Category Archives: Random Gibberings

Randomness not particularly pertaining to any other category.

The 2012 Plan of Action!

0
Posted by stuckie on January 3, 2012 – 6:05 pm
Filed under Random Gibberings

Well, 2011 was a bit of a turbulent year, but I managed to work quite a number of things.

Commercial:
Commercially, I was relatively active, it seems!
Bang Bang Racing : Available for Tegra2 Android Devices and Digital Reality are putting the finishing touches on the PS3 and X360 version which I also had a hand in.
Switch! : Ad supported Android Version, Ad Free on Android and on iOS with an in-app purchase to remove the Ads
The Best Christmas Game Ever : on Android and on iOS
Tiny Gems : on iOS with an Android version being wrapped up.

Ludum Dare:
2011 wasn’t a particularly great Ludum Dare year for me, as although I did make starts to every one of them, I didn’t manage to finish any of them really!
LD20′s theme just didn’t appeal to me at all, and I couldn’t really think up of anything, and the same happened for the recent LD22; though I did start many ideas which may be expanded upon later.
As for LD21, sneaky laptop issues stopped me from actually submitting it, but I did actually finish something on time – Thieving Fingers.
I also attempted to do the October Challenge, but failed miserably as the last quarter of the year caused a great upheaval of everything in my life, and lack of time and concentration destroyed any hopes of actually doing something, sadly. Though I did manage to get a grasp of HTML5 and JavaScript which developed further in LD22.

Pandora:
When the Pandora finally got into my mitts, I was fairly active for it as I had a fair amount of time to devote to random fiddlings.. sadly as the year went on, my random fiddling time got cut shorter and shorter, so while I did start various projects such as Extend Utils and Debian on SD, they’ve stagnated and have likely been superseded now by things that actually work!

Random Hackerings:
I did have time to do the odd random hack, though.
I gave Zear some help with a quick port of a Dingoo game over to the good ‘ol GP32.. the process of setting up the GP32 toolchain I documented on here.
I also had a quick fiddle with the Arduino and Gameduino bits and pieces… though haven’t actually released anything as yet, the same goes for the Jaguar Skunkboard I recently got from the GOAT Store.

So, into 2012 now… what are my plans?
Well, I will be doing the main Ludum Dare compos as usual ( this April’s one should be a biggie… ) and Atomicom have a few new games coming up.
I, myself, have a couple of projects in the works which shall hopefully start picking up steam soon, with one being targeted for the end of the month.
As for random hackerings and picking up older projects, they’ll depend on what free time I have left.

Should be fun!

Whooosh!

0
Posted by stuckie on November 4, 2011 – 12:48 am
Filed under October Challenge 2011, Random Gibberings

I love that sound.

I hear it a lot as deadlines make that sound as they whizz past!

Yes, I didn’t finish Little Quirks in time for the October Challenge… actually, I managed less than I did during the original Mini LudumDare challenge.. go figure.

Also, going on from my little rant last time about working on Engines rather than the Game, I decided to eat said words, and have purchased a license for ImpactJS which is a rather fancy and cleanly written Javascript Engine using HTML5 fanciness.
I plan on using this pretty heavily soon, when my super secret secret project is set loose in a month’s time – which is part of the reason why Quirks didn’t get done in time. However, if the super secret secret project pans out well, Quirks will be done in Impact too, so it’ll all be good :)

Right, I’ve another whooosh sound to make…

Engines vs Games

0
Posted by stuckie on October 28, 2011 – 4:46 am
Filed under Code, GLESGAE, Random Gibberings

Let’s have a quick moan before jumping on a train in the early hours of the morning.

I think one of the reasons why I haven’t managed to get Quirks done much this month is that I’ve fallen into the trap of building up GLESGAE rather than the game itself – I’ve been building an engine rather than a game. ( Of course, the main reason is more lack of time, but this one doesn’t help either… )

This is a trap I have a habit of falling into a lot, due to striving to try and get things “right” first time. That never happens! You code to what you need at that specific moment in time, and make it flexible enough to update later on, when your requirements change – part of the reason why I love component systems so much, as that’s effectively what they’re designed to do.

A lot of the Ludum Dare projects I’ve done have been built on top of my old SGZEngine ( or SGZ2D, or whatever I named it at that point in time ) which had already had a good year or so of development time pushed into it, so was pretty full fledged already. GLESGAE, on the other hand, is still in it’s infancy. Getting it to do things requires actually writing the thing to do, and I think that once I get the component system and Lua bindings in, it should be easier to work with. That said, I did manage to do Thieving Fingers with it – even if it didn’t get submitted in time – and that was additionally with the “broken and convoluted” Resource System, so using it is doable and especially so since I’ve fixed a fair amount of things since then.

But, sitting writing an engine isn’t going to get the game done… and there’s a constant fear of implementing engine features that aren’t going to be used, which of course just wastes time.

But writing a game without an engine can make it hard to strip things out to reuse the code…

Hmm… sod it, let’s go license iD Tech for Little Quirks.. I’m sure they’d find that hilarious ;)