I never thought I'd actually get sick of talking about new and sexier Macs, but I've spent almost the entire day about this stuff.
I was spending time at work checking out the Apple Discussions page to get ready to buy my new Macbook Pro, and answering a couple GDNet threads here and there. Then I came home and got Elcrazon to try out the new Glow demo on his Macbook Pro (which, under emulation, gets approximately 4X the frames per second as my Powerbook gets running it native ). Now there's a new thread in the Lounge for me to answer questions about the product lineup.
On top of all that, I added a couple extra keys to Glow's control scheme to allow users with only one mouse button to use the "run towards cursor" method more effectively. It plays a lot like a Nintendo DS game when I use my laptop touchpad, which is not altogether bad.
Apple should probably start paying me money. Hell, the least they could do is take some more money off the Macbook Pro I'm replacing this Powerbook with next week.
So now you can step on conversation tiles and trigger them. Which is one step closer to having a plot. It's quite nice, in fact, though I dread having to write up all of the game's plot without sounding hokey. I wonder what William Gibson's time costs for a half hour of conversation fun...
I didn't get any work done on Glow last night because I'm starting to run out of 10-minute tasks (especially implementing the entire AI). Perhaps I'll actually write the enemy definitions tonight and try to implement the AI as well.
I've seeded a Windows build of Glow to a few people, but it's missing several features. Good news: SHGetSpecialFolder path even works on Evil Steve's screwed up PC.
Looking forward to doing AI, I just have to get over that initial hump and do some performance testing with dozens of NPCs. Maybe I'll just polish the editor and static entities some more for the remainder of this week.
Edit#1: You can lay actors in the editor and save them. This was a surprising amount of work.
I have pathfinding working in Glow! I can now order little NPCs around to head to my current location through the map, and they even slide on walls and such to try and make it around tough corners. It really looks awesome.
I got the newest build up and running on Windows, and goddamn is it ever sweet. I still have to fix the text input bugs.
But other than that, it seems to be pretty good; I've fixed a lot of bugs in the trunk by finding them on Windows. For some reason DevC++ can't find SHGetSpecialFolderPath so I've hacked it in for now.
I'll do another Windows release when the testbed doesn't have more crazy invisible entities.
You can place items in the editor now. This effectively turns the editor into a very cool game creation system; eventually I'll have to add an "edit" tool for fine adjustment of the item.
But until then -- it looks pretty awesome. I can't wait to get actor placement in.
The editor now supports multiple levels, and I fixed a bug with the changelevel entity loading and dropping. So now the editor is stupendously kickass, and all it needs is actor adding and saving support before it can fully work.
Then I need to get started on improving the various actors and adding their sprites to the game (zombie, cop zombie, Hunter, defense robot, bosses) so I can get on with making the game super awesome. I think my last "hurdle" is AI. I'm surprised the game actually finished this quickly.
I'm really damned close to the content-production phase. The game was supposed to be done for Thursday but I guess that won't be done.
Bit of a rant today based on some moderations I've been overseeing...
Lately, I've noticed a couple of GDNet users being excessively secretive. Insanely possessive at times. This honestly always surprises me when it comes up, because I consider the indie gaming land (and particularly GameDev) to be an exceptionally open place about trading information about your game and technology. What really surprises me is that these users are being possessive about something that hardly matters: their stories and ideas. Most of the time, these stories or ideas already are stealing from another idea, using either our massive cultural bank of stories (Beowulf and Grendel) or genres (Doom, Final Fantasy). Hell, my game is set in an underground science lab besieged by zombies.
Compare this to the many lively and informal technical discussions you can see on GDNet. I share my technical guts with almost anyone. EDI does too. I'm not trying to get FSF-liberal here, but even those of us who are selling products are open and accessible about it. Is it a function of sheer age, of giving back to the community after so many years of posting frantically to the OpenGL forum asking "WHY THE HELL DO I HAVE WHITE CRACKS IN EVERYTHING?!?!"? The guys from Professor Fizzwizzle were posting some of their marketing research and buy-in numbers for various platforms. How does that help them?
It's just nuts seeing these new users come in here and act violently protective of a simplistic idea, even refusing to post it publicly so potential team members can get excited and join in. I wish I knew why there were such a disparity between the sharing of the super hard, differentiating technical stuff and the bitter protective secrecy of the fluff. I'm willing to chalk it up to inexperience, but we should work harder to drill it into these newbies' heads that the fluff is not the journey. Nor is it bankable. And it certainly isn't worth making enemies over.
There is an enormous culture shock between the self-deprecating, technically brilliant GDNet "journal" squad and the overly-serious, technically-and-physically-immature "ideas are life" crowd. Moderating IOTD has made me somewhat of an unofficial cheerleader for the various great projects that are kicking around here -- I've never been so enthusiastic to post on GDNet -- and I can see a problem brewing. Maybe this is why we have the one-post wonders that slam down their work request and leave when the going gets rough. At the very least, the pro-on-newbie flaming in Help Wanted was more or less culled a few months ago -- that was even more poisonous for producing actually functional newbies. I wish I knew how to fix this culture shock for good.
Anyway, just a bit of a rant for today. I'd like to see what you guys have to think -- why does this culture shock exist? How can we fix it?
You can now place entities by name, and provide them with special arguments. I'd imagine this makes my life a lot easier in the building-content department. I also have a tiny pointer that shows you exactly where you are about to place things, rather than my tile-based red pointer.
Next up, making gibs more meaty. And making the editor actually save the entire bag of crap properly so I can start building actual maps.
So I've been working on Glow (again). I've just been adding save/load stuff for entities and items for when you want to save the game and reload it at a future point. This is always my least favourite part of making a game, followed closely by AI, which I will embark upon soon.
Hopefully without Glowboy, a robot Glowman, a cyborg Glowman, alien Glowman, a talking dog, and Goth Glowman.
That was comic book nerd humour for those of you who are also enormous nerds. Those of you who have self-respect, please disregard it.
Anyway, you can die in Glow. And you can respawn at the last checkpoint you encountered. It's starting to come out to be a real game now. Boggle!
Effectively, you can respawn instantly without need for a reload, so monsters you took down before your death will still be dead. You could probably exploit this to make the game way too easy, but I'm convinced that hardcore players will enforce rules about how many times they can die, and besides they'll be going for the speedrun anyway.
Posted - 6/28/2006 8:03:53 PM
). Now there's a new thread in the Lounge for me to answer questions about the product lineup.
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