2021-06-29
Well, we’re in lockdown yet again and BLaTTiX is getting close to beta release.
As we go into July I expect the following will happen:
- I’ll work less on BLaTTiX, switching more to a mode of responding to bug reports and generally polishing it up for release (probably on September 1).
- Prototyping work will start on a couple of smaller-scope projects, “Noid” and “Deminer”.
- Gumshoe, HackTile and Punk! will be dusted off, and basically upgraded to use the latest versions of libraries &c.
- I may start exploring DownTown, Sesame and Onesie, my other 2021 projects.
All in all that’s a lot! Together with RnDB, which has already been completed,
that makes 10 projects for the year. And we’re only just halfway through. Wow!
2021-06-08
Long time! You should probably note that all BLaTTiX talk has moved over to the
Itch Page. With only a month of
development left, the game is really coming together. Looking forward to
starting a new project soon!
2021-05-12
The lockdown gamejam went swimmingly; I finished all of the gameplay work that I
intended to do, and I shipped the game to alpha testers on
Itch, adding both Windows and Mac builds.
Feedback has been positive so far.
More recently, I’ve refactored the code to integrate
Flecs, an entity-component system,
which has helped to clean up the codebase enormously, and which will make it
easier to build more complicated game systems.
I also lost a day to Linux in an attempt to get a build out; I’ve installed
Debian 7 on two VMs (32-bit and 64-bit) and have a binary built, but the VMs
won’t run the game due to a lack of support for the GL calls I’m making, so I’ll
need to test that by installing a more modern Linux on my PC. But with
installing Linux, programming in vanilla C and re-watching
Serial Experiments Lain, it’s
like I’ve been transported back to the year 2000.
Speaking of, I’ve been learning a bit about “Modern C”, and the differences
between C11, C99 and ANSI C, which is what I learned back in the nineties. Most
notable are three features that I’ve come to rely on:
- Variable-length arrays.
- Designated initializers.
- Compound literals.
I’ll also make sure to use inline functions where it makes sense to do so. And
the other C99 features, such as single-line comments and a proper boolean type,
are hardly worth mentioning.
Another change to how I used to write C is a preference for pass-by-value and
return-by-value instead of by reference. Which means fewer pointers and less
manual memory allocation. These days it can be faster to use immediate values
than references for small structures, and compilers will copy the data into
registers. Nice!
2021-04-25
Well, it’s been a while.
The Punk Collective met last Wednesday in the city. Burgers for lunch, following
an impromtu tour of a nearby co-working space. Really conveniently located;
accessible directly from the main underground train station, and just a
10-minute journey from my local train station. Seriously considering a
membership; it’s around $150/mo for five days access per month, which is around
what I think I need (basically get out of the house and meet up with other solo
developers once a week or so).
Apart from that, have been working on Blattix! I’ve added walls, collisions,
shooting, sound effects and music (purchasing ten punk rock tracks for
unrestricted commercial use for $99). Controls feel tight, and it’s fast.
Next steps are to get a simple game loop happening (I’ll just make Asteroids for
now) and get builds shipped out to the other punks. This will mark the end of
the first month of development, and we’re limiting ourselves to just three
months. In the second month, I will focus on refactoring and fleshing out the
gameplay, adding waves of different enemy types, progression through levels,
boss battles and so on. The final month will be bugfixing, polish and
optimisation.
Remember that I’m trying to limit myself to spending just a third of my time on
this particular project, so next month I plan to make some room to continue work
on Gumshoe and HackTile. Busy times.
Unfortunately we’ve gone into a snap lockdown due to some community transmission
in Perth. I’m focusing on a three-day gamejam to distract me from those
concerns, and things will hopefully be back to normal soon…
2021-04-02
Sidetracked by our Punk Collective commitment to build a game each in the next
quarter. The other three punks have been super productive with their games, and
so I spend the week working on something myself… Blattix!
This will be a retro-style shooter with multiple waves of enemies, going for
high replayability rather than depth of content. I’ve drawn inspiration from
Encounter,
Cosmic Causeway,
BallBlazer and
Vaxine.
It’s been an excuse to learn some shader programming, and to brush up on my
linear algebra. I’m not using a 3D game engine at all, it’s just rendering
sprites and doing a bit of tricky jiggery-pokery. Next I will move on to
building a simple physics engine, which will allow collisions between objects,
enabling some shoot-em-up gameplay.
Lots of fun!
2021-03-25
Third Punk Collective meetup yesterday. Everyone seemed reluctant to meet and
had various excuses, but in the end it all came together and we had the best
meeting so far. We were all on the same page and spoke about creating and
publishing one small game each in the latter half of the year, mostly to learn
the ropes end-to-end and to attempt to build an audience. Looking forward to
that!
The GumShoe refactoring is progressing nicely, and I can now see the light at
the end of the tunnel. The game is still not quite there yet; the refactored
version is janky and missing features when compared to the demo that I hacked
together last month, but the code is much nicer to work with and to build upon,
and it will make it easy for me to experiment with realtime client/server
updates, and perhaps with multiplayer.
I’m really looking forward to getting all that done and dusted so I can get back
to HackTile, which I think has great potential. Need more time in the day!
2021-03-11
I wrote a
blog post
about RnDB and recorded a video walkthough (which is linked to from the post),
and had a decent response on Reddit (prompting me to add a few new features,
particularly the ability to load and save mutations). Very nice to complete
something, ship it and get feedback from the community in such a short window of
time. And I can now cross RnDB off the list of project ideas that constantly nag
at me in the back of my mind.
I discovered
Standard Ruby
and spent a bit of time making my existing project repositories compliant, but
this in part was to distract myself from GumShoe refactoring, which is
progressing slowly. It dawned on me that the process isn’t so much one of coding
but of re-arranging things in your head. After many days of thinking and a few
false starts I now have a rough architecture that makes sense, and I’m working
to finish the refactoring and have a demo of the back-end integration
up-and-running by early next week.
This will coincide with the end of
The 7DRL Challenge,
which some of the other Punks are participating in. Beetlefeet is building an
awesome golf rpg, while Maxxor is making an apocalyptic wasteland with dynamic
lighting effects. At our second coffee shop meetup yesterday they showed great
progress. Chr15m started strong but bowed out after his Office Brawl simulator
failed to light a spark, which is precisely the right thing to do. Follow the
passion and fail early. Great to see!