December 03, 2009
Click the image to play with this one.
This is my first go at the "Propagation" portion of the UnOfficial Four Elements Contest. Not complicated; click and drag your mouse around the bitmap and watch the particles spawn and flow downhill.
Simple mechanic: each particle sniffs each of the eight pixel…
November 20, 2009
I haven't had much time to code this past week, but I have thought quite a bit about how the different parts of the game will fir together. Right now I am sorting out the logic of re-creating a biosphere from scratch, and how the elements of propagation and evolution will fit in. Research has led m…
November 10, 2009
Wow, has it been a long time since I posted here.
The Unofficial Four Elements Contest ("UFEC") brought me out of hibernation, and has inspired me to put together a casual game.
Here are the specs, thus far:
Title: Thaw
Platforms: PC/Mac/Linux
Technology: Adobe Flash
Requirements: Flash Player 10, for we…
The Unofficial Four Elements Contest ("UFEC") brought me out of hibernation, and has inspired me to put together a casual game.
Here are the specs, thus far:
Title: Thaw
Platforms: PC/Mac/Linux
Technology: Adobe Flash
Requirements: Flash Player 10, for we…
March 26, 2009
After some self-enforced exile from the game dev world, I am diving back in. After some extremely helpful feedback over at the Kongregate community I am working on TriGaVoid 1.5, which will be more of a professional effort and include things like achievements, power-ups, and lots and lots of optimi…
January 26, 2009
Quick note: I just uploaded a new tutorial to Kongregate. This one explains - with code - the formulae I used to build the Bad Guys in my game TriGaVoid.
The code I used is actually about seven years old. Back when I was first learning javascript and "Dynamic" HTML, I tried to reproduce some…
The code I used is actually about seven years old. Back when I was first learning javascript and "Dynamic" HTML, I tried to reproduce some…
January 16, 2009
While I am on a roll I will post a link to my first published Flash tutorial: Creating Textures using Perlin Noise and the Threshold Function in Actionscript.
Though it is in Actionscript, the ideas presented should carry over easily enough to any language. Enjoy!
January 13, 2009
Hello, everyone. Long time no see! Suffice to say, the final quarter of 2008 treated me very poorly in all aspects of my life.
But that is not important now: I am here to announce the launch of my first game over at Kongregate: TriGaVoid! I used many of the lessons I learned here about simple/casual…
But that is not important now: I am here to announce the launch of my first game over at Kongregate: TriGaVoid! I used many of the lessons I learned here about simple/casual…
November 02, 2008
Click here to see the interactive version.
Source code here.
It took a little longer than I thought, and I am not entirely sure what specific thing I did which made things work right, but things are working right.
Now that I have the last graphic treatment in place I am going to take a few days away f…
October 30, 2008
I took a short break from working on the game engine to play around with a mash-up of Perlin Noise-based landscapes, and Langton's Ants.
Click here for the single color version.
Click here for the three color version.
In other news, I figured out how to apply simple shading to the landscape in the ti…
October 27, 2008
Click here to play with the prototype.
This latest update includes an event which fires every time the player moves to a new tile on the world map. Right now it returns the x and y coordinates and the elevation (based on color) of the current tile. Using that information, I will be able to set up a …
October 20, 2008
Click here to see the live version. (When will we be able to embed Flash movies in our posts?!?)
This is a quick update to the tile-based game engine experiments of months past. This update includes the procedural generation of individual tile textures. Each texture is the same, but I have colored t…
October 16, 2008
Click here to play with the prototype.
I have just updated the Gyruss clone to make it run more consistently across a wide variety of browser/platform combinations, and also to allow for more intense action if need be. I used this technique from 8-Bit Rocket, and in my linked prototype the game runs…
September 19, 2008
Click here to play.
Another week gone by, and a few updates have been made. Nothing too earth-shaking this time, just a graphic update: A rotating background. This was entirely too difficult to implement, or I was vastly over-thinking the problem. Probably the latter.
Because I am blitting several bi…
September 15, 2008
I just posted an update to the Gyruss clone. It includes one cosmetic change - the color palette of the background - and some experiments around how power-ups will work.
On the inside, I change how the shots move, to give them the ability to track around the center when fired at an angle. This also …
August 27, 2008
(click the image to play).
I suppose it was inevitable, but I combined the bitmap navigator functionality from the earlier experiments with the maze generator from a few days ago, and now I have an infinite variety of mazes which can be flown over. I haven't implemented wall/collision detection yet,…
August 22, 2008
(click the screen-shot play)
In my research into procedurally/randomly/runtime generating assets for Flash, I discovered the vast world of maze generator algorithms. And lo and behold, the Wikipedia had some example code, written in Java. It took me about three hours to translate it into Actionscrip…
August 19, 2008
(click the image to play)
Encouraging improvements! I debugged a couple of things, removed a lot of extraneous code, and added the beginnings of keeping score.
I think I will go for an underwater theme for this game - more of a vortex than a space warp feel. I see much work learning how to make pixel…
August 12, 2008
My work on the tile games led me to do some experimenting, and now I have the background for my Gyruss Clone. Click the image to see it in action
I was playing around with the Perlin Noise generation functionality in Flash, and co-incidentally came across a polar distortion class at BIT-101. I took …
July 31, 2008
Click the image to see it in action.
So: What is going on here? To create the terrain, I am doing the following:
- using Perlin Noise to create a grayscale terrain map, 150px by 150px.
- using the Gradient tool in Flash to create a palette map, 256px by 1px
- going through the terrain map, one color at…
July 28, 2008
I have just posted the second iteration of my tile engine experiment. Click the image to see it in action.
I kind of like where this is headed; the "world" bitmap is 150px x 150px. Each tile in the local bitmap is 40px x 40px. Since the player moves within the local area, but by pixels, that means t…
July 07, 2008
In the absence of a game contest to enter and not complete, I am working on a tile engine in AS3, which hopefully can serve as the base for any games I actually get into creating, and thus saving me the effort of having to build a game engine in addition to building a game. The first iteration can …
February 28, 2008
The latest build of the game is here. Click here to open the game in your browser.
The pixellated, blobby thing in the middle of the screen is the intersection of two Perlin bitmaps.
One contains information for the amount of salt available on a given chunk of land. The brighter the pixel, the more …
The pixellated, blobby thing in the middle of the screen is the intersection of two Perlin bitmaps.
One contains information for the amount of salt available on a given chunk of land. The brighter the pixel, the more …
February 23, 2008
I took a little time last night to explore the world of Creative Commons music, and found the Wikimedia Commons, wherein there is much to be had.
At the moment (though I will most likely change my mind), this is the score to my game.
One small sticking point, easily overcome: Flash cannot do anything…
At the moment (though I will most likely change my mind), this is the score to my game.
One small sticking point, easily overcome: Flash cannot do anything…
February 21, 2008
Debugging a small problem led me to have to institute a new feature.
Each round in my game, a certain number of resources are used for upkeep of the current populace of the hovel/hamlet/village. The game starts at the "end" of round 0, which means that at the end of Round 1, the upkeep costs for Rou…
Each round in my game, a certain number of resources are used for upkeep of the current populace of the hovel/hamlet/village. The game starts at the "end" of round 0, which means that at the end of Round 1, the upkeep costs for Rou…
February 20, 2008
..and boy, are my arms tired!
It seems I live in Interesting Times. The several hour a week I had hoped to devote to my 4E6 entry since the holidays seem to have dried up and blown away. Or more accurately, been crushed under a huge pile of ice and darkness. Here in West Michigan we have seen the su…
It seems I live in Interesting Times. The several hour a week I had hoped to devote to my 4E6 entry since the holidays seem to have dried up and blown away. Or more accurately, been crushed under a huge pile of ice and darkness. Here in West Michigan we have seen the su…
December 27, 2007
I have spent the past couple of weeks (off and on) beating my head against the last logical issue in my game. Here is the breakdown:
o Village population is the sum of every inhabitant in the village.
o Type "villager" is an un-assigned NPC which has minimal impact on production and consumption of go…
o Village population is the sum of every inhabitant in the village.
o Type "villager" is an un-assigned NPC which has minimal impact on production and consumption of go…
December 10, 2007
I just posted the first prototype of "A Dry Harvest" here. Flash 9 required.
Not a lot to see yet. Most of my work has been under the hood, and I have taken the opportunity to learn a lot about best programming practices. Of course, this has distracted me from actually making progress on the game, s…
Not a lot to see yet. Most of my work has been under the hood, and I have taken the opportunity to learn a lot about best programming practices. Of course, this has distracted me from actually making progress on the game, s…
December 03, 2007
I have been playing around with making a type of structure document for my game (Now officially titled A Dry Harvest). Much of what I have come up with is heavily influenced by Inform 7, which, even if you never use it to create a game, is a fantastic tool to use for organizing your thoughts.
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November 27, 2007
Work is progressing on The Dry White Harvest - which I am considering renaming "A Dry Harvest", just because it rolls of the tongue better and, well, salt isn't necessarily (or even usually) white.
I have roughed in the title screen and instructions panel, and am currently building out the inventory…
I have roughed in the title screen and instructions panel, and am currently building out the inventory…
November 14, 2007
Here is the first rudimentary prototype. Mousing over a button will highlight the dependencies (e.g. ancestors in the tech tree) of the subject of that button.
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