So I had originally hoped to have Spooky finished by Halloween. That didn't happen. I've actually become quiet invested in making a suite of 2d platforming tools within JME which has resulted in Spooky taking a LOT longer than originally anticipated, and also means the scope of Spooky is probably getting bigger than originally planned as well. Making games is fun!
I have the foundation for a much more robust Sprite system than I've done before, and I've implemented Tile Maps with a custom collision system that is looking very promising. The platforming aspects of Spooky are something I've wanted to do in games for a long time, but I always used pre-made physics systems. Using physics is great for some games, but in games where you want more deterministic responses to collisions and the environment they tend to make simple things more difficult. Hopefully this makes Spooky's controls much tighter and more responsive than Dungeon Hordes were.
The month of November will likely not see any major updates to Gothic as I had expressed last time. I still really want to sit down and work through all my poorly realized net code and incomplete understanding of ES systems to make Gothic the game it deserves to be. For now it has been moved from "Probably in November" to "Maybe in January". Not the best news but that's where it's at.
Reindeer Rearing will still very likely see updates come December. A large amount of work I am doing for Spooky should be directly applicable to Reindeer Rearing. I'm honestly excited about the chance to clean things up and really fix some of the more game breaking bugs I had left due to time constraints. (Reindeer Rearing was originally made for a Jam).
My current schedule looks something like this: Continue working on Spooky with the hopes of getting a vertical slice level by the end of the month. Once December starts wherever I am at with Spooky will go on hold until I can at least clean up Reindeer Rearing and tackle some of the bigger bugs as well as re-do the sprite system to be in line with Spooky's sprite system. Once RR has seen enough polish to warrant another update, go back to Spooky.
Next update will have some screenshots no matter how ugly they are!
Showing posts with label Gothic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gothic. Show all posts
Sunday, November 4, 2018
Thursday, October 4, 2018
A Scheduling Update
Hello again! it's been a couple of months so I figured I should make a post saying what I've been up to and my current road map.
First off, I disappeared again after getting another job. Finding good ones is hard, but this one will likely stick for awhile. My hours are a lot better and I have had a LOT more time to work on things, of course I also have my kid, so that's where a lot of that time went!
I also built a new computer from scratch. This was a much needed upgrade though it did result in a couple of weeks where I didn't have access to my usual desktop environment. It also lead to me switching from Windows to Linux. I still have a copy of Windows 10 that I mostly use for playing games, I am about 90% on Linux Mint now. This means I have less distractions since most games are a reboot away so I can focus on tasks better.
I've been working on my programming projects so here's the quick rundown:
Project Dawn (from WAY back when I first tried making a game in unity) has been re-booted entirely and I've actually made a lot of progress. It's a 3rd person spaceship game somewhere in between the X games and EVE Online. I probably won't mention more than that for a long time since that's a very large project and even though I've been burning through my checklist it's still a very long ways from being playable.
Sheep Tutorial is kind of on hiatus for now. I lost some of my source files when I transferred (an issue with getting Linux to play nice with ntfs file systems caused by my relative lack of Linux experience) but it's not abandoned, just waiting for a long weekend where I can sit down and get back up to speed.
For the month of October I am working on a project called Spooky! It's planned to be a 2d platformer I am planning to launch on October 31st. More info will come as I make progress worth showing.
If all goes well with Spooky and I get relatively close to my release without any major issues, November will be dedicated to going back and really re-working Gothic. I've noticed it's probably my highest trafficked project and I really sort of dumped it without giving it a proper round of polish. I won't make any major promises outside of cleaning up the UI and re-working alot of systems that were largely hacked together.
Lastly, December will be Reindeer Rearing's month of love. I plan on thoroughly re-working it's systems and giving it a solid round of polish it definitely deserves.
Well that's pretty much all I have for right now. I hope to have some screenshots and better news to share shortly!
First off, I disappeared again after getting another job. Finding good ones is hard, but this one will likely stick for awhile. My hours are a lot better and I have had a LOT more time to work on things, of course I also have my kid, so that's where a lot of that time went!
I also built a new computer from scratch. This was a much needed upgrade though it did result in a couple of weeks where I didn't have access to my usual desktop environment. It also lead to me switching from Windows to Linux. I still have a copy of Windows 10 that I mostly use for playing games, I am about 90% on Linux Mint now. This means I have less distractions since most games are a reboot away so I can focus on tasks better.
I've been working on my programming projects so here's the quick rundown:
Project Dawn (from WAY back when I first tried making a game in unity) has been re-booted entirely and I've actually made a lot of progress. It's a 3rd person spaceship game somewhere in between the X games and EVE Online. I probably won't mention more than that for a long time since that's a very large project and even though I've been burning through my checklist it's still a very long ways from being playable.
Sheep Tutorial is kind of on hiatus for now. I lost some of my source files when I transferred (an issue with getting Linux to play nice with ntfs file systems caused by my relative lack of Linux experience) but it's not abandoned, just waiting for a long weekend where I can sit down and get back up to speed.
For the month of October I am working on a project called Spooky! It's planned to be a 2d platformer I am planning to launch on October 31st. More info will come as I make progress worth showing.
If all goes well with Spooky and I get relatively close to my release without any major issues, November will be dedicated to going back and really re-working Gothic. I've noticed it's probably my highest trafficked project and I really sort of dumped it without giving it a proper round of polish. I won't make any major promises outside of cleaning up the UI and re-working alot of systems that were largely hacked together.
Lastly, December will be Reindeer Rearing's month of love. I plan on thoroughly re-working it's systems and giving it a solid round of polish it definitely deserves.
Well that's pretty much all I have for right now. I hope to have some screenshots and better news to share shortly!
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Gothic is out
Gothic is up on Itch.io, for a multiplayer game it does not have a game browser or any easy-join functionality. You'll have to find other players and share ip's and set up port forwarding. There is a single player challenge mode with a castle prefab to see how quickly you can take it down, but the enemy does not return fire.
This project is now on hold until I can get enough support to justify looking into a central server. With a central server it'd be easy to implement a games browser and host games without forwarding ports, but I don't have the means to support one at the moment.
I have another small to medium sized project in the planning phase right now, Project Field. I'll have some more info on that shortly.
If anyone is interested in playing Gothic feel free to comment and I can set up times to have a server hosted on my personal computer. The only map in the game is 2 teams at the moment but each team can have multiple players controlling it! They share resources and units can a lot of fun can be had assigning roles within the teams and coming up with strategies to counter your opponents onslaught.
It is also extremely easy to add new maps or units to the game. Even though the project is officially on hold (kinda like Reindeer Rearing) I might swing around and add a new map or two. If you like making maps for games take a peak in the /assets/ directory (open the .jar with win rar as if it were a zip archive). There is a simple xml detailing the info for a map, and a text file under /assets/Scenes/Maps that you can append with the xml for your map and it will appear as a selectable map in the game. The challenge castles are a regular xml you can open and modify as well, and can be listed in a map as a valid challenge target.
I apologize for Gothic coming out in such a state but I wanted a chance to put the game out there as an early prototype to see if people are interested in this style of game. Single player would be an awesome addition but writing good ai for an rts is difficult and time consuming, especially for a project I am unsure will be played enough to justify the amount of time involved.
This project is now on hold until I can get enough support to justify looking into a central server. With a central server it'd be easy to implement a games browser and host games without forwarding ports, but I don't have the means to support one at the moment.
I have another small to medium sized project in the planning phase right now, Project Field. I'll have some more info on that shortly.
If anyone is interested in playing Gothic feel free to comment and I can set up times to have a server hosted on my personal computer. The only map in the game is 2 teams at the moment but each team can have multiple players controlling it! They share resources and units can a lot of fun can be had assigning roles within the teams and coming up with strategies to counter your opponents onslaught.
It is also extremely easy to add new maps or units to the game. Even though the project is officially on hold (kinda like Reindeer Rearing) I might swing around and add a new map or two. If you like making maps for games take a peak in the /assets/ directory (open the .jar with win rar as if it were a zip archive). There is a simple xml detailing the info for a map, and a text file under /assets/Scenes/Maps that you can append with the xml for your map and it will appear as a selectable map in the game. The challenge castles are a regular xml you can open and modify as well, and can be listed in a map as a valid challenge target.
I apologize for Gothic coming out in such a state but I wanted a chance to put the game out there as an early prototype to see if people are interested in this style of game. Single player would be an awesome addition but writing good ai for an rts is difficult and time consuming, especially for a project I am unsure will be played enough to justify the amount of time involved.
Sunday, February 4, 2018
Project Gothic
Working title: Project Gothic
Defend your keep while you smash your opponents! At the moment I only have multiplayer working. I will upload it as soon as I have a simple "time trial" single player, and I'll eventually add in ai opponents.
This project was a LOT of firsts for me. Building a game for multiplayer from the ground up requires a very different mindset and I hit a lot of roadblocks along the way. I try to rely on as few external libraries as possible to keep the design as clean as possible. I use jMonkey Engine as it's a very good, easily expandable engine based on lwjgl. For the UI I use Lemur GUI which is built from the ground up to work with and resemble jMonkey's scene graph and spatials. This makes adding and modifying ui elements extremely simple. I also use ZayEs Entity-Component system. By following "pure" Entity-component design philosophy I was able to add in complex systems that are very modular in nature, and allowed very easy online integration and I can trouble shoot each system independently. This does come with a memory over-head of storing large numbers of component objects and systems often have similar structures that are kept separate from each other. I feel requiring more memory is worth the trade off of having very distinct systems and components with very few cross contamination.
The assets are very simple assets I threw together quickly to have something playable. I probably won't revisit the assets unless this project gets enough interest.
Well that's all I have for right now. Expect something playable to be uploaded in the next couple of weeks!
Defend your keep while you smash your opponents! At the moment I only have multiplayer working. I will upload it as soon as I have a simple "time trial" single player, and I'll eventually add in ai opponents.
This project was a LOT of firsts for me. Building a game for multiplayer from the ground up requires a very different mindset and I hit a lot of roadblocks along the way. I try to rely on as few external libraries as possible to keep the design as clean as possible. I use jMonkey Engine as it's a very good, easily expandable engine based on lwjgl. For the UI I use Lemur GUI which is built from the ground up to work with and resemble jMonkey's scene graph and spatials. This makes adding and modifying ui elements extremely simple. I also use ZayEs Entity-Component system. By following "pure" Entity-component design philosophy I was able to add in complex systems that are very modular in nature, and allowed very easy online integration and I can trouble shoot each system independently. This does come with a memory over-head of storing large numbers of component objects and systems often have similar structures that are kept separate from each other. I feel requiring more memory is worth the trade off of having very distinct systems and components with very few cross contamination.
The assets are very simple assets I threw together quickly to have something playable. I probably won't revisit the assets unless this project gets enough interest.
Well that's all I have for right now. Expect something playable to be uploaded in the next couple of weeks!
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