Create-ivity

A little bit on the late side, but better late than never: a merry christmas to all of you, and a happy new year!

I haven’t written a post in the last two weeks, due to a busy schedule and some brief illnesses, but I intend to make up for that with a surprize either this week or next year. You’ll see.

EDIT: A merry christma tag? Is this some sort of WordPress bug or feature or something? I’ve retyped that s multiple times now but it still ends up as christma. Oh well.

The problems

After I had thrown away Flash CS3 and started to work with HaXe, I found myself in a somewhat spartan situation. Manually linking art resources by handcrafting a xml document isn’t exactly the most fascinating or fool-proof part of game-development. Notepad++, the text editor I’m using, offers syntax highlighting for a wide variety of languages and has tabbed browsing and can display function lists, but that’s where it ends, too. I don’t have auto-completion, compile buttons and visual settings interfaces, and so on.

Also, I’m spending a lot of time on school these days, so where possible, I want portable solutions. I want to be able to plug my USB stick into just about any computer and start developing right away.

The solutions

So far, I’ve found a few helpfull tools. One of these is LetMeType. Basically, it monitors what you type, and offers suggestions based on what you’ve typed before. It’s pretty customizable and provides a nice auto-suggestion ‘feature’.

Continue reading Improving your toolset…

About a year ago, my mother got cancer. First in her breast, then in her neck, then her head, and in her head again. The last time, she was too weak to be treated. She died yesterday.

Luckily we’ve been able to say goodbye a while ago already. She went downhill pretty fast during the last two weeks. She wasn’t even able to react to us anymore the last few days. It was scary to see.

I’m gratefull though that she’s in heaven now. She accepted Jesus Christ in her life, and that’s why she’s with God now. We, my father, brothers and me, experience Gods help too. It’s similar to when my best friend died: we missed him, now we miss our mother and wife, but we know they’re in heaven, and God gives us peace and strength to carry on. Even my youngest brother, who’s just eleven years old now, noticed and mentioned that.

It’s sad, but good at the same time. It’ll certainly take time to get used to, but I know we’ll make it because God is with us. And I know we’ll see her again when it’s our time.

Good news! I recently got contact with the fine guys from Triangle Studios. They've offered me an internship, one that I gladly accepted. Things still need to be settled with school, but it sounds pretty good so far already. I'm really looking forward to work together with these guys on some fun handheld console games.

I've created levels for about 6 years, and the ever growing visual standard has gotten on my nerves. I'd like to see some more actual game - not necessarily less visuals, I like to see some cool stuff, but it shouldn't come at the price of less gameplay and shorter stories.

Tomb Raider: Legends for example, those environments look fantastic, but the game itself was a bit too short for my taste, and while the movement system feels great, I think it needs some more tweaking to add more challenge to it. Or Half-Life 2: Episode 1. I'll probably receive the box tomorrow, and from what I've heard it's great fun, but the story sounds a bit on the short side even for an episode. Oh well, there's an additional commentary mode and I think I'd buy the episodes for that alone - it's always good to hear what other people consider while creating their games.

I just cleaned out my downloads folder. Usually, I'm a bit afraid to throw things away - you might just have some use for it, later - but I figured that if I'm not using it now, I'm probably not using it later anyway. Any tools I would need later can simply be downloaded again and it's likely I'll find even better tools in the process…

Anyway, the cleansing freed up well over 2 GB on HD space. Which gives me a total of 20% free disk space. And really, I can't imagine how all the things on my computer take up over 60 GB… I guess my old levels and art and such do have some impact, as well as 'forgotten' files and games…

It's time to dig up the nice little tool called SpaceMonger. Displays the selected drive as a collection of boxes (folders), sized according to their size on the HD. So, I'm going to check my C drive now. Are you with me?

// Just used it, and while it takes some time to analyse a HD, it already saved me 10 more GB. Now that's what I call purging. :)