Hum…some stuff happened lately, some I can’t go into detail right now others I can. I was talking with Rita the other days and she had this nice idea for an iPhone game. It’s one of those small concepts that may or not work but I liked the general idea, at least enough to start a small prototype. If everything turns out the way I plan (never is) it should be a 2-3 weeks project. ...
Small side-note first, Vizati is now available for the Super Nintendo, more info. For my third idevblogaday post I’m going to talk about Game Center. Game Center was released only a couple months ago (September or so) but already tons of applications are using it and even more, players ask for it. It’s a way to track achievements, leader boards etc. Unfortunately It’s only available from iOS 4.1+, so some compatibility check has to be done. ...
This week I’ve been working on replacing my current scripting system. It worked great for Vizati but I need something with a little more flexibility. Instead of explaining what I’ve managed to get working I’ve made a screenshot with some notes. I think I’m going to make this my #ScreenshotSaturday
Spent a little time giving my blog a new look. It’s not that I didn’t like the old one but sometimes it was a bit of a mess, I’ve been getting many new readers so it was time for a cleaner look. My main concern was getting all code posts to be readable but I think they are class XPTO { public: XPTO(); }; Let me know if you find any errors, since I’m not going to dig up the whole blog finding errors =P Also feedback on the new layout is most appreciated. ...
So you can’t make a game without images, right? Well, actually you can but that’s another story. But how can you load a jpg or a png and use then on OpenGLES? First let’s make a simple class Texture2D class Texture2D { public: Texture2D(int id, int width, int height) { _textureId = id; _width = width; _height = height; } virtual ~Texture2D(void) { // Delete Texture from HGL Memory glDeleteTextures(1, ((GLuint*)&_textureId)); } int getTextureId() {return _textureId; } protected: int _textureId; // The reference ID of the texture in OpenGL memory int _width; int _height; }; Now for the code to actually load the image ...
I follow a couple of dev blogs, some are game developers, others make websites or software. In the last couple of months I’ve been reading a lot of them complaining about lack of motivation to develop their idea of the lack of motivation for development in general. Happens to me too, heck it happens to everyone once in a while… It’s something that happens usually half way though or after you get the initial prototype running. Around one year ago (Feb 2010) when I started developing our first game it was all great, new stuff every day, things starting to work, replacing my crappy programmer art by Rita’s drawings. The real endurance was after we had a working demo, and the decision of actually finishing the game. ...
This is my first post to http://idevblogaday.com/, I’ve been waiting since November so I’m pretty excited about writing to a broader audience =P. Even though I only have one product on the App Store I have gathered some knowledge on how stuff works to get there. I’ll start by talking a bit about how we made our PC game Vizati to iPhone. When we started, this represented our chance of making games and putting ourselves into test. Without any pre determined rules and/or a major company dictating what to do we were able to have full creative control to try and do something a bit different. ...
Something that has always been scary (well, it’ still is) before launching Vizati is tech support. No matter how much you tested your game, it’s bound to have bugs. Also what I’ve realized is that I don’t spend enough time testing the game, oh and you too, yes YOU (I’m assuming you’re a developer of course). The past year I gather around a few friends who never played it to test the game for 2 days. 6 people played it the first day, 4 played it on the second day. We gathered around all complaints and issues and addressed them. After that there was more play-testing but not as aggressive. There were 3 or 4 persons testing it regularly. ...
It’s little over a month since I said I wouldn’t do any more porting for Vizati. Lesson learned, don’t say never again… When I started making the engine in C++ with an OpenGL/DirectX layer, I tried to keep in mind a multi-platform environment. Keeping rendering and OS specific calls abstract from the game itself and the engine to a certain level was one of my goals. Easy to say, hard to accomplish. Anyway the engine already supports Windows, iPhone and iPad. ...
So another year has come to an end, time to make plans for a new one and look back on what has been done. This was one crazy year, where I embraced indie development as my free time “hobby”. This picture illustrates my year very well, dark link is a bonus since my twitter handle is DJ_Link I’m tired, but happy and hoping that these were the first steps on something greater and bigger. Developing Vizati turned out a much more complex task that I imagined, making everything from the ground up, from engine to the actual game for 5 different platforms took me around 3x more time that I expected. Valuables lessons were learned so I’d be a fool to repeat those mistakes again. ...