Thursday, 28 October 2010

Yarrrr!!! and stuff...

Ok, so the mini mini project was actually completed on time, however there were a few slight changes to what I had originally planned. Because I always want to do one better than myself (yes you read that right, I compete with myself...) I decided to create a completely new game somehow related to the school rather than remaking something I new I could already do.
When I came up with this idea I thought I had maybe an entire week to get things done. However, work was  super busy making me incredibly tired and/or ill, turning my week into a mere 2 days. (I like a challenge but considering my "I feel dead" state, I didn't really want to make an entirely new game in my spare time). But I kinda shrugged it off and came up with this:
The title screen uses 3D models/water (the water moves/reflects and looks very cool)

The game screen is 2D (the water still moves and still looks cool). Check it out, my particle engine is in there ;)

 There's also a funky character selection screen that I won't show because it uses actual people who I modified to look like pirates. I'm not sure they would appreciate me putting those pictures on the internet...
Considering it took a grand total of 12 hours over the course of 2 days, there's a considerable amount of stuff in this "mini" project. It's also given me some insight into some problems I'm gonna have with water in the RPG...fun times.

Speaking of the RPG, I'm currently working on scaling objects. This is a bit tricky considering that an object is made out of many tiles that have been "placed" in a specific position to create the illusion of it being a complete object. Each tile must be scaled and moved appropriately depending on it's position and size. Good fun...

But yeh, I'm still going folks

Thursday, 14 October 2010

Silence...

You may have noticed I've not updated for a while. This is actually due to the fact I have nothing to update you with! Parental units have gone to Cyprus for 2 weeks, leaving me with an empty house! This means loud music and access to the TV! So you can imagine why I haven't been doing much work in this time ;)

Though, for a small change of pace I'll be updating you on a mini mini mini project I'll be working on. I've been asked to give a presentation to year 6 about careers in the game industry. Out of curiosity I was asked "is there anything you've made that we can run in the background?"

To which I replied "nothing really appropriate...I made space invaders, but instead of there being space invaders there were birds, and instead of them shooting you they were shitting on you."
"Oh, they'll love that!"

...right! ok then! time to dig out the old uni code and polish it up a bit! Hopefully you'll also see a nifty presentation posted here as well. This is to be done by Thursday next week, so stay tuned!

Wednesday, 6 October 2010

Fills me with confidence

I really should stop punning with my blog titles...
Well if you haven't figured it out from that, I've implemented a 'fill' function that lets you fill the map with a certain object. As an example and to show off some upcoming shiny's I selected a grass object 1x1 tiles's in size and used the fill function to fill the entire map (size in pixels can be seen in the bottom right) with that grass object

Click to enlarge

The GUI will more than likely be changed once the bulk of coding is done but you can see in the lower right some things that have already been implemented (Map resizing, Map preview draw methods, Adding and removing additional layers and being able to set the collision map)

The whole thing is nearly finished, just a few things left on my to do list and unless I think of things to add along the way, these should be the last! Check it out:

The additional option of using a tile based collision system instead of texture based
Water effects (water effects will be applied to a selected region/s of the map)
Atmosphere effects (day/night/fog)
Weather effects (rain/snow/storm)
Managing multiple maps in one project (that's what the big white box at the bottom is for)
Draw to rectangle (like the fill function, but only fills a region specified by the user)
Map Saving/Loading
Eraser and undo functions

Tuesday, 5 October 2010

In between work and play

Ooooo! look! an update!
That's right folks, in between work and Fifa and FF14 I have salvaged some time to do some more stuff on the map maker. Collision maps can now be applied to normal maps. I've not done the logic behind it yet cus I've not started to implement the live testing phase yet. By that I mean you cab have a character walking around the map even as you build it. Ideal for testing collisions and occlusions and generally getting the feel of a map. I've also implemented a few drawing options for maps such as:
being able to draw the entire map to a specified opacity
being able to draw the entire map to semi transparency, except the layer you are currently working on which is drawn at full opacity
being able to draw the entire map at full opacity, representing a preview of what it will look like in game.

Speaking of which, I've also made a few changes to the map so that there can be an infinite number of layers. I can't see any immediate use for more than 2 layers, but just in case, the option is in there. It's just a case of implementing the GUI for all these things. That and saving of course. Not a lot of use if we can't save a map...