To celebrate my birthday, I’ve decided that from this day forth, my stealth game Secret of Escape will now be available to download FREE of charge. You can now get the game from either IndieGameStand or Itch.io if you want to download it and enjoy it as much as you want. I haven’t been able to change the price on Desura because it won’t let me set a price below $1.99, but since Desura’s bankruptcy I doubt anyone will use it.
Tag Archives: video game
Procedural Meshes: Generating Gemstones Part 2
Last time I talked about writing a gemstone generator for Unity, in this part I’ll talk about taking that script and making it work in SFML 2 using C++. What makes this challenging is that Unity is a 3D engine with a Mesh class making it easy for procedural geometry, while SFML is a C++ framework made primarily for 2D games. The most SFML gives you is the sf::Vector3f object, which allows you to store 3D [x,y,z] coordinates, which means the rest of it is up to you. As of writing, this is the approach I went to generate 3D gemstones in Gemstone Keeper.
Procedural Meshes: Generating Gemstones Part 1
So two years ago as a student researching for his thesis, I took part in the first procjam. Organised by Michael Cook, this is a games jam that focuses on procedural content, whether that be games, art, text, tools, anything that can make something. Last year I decided to go a bit basic, write some pre-existing noise and maze algorithms for the Haxe Programming Language, which I eventually tweaked and published on Haxelib and Github as MAN-Haxe.
Last year, I decided that for my current project, I was going to do something relevant, and this time use no pre-existing algorithms, this is where the Gemstone Generator comes in. I have images of the meshes below that show the progress from early successful generations to the final most generation test before the UI layout was cleaned up and the demo was uploaded. The generative process is now being used in Gemstone Keeper, albeit with a different rendering process considering I’m turning Unity’s Procedural Meshes into SFML meshes.
Weapons of Gemstone Keeper
So for this week (11th – 17th January) I decided to focus on weapons, a pretty important element of twin-stick shooters. I didn’t want to stick with using one weapon for testing, so I decided to see if I could make a few more for the game. This should explain how I approached the problem and what the weapons system currently looks like for Gemstone Keeper.
New Year
Celebrate what you have accomplished, learn from what went wrong, and most importantly you must move forward. Hope everyone has a great 2016!
One of my goals for 2016 is for Gemstone Keeper to be on Steam Greenlight. I’ll will be sure to have an alpha build ready for play within the next few months.
Understanding ASCII Art
It’s pretty easy to see that I’ve taken the step of using ASCII art in my next game, Gemstone Keeper, and it’s pretty difficult to not notice it if you see the screenshots I’ve been posting for #IndieDevHour or Screenshot Saturday.
This writeup will explain my understanding as mainly an outsider and relative newcomer to the ASCII art and Roguelike Development scenes, and hopefully explain my reasons why I chose to move to ASCII art, and how I am approaching it to make my own style to the art form.
IRDC 2015 Review
So to sum up last weekend, when I went to Nottingham for the International Roguelike Developer Conference 2015’s UK event, I’m not kidding when I said I had little expectations, considering that the Roguelike genre is still fairly new to me, despite spending a year researching procedural level generation for my University dissertation. Despite this, I had a great time and was able to gain a lot from the games, the genre and the role of procedural generation from these two days.
Day Zero
Although I have met the event organiser Mark Johnson and Roguelike developer Darren Grey from the PROCJAM conference organised last year, I wasn’t sure if I was able to meet anyone at the pre-meetup, especially since Mark unfortunately went down with food poisoning before the pre-meet began. However I decided to head off to the Bell Inn and see if I could find anyone.
By chance, I went to the bar and a man sitting at the table asked me “You here for IRDC?”, that man was Johannes Kristmann, and with him was Paul Jeffries. We talked about games, had drinks, and they joked about IRDC events of the past and eventually more people showed up, including Alan Charlesworth, Tom Betts and Ido Yehieli. We all decided to have more talks and drinks at Darren’s apartment block until we all decided to head to our respective hotels to prepare for tomorrow.
Day One
These were all the talks that were given that day (taken from Mark Johnson’s blog):
1025 – “”And [my bot] vowed to return victorious!”: Spelunky as an AI Benchmark” (Tommy Thompson)
1050 – “Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Development” (Pete Hurst)
1115 – “Alternative Death Systems” (Darren Grey)
1140 – “Generative Design” (Paul Jeffries)
1205 – “Modability and You” (DarkGod)
1330 – “Making a Roguelike that uses Twitter Data” (Sean Oxspring)
1355 – “KeeperRL Development” (Michal Brzozowski)
1420 – “The Curious Expedition Development” (Johannes Kristmann)
1445 – “Murder Puzzle – No Longer a Roguelike” (Ido Yehieli)
1510 – “Scaling Brogue“ (Flend)
1535 – “Creating a Procedural Level Editor” (Me)
1600 – “Sir, you are Being Hunted Development” (Tom Betts)
1625 – “Algorithmic Generation of Global Racial, Cultural, Religious, and Architectural Variation” (Mark Johnson)
There were so many great talks, some were really funny and others were really informative, I even managed my talk, despite all my nerves. I spoke about a part of my University dissertation, the Procedural Level Editor.
If you didn’t catch them on Twitch, all of the talks will be online on Youtube in the coming weeks. These talks were followed by curry, and then drinks at Ye Olde Trip to Jerusulem, possibly the oldest pub in England.
Day Two
This was an experimental part of the day, where members of the public got to try out some classic and modern roguelikes such as DoomRL, Angband and Incursion among others, as well as a selection of board games that possibly inspired Roguelikes.
So I had a really fun time, and got to speak to a lot of talented game developers about procedural generation and gaming in general. I got to talk about my University dissertation, and I also got to speak on roguelike radio about the conference, which should also be online soon as well.
So I think it’s time to announce my new main project, during my dissertation I wrote a short prototype game to demonstrate the procedural level editor. I’ve decided to extend this game to be Gemstone Keeper, the roguelike twin-stick shooter. It will use the Procedural Level Editor, which I will also release for public use when it comes to a stable enough point.
ThreeThingGame and the Ricoh2DFramework
Between the 11-12th of June, I went up with a friend and fellow Windows Games Ambassador Aaron Smith, along with a games design student Nathan Holding to the University of Hull for ThreeThingGame, the University’s 24 hour games jam. The premise is that each team was provided three words, and were tasked with making a game that incorporated them. The games would be judged on how well they fit the three things, and the quality of the game overall and the winning teams would get prizes.
This was going to be an interesting event for all three of us, as despite being used to travelling around several campuses for events, Hull was way far out for us. We were also aware that the majority of students there had been at ThreeThingGame before and new how it all worked. However Aaron and I were a bit more confident in what we could pull off together since we went through a games jam one week prior, where we learned to have a proper functioning version control system that the tools can work with, as well as having an actual artist working with us this time. Our three words were Room, Moon and Lune, and from that we made a Lunar Lander style space game where you avoided asteroids and landed on moon bases.
We also had an additional tool to work with, my Ricoh2DFramework. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before on this site, but the Ricoh2DFramework is a framework for MonoGame. The purpose of the framework is to provide classes to assist with graphics, collision, input and audio among other functions. I was actually quite eager to use Ricoh2D in a game development project to see how well it works practically.
Game Development went rather well, and while there were some small issues found in the Ricoh2DFramework, they were easily fixed and all of those changes have been uploaded to the Ricoh2DFramework’s repository. There were also some performance issues that required some work arounds in order to avoid (slow downs, glitches and crashes galore), but in the end we finished the game.
What went right:
- Proper source control: Using C# and MonoGame with Github is much better than the last games jam at Stafford, where we tried to use Unity with Git. Overall it was a nightmare back then to merge all the changes and ensure the project work. Using a system that is completely text based and readable made the process much more easier.
- More prepared: Using the Ricoh2DFramework definitely saved some time in developing the game, and even though the framework had issues they were much quicker to deal with instead of having to build everything up from scratch.
- Having an artist: Definitely enables the team to work on the game while assets are being created, instead of having to be made during or after development where issues can arise.
What went wrong:
- Didn’t sleep enough: All three of us, me especially, thought we could spend the entire night working on the game. We didn’t. I could barely stay awake after literally staying awake for 24 hours, even with an abundance of food, drink and snacks to help us keep our energy.
- Technical issues: While some performance issues were most likely due to some of the original code that was developed for the game, we also had numerous unexplained crashes from Microsoft and SharpDX libraries. This was especially bad when the game crashed unexpectedly with an unhandled exception while judges were looking at our game. This could’ve been one of the reasons why we didn’t get a place in the rankings, but since we were still using the Technical preview, hopefully issues would be ironed out afterwards.
Overall, I rather enjoyed ThreeThingGame. It’s a neat idea for a games jam and everyone at the University of Hull was very enthusiastic and eager to make games, which makes it even more impressive as the University doesn’t have a specialist games course unlike Staffordshire University.
Now it’s back to the Procedural Level Editor and my newest game project Gem Finder, where I’ve already started on new features…
Glow Drop DX and Global Games Jam are Out!
Over the last week, I’ve technically had to prepare for two releases, and guess what? Both games are out, and I’ve updated the game menu to include links to them! It’s pretty cool how both games were originally made at 48 hour game jams, and both are being updated as we speak. Feel free to read on about my experiences with Global Games Jam this year, and try out these two releases as soon as possible, all feedback is awesome!
Glow Drop DX
We Are Surrounded
Ludum Dare Results Comparison
So the results are in! So awesome to see the final scores and see what games got in overall, and see where everyone else’s results are on the rankings. Since this is my third successful Ludum Dare, I thought I’d try a little comparing to see how much I did better (or worse) at this point. Then for future Ludum Dare entries I can then add in those results and probably build a chart to see my progress.
The Results
Ludum Dare 27 (Ten Seconds) – 10 Second Paper Flight
Ludum Dare 29 (Beneath the Surface) – Under Maintenance
Ludum Dare 31 (Entire Game on One Screen) – Glow Drop
My Comments
So while the ranking don’t appear to have changed, the average score for most categories has improved. The only category to have gone down considerably over the three LDs was Humor, although in fairness since my game wasn’t intended to have humour so I could’ve omitted the category. I’m also one of the people that got 100% coolness which is an awesome surprise, it means I’m (technically) listed on the results page. At the moment I’m balancing University work and turning Glow Drop into an Android and Windows Phone release as Glow Drop DX. So hopefully you might see more from me in the future?
GAMEPOPPER 