Sunday, November 29, 2009

Google Wave

Got the invitation for Google Wave, accepted it so I am on Google Wave as simplegoogly@googlewave.com, still some tweaking is left, I can't find a workable extension to post to blogger, if anyone knows how please share.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Flash Back : Making of TankX

TankX was my first game, made in C++ 3.0. I could only use the graphic library that came with this version and sixteen colors was my limit. TankX had 936 lines of code and five header files. I made specific header files for player tank, enemy tank, power-ups, score, enemy movement. The main file had stuff to make all these things get together and make a game. There was some really heavy programming included for the collision detection and enemy movement. At first the game was really slow and jittery, because of the afore said heavy functions. I made some nice improvement and really got a performance boost in the gameplay. The limitation with C++ 3.0 was that there was no thread system, everything went in procedural kind of way. So I had to check and maintain the code in a single loop which was to end whenever the player hit something.

At first my collision detection involved checking for the co-ordinates of all the enemy tanks and matching them with the player tank, this was really crappy and took a lot of processor power to run, after that I came up with a solution to this one, instead of checking for collision detection every loop, I just checked the vertical position of enemy and matched it with player's (plus minus the radii of both of them added), if this is true then it means that the enemy is in the same vertical position and then I checked the horizontal value of both and if they match we had a collision.

The other header files were really easy and score.h had a system so as to encrypt the data so that possibly someone will have a hard time changing it manually, this thing was stored in a file and if viewed would show crap values and characters, it was only meant to be read in-game.

Another problem that I faced was limited use of Arrow keys on the keyboard, so I had to make do with WASD for the player movement and k,l to speed up or lower the speed of the tank, this feature I never saw before, all these vertical scrolling games have the level and power-up increase the speed of the player with no option to decrease it.

After all this, I had planned to add more power-up and stuff but I never really got to make it as is with all the indie game developers, we get all other exciting ideas and the old one is scraped. The world of Flash opened up many possibilities for me, and I do plan to make a better version of TankX in Flash. Hope those who play the game like it, it can be downloaded from my games site http://simplegoogly-games.blogspot.com/

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Unity3D vs. Torque

I hope you all know that these two are big time Game Engines. Here is something that is either different or same in both.

Both of them have different pros and cons. Unity3D can be used to make browser based games. Torque is more detailed like having shadow depth and volume, whereas Unity3D has only projected shadows. And shaders, physics, meshes, networking systems are almost same in both. Though torque has an in-built editor for GUI and texture, unity employs the use of 3rd party but good editors (like Maya, 3ds Max, etc) it has a feature which enables Unity3D to import and export data from all these editors seamlessly. There is also the difference in how they animate, Unity uses keyframes though Torque employs inverse kinematics. Torque only support C/C++ but Unity3D supports C#, JavaScript etc. Both of them can make games for Windows, Linux, Mac, Wii, iPhone etc (but notably only Unity3D supports browser based games) some of the earlier version of torque couldn't but now they do and even Torque X has to make do with XNA still it is under construction.Unity3D en-powers the game with good music and video playing capabilities, whereas there have been many objections on the sound quality of Torque Game Engine. Unity3D is more efficient for rapid game development. 

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Tutorials

I have been checking out the ways and tricks of games. Especially physics and maths part. For the top-down shooter I have been using a lot of mathematical formulas to get the correct and enhanced game-play. Mostly wikipedia lists all the kinds of projection and vector maths formula and they have been real helpful.

Downloaded the 'N' physics tutorial which tells about collision detection in detail. Learnt some new techniques from it. :)

Ideation and Prototyping

The three ideas of mine which were accepted to be interesting have gone a step further, the prototype is ready for two of them and one of them has a playable demo too. But it is still a long way to go before the final game will come out. The demo that I made has all the fundamental working of elements of the game, the AI hasn't been done yet. All in all, the others had some confusion regarding the game so had to make this demo to make them visualize what the game will involve. And after that I have started working on a new top-down shooter.

Multiplayer and Trainings

So, these days I am all into having training sessions and playing multi-player games like AOE 2, Quake 3 Arena, Counter Strike, etc. Been busy with all these.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Over the weekend

So, over the weekend I played on PS3, which has been bought by my co-workers. And on the second day itself we got into a problem with the wireless controller. Have to get it changed. The new firmware upgrade recognizes it as a fake controller.

So I am now onto a TPS (third person shooter) demo. Lets see till when I can finish it.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Ideation Recall

So 3 of my ideas have kinda been taken as good and I have already developed the demo for one of them. Looking forward to making another demo and last one will be created by the team.

Play head

So today we played AOE 2 in office and it was quiet a fun.

Especially since I have challenged a person at office on a game of AOE 2. Won One, lost one with team. 

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Ideation meeting

Will take place tomorrow, lets see if the ideas I have gets accepted or not. :)

Game genre

All the "traditional genre of game" these days are getting muddled up, they mix action with RPG and adventure and even racing. They do FPS and RPG, strategy and simulators, all these flash games have almost all kind of genre mixed up and muddled. If someone starts calculating the number of combination the game developers have come up, with to satisfy the players, he/she himself/herself would get confused as to what is going on. The number of games released in an year is astounding. And then add some combination of genre to each of them and you get the wrost number of combination of new genres.

Another game

So I have been making this "new game" for quiet a while (hmmm 3 days to be precise) and about 75% of the programming have been completed. I need to have a good art and that will take some time. Lets see when this "new game" finishes.

A day of revolving and repeated tweets

So I have this feature where I get SMS from twitter about the people updates that I have chosen. Today was the day when I had either retweet or some jumble in the signal of phone, I got all the messages atleast 3 times. Shitty, huh!

Is this right?


AGILE development process

As almost every company, our company too employs agile development process and that means we have a set of targets (called a part, and to be completed in a set of time) which when completed gives a running output of the game, and we can tell how the game will turn out. Like for example we are making a space shooter kind of game, then it is divided into parts and each part is completed in a set of time, so we have the 'plane' in first time period and then the player sitting in it, then comes the enemies and so on. This technique is especially good for casual games as it is fast and also gives an idea of how the game will look like (when it finishes) as early as the first part is completed, so then we can decide if we wanna go further or change the theme a bit.

Emotional

Today, I had to get some duplicate keys for the office. So I went on a lookout for a key-maker, finally I found one but he still hadn't opened his shop. So I waited. There was this guy nearby who repairs cycles. I asked him at what time does the key-maker comes but he pointed to his ears and mouth and shook his hand to indicate that he can't speak or hear. I pointed to the key-maker shop and made sign to make him understand my question "when does he come" he understood and pointed to the cell number written on the shop. I called and the man said he would come by in 20 minutes or so. As I waited for him, there came this tea-man who tried to give this physically challenged man some tea and 'samosa' (an Indian dish prepared with potato and flour) but the guy refused (he won't take free food). There is still pride in him. I appreciate that, I haven't ever seen any other guy who is in this condition and still refuses to accept free food and work to fend for himself. May he have a good life.

The drink tht no one had

Late last night I got this terrible thirst. And I was out of drinking water. So I went out and after looking every  closed shop, I finally found a place that was actually closed but the shutters weren't down as yet. I persuaded the guy to give me some water or cold-drink. Finally he accepted and then came back and told me that he was out of stock and there was no water or cold-drink available, I asked him were can I get some water, he went to look inside and came back and got me a sprite. I was lucky to get that.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

17th November

So today did some more sprites and made the high score list of warzone defense. And then worked on a game idea of my own. :) Of to my home now. And planning to buy a new things related to bed.

Made the high score list of warzone defence


Hehe, After days of playing I ripped the high score list. This only gets better. I am on third place, nicknamed simplegoogly as always.

Monday, November 16, 2009

16th November

So we finally got almost all the animations running from the sprite sheets that I created, some of them had a problem (either dimension or the way they were placed in the grid). So most of my day was spent on correcting these things. We were supposed to have a game idea sharing session but that didn't took place as everyone was extremely busy. Might get to have this session later this week.

And I was given my own e-mail account onto the company's website. Training sessions will start tomorrow. Lets hope they go fine.

From joining till today

I have started learning Flash. And C/C++ (which I already kno in gr8 detail).

C/C++ is used in iPhone games.

Well, half the employee of the company are reporting sick, some viral. And the weather too is transitioning from summer to winter so this kind of fever and all is supposed to be. In any case, I got work on sprite sheets. The iPhone provide hardware acceleration for 'pvr' format only. Now the thing is that the artist made all the work in 'png' format. And the software that encode from 'png' to 'pvr' only takes 'png' of the equal width and height and that also should in power of 2 i.e 256x256, 512x512 etc.

So first I have to merge all the frames in an animation into one file and then re-size it to have equal height and width in power of 2. Then I have to convert it into 'pvr'. It is really time consuming and most of the resizing is to be done from command line.

Today is supposed to be the game idea sharing session, I got four ideas for game. And I hope atleast two of them are really good, lets see what happens.

9th November

Yipppeeee.

I got a call from the company and they told me that I have been selected and here I am for the first day of my life as a game developer.

31st October

Well here ends my internship. I made a game called "save the castle" you can play it here. I have set up this other blog for sole purpose of keeping my games. Its address is http://simplegoogly-games.blogspot.com. There are some other previously made games there too, go check it out and tell me how you liked it.

27th October

Started my internship, the environment is nice and the people here are really helpful. Had an introduction session in the morning and got to everyone and what they do and currently on which game they are working. Next up was some of the features of Flash some of which I already knew. Now I have been given a basic idea and have to develop a game around that.

26th October

Ah crap, I didnt get the booking as my ticket was still wait-listed. So am going to go by flight. Hope it goes smooth.

24th october

Well, I cleared the telephonic logical and language fundamental interviews. The company name is tiger tail studio, they make games. I have to go down to Hyderabad for my final round which is going to be a week long internship in which I have to co-ordinate with the company's employee and make a flash game. I have booked my tickets on train, will be going in AC class. But still I am in wait list, hope that I get the ticket.

Pooh

Well I got sick of writing all this "Mom Says" stuff. So from now on this blog will be dedicated to having all posts of day-to-day life as a game developer.

Thursday, November 5, 2009