Monday 18 April 2011

Bought an iphone 4 recently

I did this mainly to explore the possibility of app store as it's very alluring to do a game for it, even tho the biggest problem for this platform that I see is the lack of any physical buttons for controls as the type of game I'd like to do really wants buttons instead of a touchscreen. Anyway, the phone is nice and very accessible with very impresive display. It took a few days to get used to it and learnt how to control it as this is my first apple piece of hardware ever.

Saturday 9 April 2011

Learning classes

Not much of an visible update, I was learning classes recently and it was quite overwhelming at first and now I'm trying to rewrite the code using them as I had none in my program, heh and quickly understood that I'm not going anywhere without them. Especially when I tried to do more inteligent enemies than the current placeholders that I have in my code.
If anybody knows any good links/video/tutorials on classes I think I could still use more :) but I'm slowly getting into it... it's just not a simple subject to understand after a week of learning, it's more complex and it needs some time to practice.

Wednesday 30 March 2011

Just two sprites.

Just 2 my sprites I did earlier but haven't used them anywhere yet. Would like to use the second one somewhere as I like the expression :-)

Tuesday 29 March 2011

How I did the graphics.

A few people asked me how I did the graphics in my last video.

It's actually quite simple, First I took a screenshot from my tilemap from the running game and pasted it to photoshop. It looked like this:
When I had this in photoshop I just drew my graphics on top of this. I used only 4 colours so it didn't take that long. I mostly did it just for the test, how it would look like instead of just repeating tile patterns. When I finished it was like this:
I was quite happy with it, but I still thought I could add one more layer below, so I drew separate layer with the stuff that goes below:
then I simply rendered these pictures over or below my charater in the game and that's it :-) simple and it does look like something I'm after.. It will need some fine tuning and adding more details later but for now I'm quite happy with the outcome.

Sunday 27 March 2011

The game - 7 weeks, graphics test


Hello world!
This is my third video about making my little game and (hopefully) learning some c++ on the way.

There has been a lot of progress recently,
mainly the graphics layer which I did to test of the style how the game could look like.
Next there is an ability to read signs and interact/chat with items/enemies,
then there are destroyable blocks which (are horibly implemented, but works) can be shot with your weapon, and ofcourse I made player start without the weapon so you need to find and pick up the weapon first before you can use it.
Then we have a "Main menu" and a "Pause menu" from which you can quit the game.
and yes we have first signs of water... it's just a graphics for now, it does nothing water should do, but I still don't know what would be the best way how to do water.. hmm, need to think a lot more for longer period to figure it out somehow :3

anyway there are bugs, mostly the whole collision detection system is one big bug -_- that I don't like..

and yes I almost forgot, I made this into a release if somebody would want to give it a try... (^_^)b here you go: link is in the youtube video

any comments/critique/hints/hate mail welcome...

BTW you can toggle thru debug modes with 'W'
there are 5 modes:
first just display some crap on top,
second will show you the collision tiles,
third will show the bounding boxes for player collision detection,
fourth will make you fly and
fifth will swich off the collisions so you can fly thru walls.

How to implement slopes!


Second video from my attempt to learn c++
This time I tried to implement slopes!

Something so trivial looking like slopes is actually pretty tricky task to do... my brain almost exploded till I finally figured it out how to do it :3

I googled and googled and found a way with an array thingy attached to each slope tile telling how much should push the hero upwards but that sounded like a pretty over-complicated way to make an array for each slope tile so I went my own way and simply calculated how far is my characted inside of the slope tile on X axis, then simply adjusted Y axis by the same amount :D ...it was working for 45 degree slopes, then for 22.5 ones I just divided that amount by 2

another byproduct with this method was that my heroine was snaped to the slopes like a magnet as soon as she entered the tile with a slope haha.. so I had to figure out the way how she can un-snap to be able to move freely and jump from the tiles and not be locked to it like a train to rails

I finally managed to solve that as well, there are still some issues and the slope tiles can't be touched from the bottom and from the sides or bad things will happen -_-
Only the 45 degree ones can be touched from the sides like you can see in the video in the top right part of the map.. and it took some huge effort to be able to do that, heh.. but my brain gave up on the rest xD

The whole code is almost 1000 lines by now

My first version of my game!

After my first 2 weeks of c++ experience and my epic tictactoe program I have dicovered HGE (Haaf's Game Engine) and decided to give it a go as it looked as something very easy for somebody who knows very little about windows programming and started learning it... here is the outcome after another 2-3 weeks of work

(more info in describtion of the video for those especially interested)

Saturday 26 March 2011

My first windows application!

After first week learning the basic in the console mostly from here http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/ I got bored and decided to move to my first window program. To open a window is not an easy task! But I found some good youtube tutorials from xoax here http://www.youtube.com/user/xoaxdotnet and in about 2 weeks time total from the beginning I was able to get out this:
Simple tic tac toe based on one of those tutorial from youtube, but mostly learning how to open a window and how to add menu items, draw stuff on screen, open additional windows etc. :-)

Let's learn c++ to make a game!

I've started learning c++ early this year so I thought it might be a good idea to set up a blog to document my progress.