Bogie Weapons and the return of Reindeer Rearing

Hello, I hope you had a great November. My November was very productive. I had a solid week off from work due to the holiday and I dedicated most of that time to working on various projects!

Bogie is churning along nice and steady. I continue to bash away at physics to get them as consistent and predictable as possible. I was able to boil down the aircraft flight model into several easily modifieable and understandable tables and the results are very pleasing. The underlying math for the flight model is not likely to change dramatically from here on.

After I got the flight model in a useable position I started playing with weapons. I now have working machine guns and guided missiles, all weapon code is still rather early though and likely to change alot.

I was able to implement asynchonous loading and loading screens with progress bars! This was a first for me so I am pretty happy to discover how simple it could be.

December is here, and that means I decided to revisit Reindeer Rearing. I wound up leaving RR in it's broken state 2 years ago when I realized I was trying to build on top of a broken base. I decided to give the project a complete re-write while using the assets I had already created. Hopefully I can have this finished before Christmas.

That's all for my November update. I apologize for the lack of pictures but nearly everything I have finished is either completely behind the scenes or just being drawn with debug lines atm. I will do my best to have some screenshots for my next update!

Physics are fun! Also Ludum Dare 45

Hello everyone, I hope you're having a fun Halloween time! I've spent most of the last few weeks working on costumes for the family, but I've also managed to squeeze in some programming, and even another fun project that my wife suggested and is co-producing!

Early this month was Ludum Dare 45! I thoroughly enjoy attempting this jam and I was looking forward to giving it another run. The theme was "Start with nothing" and I set a restriction to NOT make another 2d sidescroller action game. Instead I started with the idea "Open a shop in a back alley as a homeless person." I do wish to take a moment and say I recognize the sensitivity of this topic. Many cities in the US are facing a major problem with homelessness, and I strongly feel the position of many citizens and governments are actively making the situation worse. This helped shape the tone of my game to focus on the desperation of such a situation.


Every morning random garbage spawns in 2 back alleys. You must collect this garbage and attempt to talk to people to find anyone willing to give you money in exchange for this garbage. "One man's garbage is another mans treasure." If you are unable to raise $10 by nightfall you will not have enough money for food and water, and will not survive the night. To make things even harder every item is made up of a grid which takes up space in your inventory. Your inventory is pathetically small at 2x5, with items being 1x1, 1x2, 2x1 or 2x2 in size.

Just because you manage to fit an item in your jacket doesn't mean you'll be able to sell it. People are not willing to stop and chat with a homeless person and will largely ignore you. If you don't have exactly what someone wants, when they want it they'll continue on their way and get the item from somewhere else.

This game took me right up to the deadline to finish and is missing many features I had hoped to implement. That said if you are interested I have posted a playable version to Itch and the source code is available on Github.

I've been really focused on working through physics and collisions for Project Bogie. I know I want rather large environments and a system that integrates well with my entity-data structure, so I figured I could tackle most of the collisions from scratch. This is working pretty much as well as I had hoped, with some parts going very smoothly and others being kind of a pain, but progress is being made every week and I can't complain about that!

The flight physics I want to try are loosely based off real aerodynamic lift models. I am boiling the flight dynamics I wish to see in each aircraft into as few tables as possible. I am not trying to make a simulator so everything is being focused on feel.

I should note that I do not plan on including any real world vehicles. Everything will be fictional and slightly futuristic. I find the aesthetic for Crimson Skies very appealing.

Collisions are causing a bit of a headache. Object to object collisions were surprisingly straight forward to implement and I am very happy with the results. Terrain is currently problematic and I have gone through several iterations to find what works the best. I do not need incredibly accurate terrain collisions to get a functional prototype working, I do need one that works consistently. This is likely going to be my focus for the next week or so.

Until next time!

Another Hold, Another New Venture

Game design is hard, solo game design is even harder. Sometimes you start with the greatest ideas and rush in to happily create what you think is awesome. Sometimes you get 80% of the way to a playable prototype and realize that awesome idea is really just some sparkly mud.

I'm putting Ceres on hold (probably indefinitely) since after getting as far as I did, I realized it was just plain not fun.

Now I'm working on another project under the name "Bogie" for now. This is a genre I've always wanted to try making a game for! As of writing this I don't have much more than cubes flying around in what feels like the direction I hope to take the project, but I'm also tackling some engine level problems that I've had crop up in previous projects. This is making for a much slower start than on Gothic or Ceres, but the end result will be several new libraries I will be able to re-use in the future which are solid and well tested.

Sometimes life hands you lemons, other times you try to grow lemons and realize you planted a thorn bush. I know I haven't had a playable project in awhile, but that's ok. Every day I'm working to make the next playable thing the best playable thing I can make!

Thanks for coming by and reading. If you're looking for something fun to do there are some playable games linked on the right, or check out my "Interested in making games?" section and try making something fun!