It's what can be described as a bit buggy, but I've got the painting working in the map editor.

The brush position is wrong but it kinda sort works.

Still trying to solve the same issue; getting the cost of movement to each tile on the map from the unit's current tile. Immediate neighbours would be a cost of 1 for grass tiles, 2 for the neighbours of neighbours etc. Some tiles would have increased cost, say forests might have a base cost of 2, so going through two forest tiles would cost 4.

Then gotta represent that as a highlighted area of possible moves.

I'll get that working eventually but for now I've just added a river to my demo map. (The highlighted area here is just for immediate neighbours, getting it to iterate correctly is proving difficult in a functional language :p)

Today was my first of a full week devoted to game dev. I worked on adding units, keyboard controlled pointer and selecting.

It went pretty well but I've got some difficult bits to solve tomorrow.

Placeholder art as always.

I'll keep trying on this tomorrow...

So this is kind of cheating entering the same game for two weeks in a row, but all my development time this week has been taken up with streamlining my Ludum Dare Entry and incorporating the feedback that I've received here and elsewhere. Here is a short list of the differences:

Options menu - You can adjust the length of the debate and the thinking time to make things easier or harder (that was for you @Anja).

Word list - The word list is greatly cut down from 50,000 words to about 5,000. I am a native English speaker and have a fairly extensive vocabulary and I had never seen half of the words before. Younger audiences or individuals who don't speak English as their first language can enjoy the absurdity of the debate more if they know what the words mean (Thanks for pointing this out @Stephan) Plus, I enjoy it more with the change also.

Game speed - I eliminated some of the prompts and the messages that didn't add anything to the game but did slow it down. I also reduced the default number of rounds to 6 from 10 (although you can move it back up again if you want in the options menu). Each debate takes less than half the time that it used to.

You can play the new version here.

So I've been a bit crap at keeping the streaks going this past week. However! That should massively improve this next week since I have 5 days of holiday to do nothing but make my game :D

But for this evening I continued working on the map editor. I've been adding the interface, you can click the different brushes which changes the tool and paint the first tile. Just gotta make it so you can paint the rest of the tiles as well.

Hopefully will have this functional by the end of the weekend as I need to get cracking on units, movement and combat to have an MVP ready for Rezzed in case anyone happens to ask to see it...

(please forgive the weird layout of the "interface" so far :p)

Found out how to view my shader compile errors in Luxe today. Shader progress will greatly increase now that I'm not just guessing and checking where the errors in my GLSL programs are...

Wrote some quick shader that makes everything grayscale. No pictures, so you will have to imagine.

I'm working on my entry for Ludum Dare 32 (theme: An unconventional weapon). My entry is The Great Debate. Beat down your opponenets with the power of your words!

The game is a puzzle game disguised as a debate simulator. Each round you get a list of four words to pick from. They are all worth a different amount of points based on some criteria, but to find out what that criteria is you are going to have to experiment and watch how both your words and your opponents words are scoring. Better figure it out quickly because there are only 10 rounds in the debate until the winner is determined.

Note this is after one day. I still have all day tomorrow to clean up the little things, add more puzzles (each debate has the same solution now), add additional characters, and all that fun stuff. Plus, the MadLibs inspired jokes,which are kind of the entire point of this thing.

You can try it out HERE,

Today I worked on the initial unit movement, no transitions just pick up and drop. You can quick cycle through the units with the "." key. I did add a possible movements highlight but as you can see below this is entirely ignored. Also the world's bounds aren't adhered to...

Tomorrow I'll look into actually calculating tile type cost and distance cost. I'll need to calculate the cost to every tile on the map from the unit's current position. I think that would involve some dijkstra? Not sure, never done path finding.

Today I created a save/load system where the player can create a single save file and later load the game from it. It actually was easier than I had thought. I'll add an option to create multiple save files later. :)

I also did some AI studying, nothing much to tell about it, though.

If you would like to support Crystal Kingdom, please consider liking its facebook page and following it on twitter.
Yesterday's update can be found here.
In a case of any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact me here or on twitter. ;)

I found my bug that was causing the Flash port of my Mass Battle game not work properly. At one point I was casting a generic Entity into a specific data type. There is a chance that this cast could fail. Neko handles this failure gracefully and resolves the object to a null, which works fine with my code. Flash just crashes. Granted, this is my fault for an unsafe cast, but it was a pain to track down.

I also learned that when I updated my FlashPlayer recently it didn't update the debugger, so I wasn't getting the error. That lead me to believe I was stuck in an infinite loop and lead me down the wrong path for a while.

If you want to move around some stuff and see it working you can hit the Flash demo today: http://codingadventure.net/index.php/games/mass-ba...


A very short update today. Mostly did a lot of planning and thought about what to do next. Came up with about 8 things than need to be done next and I'm hoping to do some coding tomorrow. :)

Yesterday's update can be found here.
In a case of any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact me here or on twitter. ;)

For more updates, you should follow my twitter account - @PeterLauris and the account of Crystal Kingdom - @CrystalKingdom_.

Woops!

I've been doing bits here and there but haven't delved into my primary project for most of that time. I had a week off from work where I hammered out some good code, but going back to the office really killed my momentum. And momentum is hard to build back up.

I'm off to Rezzed tomorrow for 3 days, then have a small project to get out the door in the days after that. THEN hopefully I will be able to get back to smashing out my game and on the road to becoming a legit indie dev.

In the meantime I have done some work on a demo game for an article I am writing, the next in a series on developing games in Elm. It's a simple space invaders game but it's still something I guess.

I'm starting to like Luxe. I still don't like it as much as HaxeFlixel, but I'm still fighting to learn it, so who knows. One thing that I do love about it so far is the way that it handles States.

Basically today I created a Finite State Machine to control the game states in Luxe. What is cool about how Luxe handles them is that I can switch between them easily, or I can enable them individually to have multiple states active at once. I'm going to use them to create modular behavior for entities that I can reuse. So for instance, I can create a SearchState where the entity will wander around trying to find the player and I can add that state to every entity in the game to give them all that ability.

The same states can be used to run the game logic too.

I wrote a whole long blog post about it here if you are interested.

Today I finished off a refactor of the initial smattering of ideas I've played with over the last couple of months. This brings my code into line with the architecture guidelines for the language I'm using (http://elm-lang.org).

Further to this I fixed up the issues rendering the basic isometric tiled map and began on building the map editor.

So I finally sorted out the problem I've been working on for a few days.

Now when you select a unit it highlights all tiles that are within a set distance of the unit (currently hardcoded to 3). I'll add in a cost based on the tile type over the next few days. Also need to make the highlight list remove duplicates as you may notice some of the tiles are double highlighted in the screenshot.

I had given up on this earlier today after several hours but had another quick look at it for 10 mins and had one of those great "oh yeah!" moments and fixed it. Programming can be massively frustrating at times :p

Heyy everyone, my name's Alex I'm an artist who is starting off in programing. Making games is fun! :D

Managed to get this ball bouncing in Unity 3d. I was having trouble setting a bool canJump to true again after colliding with the floor. Learned about object tags in the inspector, even though I did not use it. Instead I just have a check if the ball is colliding with a gameObject named "Floor".

When you hit Space you AddForce to the rigidbody with a public variable float called jump.

-Alex


PlayerController.cs712 bytes
1 download

This was a quite productive day. First of all, I created a bonus system for gathering resources which seems to be working great. Second, I made a weighed random function for choosing an event for them to have different probabilities. I also had some great ideas on how to improve Crystal Kindom and what else to implement, but that's for later. :)

Yesterday's update can be found here.
In a case of any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact me here or on twitter. ;)
For more updates, you should follow my twitter account - @PeterLauris and the account of Crystal Kingdom - @CrystalKingdom_
.

This was a pretty productive day. I added a new building - barracks and new resource strength. It will be used to attack other players and defend from their attacks. Also did some minor improvements not worth mentioning. :)

Yesterday's update can be found here.
In a case of any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact me here or on twitter. ;)

For more updates, you should follow my twitter account - @PeterLauris and the account of Crystal Kingdom - @CrystalKingdom_.

Today I continued working on notifications. Created functions for adding and removing them with nice animations. All in all, I'm quite pleased. :)
I'll a gif with the new notifications.

By the way, if you would like to show Crystal Kingdom your support, you can like its facebook page. :)

Yesterday's update can be found here.
In a case of any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact me here or on twitter. ;)

For more updates, you should follow my twitter account - @PeterLauris and the account of Crystal Kingdom - @CrystalKingdom_.

I simultaneously hit a major milestone and problem in my most recent game. The basic plan is to make a turn based strategy game similar to Shining Force and Fire Emblem. I've been working on the movement for a couple of days and finally got it working how I want it to.

The Good

  • I wrote an algorithm that steps around a character and finds the spaces within their movement range, taking into account terrain.
  • I wrote a heatmaping algorithm that allows all the troops assigned to a hero have an easy, computationally inexpensive way to move towards and keep with the leader of their squad.
  • I wrote a bunch of code that handles movement exceptions (squads can move across members of the squad but not stop in the same space. Heroes can swap places with any of their squadmates. Enemies block movement. Etc.)
  • I made some test graphics and got everything working together.
It works slick so far. I assigned 200 troops to a leader and can move him and have all 200 troops find the best way to follow him in less than a tenth of a second, less time than it takes for the movement animation to finish.

The very, very bad:

I'm writing it in Haxe using HaxeFlixel. The problem is that when I target Flash it hangs. Even with only one troop. There is something about the different way that Haxe compiles to Flash versus the Neko emulator that causes my algorithm to hang. I love Haxe, but these types of errors are really difficult to track down.

Worked on an old prototype I had lying around. Might try and finish it for the 'finish your game' itch.io jam...maybe.

Double dipping on this one. I coded up a simple Unity Tutorial and made a video... which per my normal style has a lot of doodles :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWyJpliGX3A

Go

A submission for Code @Home 18

I worked on some more Go asset management, but got a bit stuck on the regular expression functions with named captures. I also have my BeagleBone Black running Debian testing with systemd. Basically it was "failing" to boot last night. Turned out, dhcpc wasn't getting invoked for the ethernet, but networking was still working for USB. Once I fixed that configuration I was able to ssh right back into it to get more packages & rebuild Go 1.4.1. Also started building Ruby 2.2.0 using RVM on the BeagleBone.

Today I worked on adding signals between the various models for the world map. This ensures the models only know about their child and not their parent.

Editor -> World -> TileList -> [Tile]

In Elm signals are kinda equivalent to events, but described as "a value that changes over time". I don't quite fully grok them at the moment, so I suggest reading the info here if you're interested - http://elm-lang.org/learn/What-is-FRP.elm

No exciting screenshot for this though today.