Whooosh!

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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

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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 ;)

Little Quirks – week 4 …and beyond!

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Posted by stuckie on October 26, 2011 – 9:03 am
Filed under Ludum Dare, October Challenge 2011, Random Gibberings
Tagged as

Well.. this hasn’t gone to plan.

I do have something on screen now!
And I have Box2D Physics all bound up and active! ( Though I haven’t thoroughly tested it for the needs of the game, as yet. )
But that’s about it!

Actually, I fixed a couple more engine bugs and abstracted some bits and pieces out to make them easier to deal with, so that’s good.. but still, progress overall has been rather minimal.

With only this weekend left, which has already been taken for something more important, there’s probably not much of a chance of Little Quirks getting out in time for the October Challenge.

So, what now?

I think that abandoning the Quirks ( again ) would be a bad choice. Some of the people I’ve talked to about it do think there’s something in it, and that’s always a good sign that gibbering about whatever game you’re working on sparks interest in those not affiliated with it, so it would be good to actually finish something that people might actually play.

But when will that happen?

That’s a trickier question… the remainder of this year is going to be pretty hectic for me, and finding time to work on anything outside standard work-related tasks could be particularly difficult. As this stuff doesn’t fall under the “standard work-related tasks” banner, it gets pushed to the side till free time comes available. So it’s *cough* done when it’s done.

The next few months are going to be mental compared to most of the year, so we’ll have to see what happens. I would like to have it done – or at least playable – by Christmas though.

That said, I have been known to randomly pull things out from nowhere, so we’ll see what happens on the run up to Tuesday.