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I apologize for the absence, Mike has been out of town and I haven't had much to report other than disasters.
I keep all of the game assets on an external drive that is connected to my development server; this makes them easily accessible from anywhere. However, I had an issue the week before last with files disappearing momentarily, most notably video and audio files (mainly because I use those for an extended period of time.) I've backed everything up, but I'm not sure how to move forward as neither the server nor the drive seem to have any issues. I was thinking it was a connector issue, but I had no issues with it connected directly to my laptop; now I'm thinking it may be a network issue.
Then this last week I spent most of my time over at my mother's house due to an infestation of yellow jackets. We're back home now and it is mostly dealt with (I hope), but I didn't get much done as I was running back and forth between my house, my parents' and the store.
This last weekend was not much better. I spent most of my time trying to track down an error that was being caused by MonoGame. Basically every now and then the game just won't run, it throws an error about failing to find the entry point for one of the opengl DLLs. This is just one of a long list of issues I've had with the library, so I'm moving away from it; playing around with SFML at the moment to see how well that works. I originally chose MonoGame as I wanted easy cross platform, but the cost to develop using C# on Android is just getting to high at this point ($1000USD per year, per platform, per developer just so that I can use it with Visual Studio? No thanks.) This is another reason I'm looking at SFML, they have bindings for C# and Java, so it should be easy enough to have two separate builds. We're having a meeting today to discuss the alternatives though.
Top Down Shooter Engine
I was able to get the TDS engine I created for LD27 converted over to MonoGame (from XNA) and got it updated to use our core libraries. This was pretty painless; I've written the code a lot of times, but it changes each time and it is usually just enough to make it a PITA when I try to convert it. There is still a ton of features that it needs, but it is a pretty good starting point. The first thing I'm going to work on is adding thinner walls and collision detection that will work with that.
Seeking Imagination Battle Arena
I fell behind on development for SIBA because I was trying to make the two engines the same since SIBA is supposed to be the prototype for Seeking Imagination. As you can imagine, this doesn't work very well. While they both have the same core mechanics, the engines themselves are very much different - SI is a singleplayer action RPG, SIBA is a multiplayer action arcade game (with RPG elements); SI has saving and loading, SIBA does not; etc. So, going forward I am focusing on SIBA and once I'm done I'll fork the code and alter it for SI.
I did manage to get melee combat in; I need to update the code so that it (and activation) takes the player's facing into consideration. Once I have some AI brains completed I'll post a video showing off the combat.
Lastly, I completed the implementation of a new feature - item instancing. We added this as we want to allow customization of items (think enchanting or sockets.)
Game Jolt Integration
I've mentioned Game Jolt before, but I haven't really been using it. Back in February I created an open source API on CodePlex (gamejolt.codeplex.com) and I've now completely integrated it with our base library. The API provides simple solutions for game news (new DLC, kickstarter, etc) and cloud saves at the moment, if I think of anything else I will be adding them as I go. Here is a screenshot of the login screen and trophy screen running in Young Minds Memory Game:
Obviously the project will be changing shortly, depending on which library we decide to go with.
Indie Spotlight
We chose our first Indie Spotlight entry - Steam Marines. You can find out more information about the game on our spotlight page. It's a great game and I highly recommend checking it out.
We have chosen the game for our second Indie Spotlight, but we plan on continuing to do them, so if you'd like to be featured on our front page, our Facebook, our Indie Spotlight page, our weekly update video and have a permanent project page on our website then let me know. It doesn't have to be a specific platform (though we are limited to recording Windows only at the moment) nor does it have to be free. We'll also update the page whenever you'd like; so if you add DLC/expansion packs, start a Kickstarter, etc you can just send us an email and we'll help spread the word.
Facebook Contest
Our Facebook contest is still going on (facebook.com/bealssoftware); we're just 15 likes away from our first drawing. So let your friends know to get in now for the best chance to win. You can find the rules in this Facebook post.
I've rambled on enough today; if I missed anything I'll cover it in next week's post. Thanks for stopping in and have a great day!
