Bullet consumption
June 21, 2008 at 3:08 pm | In Flash games, Game development, Game idea's, HaXe | Leave a CommentI’ve been prototyping yet another game idea during the last few weeks. Since I’m now a full-time game programmer at Triangle Studios, I have less spare time to devote to game-development. Fortunately, less doesn’t mean nothing at all. 
So here’s BulletEater. A danmaku/bullet-hell game. Except that you’re unable to fire back at turrets, so you’ll just have to survive the bullet patterns. Actually, you’re not completely defenseless: there’s an overcharge mode that allows you to eat bullets, which in turn adds to your score. It does cost you a life however, but lives slowly recharge so that’s simply a matter of surviving long enough. Eating bullets speeds up the recharge process a bit so you may want to save your lives for the really nasty situations.
These are things I’m still thinking about, as they make large bullet patterns easy score-fests instead. So I’m thinking about including laser-beams that can’t be eaten to control the difficulty and challenge some more. If you have any suggestions, feel free to share them.
Checking out Neko Media Engine
February 25, 2008 at 12:08 am | In Flash games, Game development, HaXe, Programming | Leave a CommentTags: HaXe, neash, neko, nme, sdl
I recently stumbled across Neko Media Engine, a SDL wrapper for haXe. I decided to port one of my Flash games to NME, to make it a stand-alone application. I got it up and running after modifying my framework for a few hours. It turns out that, with relatively few changes, my framework can be used for ‘normal’ games just as well. I’m starting to like haXe more and more now, especially with such libraries around.
The developer of NME, Lee Sylvester, has recently teamed up with Hugh Sanderson to create Neash: a Neko library that provides the Flash API for Neko applications. In other words, we’ll be able to use (almost) the same haXe code for both Flash and Neko applications… That sounds interesting!
Final internship has started…
February 13, 2008 at 11:05 pm | In Flash games, Game development, HaXe, Programming, Triangle Studios | Leave a CommentTags: Flash games, Game development, game-dev, internship, Triangle Studios
Last week I started with my final internship. It’s, again, at Triangle Studios. This time, there’s no mobile games to work on though, but Nintendo DS titles. I’m working on something pretty interesting, but for now that’s about as much as I can tell.
As for spare-time development, I plan to release AI Wars next week after some minor fix-ups. I’m then going to continue work on the surprize I mentioned last month. After that, I’ll either do another small project in-between or I’ll immediatly take up work on Aural Fighter.
The framework I’ve been building for Aural Fighter has been tweaked and refactored all the way through AI Wars, the surprize project and a few other prototypes. I recently streamlined the rendering system: animated sprites are now simply a matter of creating a single sprite sheet and writing an animation data text file, rather than creating multiple numbered files. At compile-time, this animation data is compiled into the .swf file. The sprite loading process then attaches that data to the loaded sprite. There are still a few things I’m working on, such as color remapping and fading filters, but the framework is steadily moving towards a point where creating new games doesn’t require me to add new functionality anymore. Which means I can focus more on the actual games and less on the technology behind them. Which is good. 
AI Wars is looking for AI agents!
February 5, 2008 at 5:44 pm | In Flash games, Game development, HaXe, Programming | 2 CommentsTags: AI, Flash games, Game development, games, HaXe, turn-based strategy
AI Wars is done
It’s finished. The Flash frontend and Neko backend are done, and my classmates have produced a nice AI client for demonstration purposes. The whole package is roughly 0.5 MB.
To make things a little easier, I’ve written a batch file that starts both the backend and the frontend. All that’s left then is connecting the AI clients and starting the game.
The gameplay
Surprizes and tools
January 4, 2008 at 3:55 pm | In Flash games, Game development, Game idea's, Programming | Leave a CommentTags: flash, games, puzzle, surprizes, tools
Here’s a small image hinting at the surprize I wrote about in my last post. It’s a puzzle game, it’s almost completely finished and it includes an editor. I’ll post more info about it later, once it’s fully playable and polished.
Meanwhile, I’m finishing up AI Wars – it’s almost done now, except for a few communication issues. I’ve also written a few additional Python tools. Since I’m painting quite a few tilemaps for Aural Fighter, I figured a few tools wouldn’t hurt. Today I added one that takes an image, asks for the desired tilesize, and outputs a serie of unique tiles as separate images. It’s using Python Imaging Library (PIL) to load, compare and save the images. It then optimizes them, using PngOptimizerCL, the command line version of PngOptimizer. The tool took me about an hour or two to create, and it’s less than 100 lines of code. And, except for the optimization phase, it’s quite fast, too.
Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
