it was brunch with the in-laws, then over my folks for tea and to set up their ADSL.

Day Thirty Nine

Out for yums with the girls and the folks after work tonight, then home to Newstopia. Will be busy doing work work this weekend, so don't expect any progress (not that you do anyhow).

Day Thirty Eight

Out straight after work tonight. Tired when we got home due to yesterday's work-from-home stint. So to bed!

Day Thirty Seven

Played a bit tonight, but mostly working from home. For real work. Wha?

Day Thirty Six

Out tonight; the announced IGDA event was cancelled, but we stayed and talked the crazy talk at the pub for ages. Need a kick up the arsepipe to get into the zone on this project again. Maybe asking A. for some pixel art would get me inspired!

Day Thirty Five

No dev work today, and likely that I'll be working from home over the next couple of evenings, so not much on the cards, either. Plus, I'm coming down with a cold :(

Day Thirty Four

Again, not much. Did play Exile on UAE for a while, though :)

Day Thirty Three

Got a bit done today; improved camera controls and the background drawing. Still not enough, though, but better than now't.

Day Thirty Two

Looking after a sick child and spending the evening watching a romantic movie with the wife makes for slow progress on the hobby project.

Day Thirty One

Okay, missed posting last night, which is dangerous (I want to make sure I continue the habit). So, the update is that nothing was done, because we went to a party after work, and got home late.

Day Thirty

So, here we are - a full week of inactivity. Pretty depressing, really. But there's a long weekend coming up, and I'd like to have the basic engine+editor finished by the end of the month, so there's some motivation. But there's a party after work tomorrow night, so unlikely that I'll get much of a chance to do anything until Friday. Let's make the long weekend count, eh? Sheesh!

Day Twenty Nine

Finally figured out what I'm making. It's going to be awesome!

Day Twenty Eight

End of the first four weeks; got the refactored code building, so v. keen to implement the in-engine editor, and then focus on player movement!

Day Twenty Seven

Again, not much movement today. I guess it's a bit of a lull because I'm building up to implementing the in-engine editor, and I know that'll be a fair bit of work. But I reckon this pattern happens with me all the time, and "four days on, four days off" would suit me to a T, whatever that means. I've been trawling blogs, reading about the Ludum Dare, and thinking how I wish I'd known about it earlier.

Day Twenty Six

Not much movement today, either. Mostly concerned with hacking about on the ol' DS.

Day Twenty Five

Nothing today. Great night out with E. and D. after work, and no energy left.

Day Twenty Four

Pretty tired right now, and D. back from dinner out with friends. Made a start on the new project, but just refactoring the hello world, really.

Day Twenty Three

A few garden paths tonight. Finally got a great SQLite GUI installed - SQLite Expert Professional. Got my data into that, then hit a wall using sqlite3. Looked for a C++ wrapper, and it took three goes. Downloaded one to find it needed Boost, downloaded that, banged my head against the wall with build errors, got that sorted, then found it throws exceptions rather than returning error codes. No thanks! A second attempt went nowhere, and then sqlitewrapped showed up. Ten minutes later had my data read and displayed in-game. So, yes, I'm ready to move on to the in-engine editor. Yay!

Day Twenty Two

Just a couple of updates:

• Got SQLite downloaded and linked against the project.
• Open and close database. All hunky dorey.
• Lock FPS.
• Improve the tile handling to make more data-driven friendly.
• Get stuck trying to find a good front-end for SQLite.

So, tomorrow I want to find an SQLite front-end, then move all my tile data into the DB and prove that it works nicely. And that'll be all I need to get sorted before moving on to the project proper.

Day Twenty One

Back from the folks, pretty tired, but decided to do my hours worth. Got audio happening with some contact callbacks, and that should be pretty useful for game data too. You get the normal and tangent forces, so should be able to do audio volume based on force, and choose the sample based on the normal or tangent (i.e. a sliding sound or a rebound sound). Material types can be implemented as user data, so lots of flexibility there. Should also be able to do game logic that way, too (for example, running on ice vs. rock).

Also hacked in a mode that locks the angle of the viewport to that of the player, which is a great way of making you feel sick (this is mapped to the K key).

So, with animation and audio sorted, it's almost time for a refactor into a generic Engine+Editor that will become the game. But (gasp) before I do that, I need to sort out serialisation. The plan, as mentioned previously, is to use SQLite. HGE can load its resources from memory, so may even be able to encode audio and gfx as blobs, although I'm not sure that this would be a wise move. But I definitely want to be able to persist the state of everything (for game saves) and the initial state of the world (for level design). This is probably the last unknown, and once that's sorted, it'll be time to refactor.

Speaking of which, I expect the refactor may take a while, and that I won't have much to report once it's underway. We'll see. With that said, here's today's release:
DayTwentyOne.zip.

Day Twenty

No work on the project today. Was out of the house most of the day, and am now far too tired. An early night is in order; will hopefully get audio sorted tomorrow night, after returning from dinner at mum and dads.

Day Nineteen

Starting to look at SQLite for game data. Should work pretty well, so will need to download and compile against the game at some stage. Apart from that, downloaded a mario sprite sheet, cut out five frames of run animation, downloaded tile studio to put it together, then got my little pink dude replaced by an animating mario. So that's one down; I reckon it'll be audio next, then a big refactor (don't think I need to solve the shooting mentioned yesterday before that).

Day Eighteen

Mum and Dad over for dinner, followed by a movie (Eastern Promises), so not much time. Got this done:

* Pause mode (press P - debug is now O). Can still move camera, etc.
* Press R to respawn the guy.
* Mouse cursor is visible.

Next:

* Animation.
* Shoot towards mouse cursor.
* Refactor into a neater engine, and start on the in-engine editor.

Download: DayEighteen.zip

Day Seventeen

No work tonight. Wil came over, showed him the prototype, went out for dinner and drinks and talked about it, then back for a viewing of "King of Kong". Still inspired, but knew there'd be no time for dev this evening.

Day Sixteen

Less than an hour available tonight, so only time for

• adding foreground and background tiles;
• adding poor-man's parallax to these;
• spawning the guy with a random size;
• improving his physics bounding box; and
• allowing static tiles to be rotated.

The in-engine level editor mentioned yesterday sounds golden and all, but the code will need some refactoring before I can make a good stab at it, and I want to sort out animation, movement, audio and such like first. But definitely the plan. I reckon a nice milestone would be to ship something to my cohorts in two weeks, so they can start working on content.

Anyway, here be today's release: DaySixteen.zip.

Day Fifteen

Got some static background tiles working, and got sprites and tiles drawing at arbitrary scale (abstracted this out a bit). Next step is adding tiles by mouse clicking, and saving / loading the world. Link: DayFifteen.zip!

Day Fourteen

If you've tried to run the previous two releases, you may have been greeted with this message:

This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect...

This is due to so-called "side-by-side" issues. You can get the earlier releases running by downloading and installing the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package. I'm fixing the issue by statically linking my app, so future releases (including today's) won't require this.

So, on to today. Home from mum and dad's for tea, then some pottering around, where I

• got the project statically linking;
• disabled texture blurring for that ye olde schoole pixellated effect;
• implemented viewport panning and zooming;
• got a follow-cam working.

So download and explore. Controls are now as follows:

• a, d: move the guy
• space: jump
• q, e: rotate
• cursor keys: move viewport
• pgup, pgdn: zoom viewport
• p: toggle debug
• l: toggle camera lock
• esc: exit

And the link: DayFourteen.zip

Hmmm... don't expect this productivity burst to last forever! But, while it does, future plans are:

• Animation
• Sound FX
• Particles
• Data file format, and loading

Day Thirteen

I think I'll be working on the HelloWorld app for while yet, and I'm spending time today going through hge and b2d dox, making sure I get some broad overview of how these libs work, now that I've got something basic going. Next steps will be to divorce the physics sim from the view, allowing me to have a large world, scrolling the view around and zooming in and out. I also want to draw some debug lines so I can see where the static and dynamic physics bodies are, without having to rely on hge sprites. And I'm starting to think of what the prototype game might be...

...and later I got debug drawing in, got the guy bouncing around, and fixed a few bugs. So it's a-d to move, space to fly, q-e to rotate, o-p to set debug drawing on/off. And here's the link: DayThirteen.zip

Day Twelve

Got graphics loading fixed (loading from a packed resource file now); got Box2D ticking away, and got keyboard control in for moving the little guy about. Not bad for an hour or so of a Sat'dee evening. Zipped everything up into a release, which I'd hoped to upload here. A bit of googling around revealed a bevy of free file hosting sites, and I got me registered at one. So, here's the link: DayTwelve.zip.

Day Eleven

Nothing today. Randomly decided to see Miss Saigon, and just got home from a late supper at Billy Lee's following the show, so no time to make any headway on Project "White Box". Hehe.

Day Ten

Continued the hackery. Got a simple Engine class going, although that took longer than expected because hge's update and render callbacks need to be static. Resolved this by making Engine a singleton, but still need double-indirection for the callbacks. Then got a sprite moving around. Or, to put it bluntly, a white box. Must investigate file loading soon, so I expect the tune for the next few days will be investigating how best to do something, implementing, refactoring and so forth, until HelloWorld hits yesterday's feature list, and is structured in a sound way, providing a framework for further development. Natch.

Day Nine

Really tired tonight; it would be oh-so-easy to make some lame excuse and do nothing. Instead, I squeezed in an hour's work, from half-nine to half-ten. I got the hello world example building and linking, with everything in P4. There's no sprite bouncing around the screen with physics driving its movement, but the framework for that is in place. I expect the next step will be reading docs and hacking on the framework to get to that point. Even better, here's what I want:

• Arsepipe splash.
• Arsepipe audio.
• Sprite bouncing around, with gravity.
• Control something with keyboard and / or mouse.
  

There's not much time, but I'll make that the milestone for Sunday. So four days, which translates to four hours, probably!

Day Eight

Turns out that D. wasn't having a night out, so I had scant time to dedicate to the project. I improved my P4 configuration, got things working on the command-line from cygwin, imported Box2D and hge into the repo, got the hge tutorials building from the cygwin command line with vcbuild, and coded a HelloWorld app that doesn't, as yet, build. Task for tomorrow is getting HelloWorld to build and run, incorporating both hge and Box2D. Basically a sprint bouncing around with physics driving it.

Day Seven

One week, eh? So, to the folks this evening for roast chicken, not back home until late. Still managed to get P4 set up, and a skeleton workspace in place. A bit weird to go back to using it after many months of SVN, but it's all good. My milestone is to have the dev environment sorted by tomorrow, so day eight is going to be a big one; I need third party libs submitted, building and linking against a hello world app.

Day Six

Really wanted to set up P4 today, but, even with an extra hour in the day, I failed to make the time. I should be able to do better than that, so I'm pretty annoyed at myself. And tomorrow won't be any better, because we go to my folks for dinner, and generally don't get home until pretty late. So, my future self, I'm sorry for doing so poorly at this early stage of the project. Promise I'll do better! Things should definitely pick up by Tuesday and Wednesday; see if they don't.

Day Five

Again with the nothing. I was starting to question whether it's a good idea to blog daily about a project when I only get an occasional hour here or there to work on it, but I think the routine of writing something will help keep me motivated to actually finish something for once. Still looking forward to setting up the environment; still not getting any time to! So, to bed with Making Money.

Day Four

Nothing. No progress today. Too busy at work, and came home to dinner + wine + movie, so a bit difficult to focus. And so to bed!

Day Three

Nothing done today. Been doing work (for my day job) while a film crew works across the street, shooting a feature with a new-fangled RED ONE 4k digital camera. I do have time to think about things, though. What I need to do is get P4 set up so that Box2D and HGE are checked in, then create a HelloWorld project and check that in, and then create a build process so that the libs and the exe get built, and that all works. After that I'll be pretty close to having a bare-bones environment to start prototyping in.

Day Two

Phew... suck of a day at work. Trying to take criticism in a good way, but it can't help but feel like fingerpointing. Makes having a separate project at home a breath of fresh air. Didn't achieve much with it tonight, though, due to lack of time. Got P4 installed, got a FogBugz trial sorted, downloaded VC++ express, downloaded Box2D and HGE, had a quick bash at building stuff and that's yer lot.

Don't want to spend too much time setting things up. Deadlines look a bit like this:

• April1: Dev environment established (i.e. pipeline for writing code, building it, testing it)
• May1: Prototype done and dusted (i.e. prove we can actually make a game)
• June1: Alpha version ready (i.e. core gameplay sorted)
• July1: Beta ready (i.e. feature lock, just bugfix, optimisation and polish to go)
• August1: Ship!

So, a few more days to sort out the environment, then. Wish me luck!

Day One

I don't have much time, and I don't have a snazzy computer, but some classic games were built in short order on very primitive machines 30 years ago, so I don't see what's holding me back. My deadline is Nullabor 2008, which, I think, is going to be held with GO3, which is happening on August 1. Don't know when the submission deadline will be, though. Another deadline is work related, and is June 1. So that'll give me two months. Until then, I've a bit of time in the evenings to plan and prototype.

All I know now is I want 2D, perhaps with physics, and with some nice pixel art supplied by a mate who's willing to be involved. I have a sketchy idea for a game that involes time travel, but I reckon I'll start with getting something moving around on-screen, and see where that takes us.

I'll be developing for Windows, in C++, and potentially with Python or Ruby or LUA tacked on. Right now I'm looking at hge for the engine and Box2d for physics. So the first task will be downloading those guys and getting them to build. They're both free, even for commercial use, and look pretty straightforward. Should be fun.

I should also get me a game controller, because keyboard control sucks the arsepipe.