Create-ivity

Lacking inspiration?

Recently there have been some threads about ‘how to get inspiration’ on the Gamedev.net forums. Sometimes it feels as if every good idea is already taken, and that every addition or twist you come up with turns out wrong.

That was written in a game design board, but I’ve also seen it come up many times on level-design forums. Take Counter-Strike for example: so many custom maps have been created that there’s virtually no original setting left. Or Half-Life 2: try to come up with an original physics-based puzzle for once. That’s harder than it looks.

Here’s how I handle it

Continue reading How to get inspiration…

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.

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.

I promised to write about that ‘other game’. It’s a school project focussed on AI. Me and a friend are writing a turn-based strategy game similar to Advanced Wars, and some other friends are writing AI applications that can connect to our game. We’ve chosen for a Flash-based front-end, connected with a Neko-based back-end that handles the connections with the other AI apps. From there, it’s simply watching those AI agents duke it out against each other.

As for Aural Fighter, it’s slowly becoming better and more playable. I haven’t done much on it last week due to being ill, but I’ve done some things nonetheless. Most of the missile weapons are now working: the guided missiles and splash damage missiles are pretty fun to play with and they’re quite powerfull. I’ll tweak the exact values once I can playtest some of the later levels, but for now, it’s fun to blow up waves of enemies with splash damage missiles.

The first level is nearing completion, too. I only need to do some art for it and add several more enemy waves. I’m also working on the first endboss, which is going to be component-based. I’ll probably write some more on that in a later post.

Something has bugged me for quite a while: Aural Fighter reacted slower and slower the longer I played it. I was absolutely sure it had to do with the rendering code, but even a bare-bone test game slowed down after a while. Confused, I ignored the issue for a while, but I realized I couldn’t release Aural Fighter with such an issue unresolved, so I just had to fix it.

But whatever I tried, nothing seemed to cause the problem. Finally, I decided to create a minimum piece of code that still reproduced the problem, to post on the HaXe mailing list. While doing so, I found out that the game only stopped respondeding after a lot of keypress events had happened, not just after some time. I was confused: was I handling input in a wrong way? It should be a perfectly normal method… but while stripping away unrelevant code, I finally figured it out: I had added another keyListener in a pre-loader frame, one that was never removed afterwards. This one started to intervene with the other keyListener. Removing it finally solved the problem.

On a side-note, I’ve added shadows to all enemy fighters and I’ve drawn a few new enemies and tiles. I’m also working on another game - as a school project - so Aural Fighter is proceeding slower as desired, but the experience I gain from that project should be pretty usefull for later games. I’ll write some more about that project later.