New!
New website design!
New upload!
New game engine!
I spent 4 1/2 hours the other night designing the top-down waking level, and when I was finally satisfied with it, I clicked save, just like I do any other time. The Torque Game Editor decided, however, that the last 4 1/2 hours of my life were completely unjustified, and it promptly resized the tile map into a 10 x 10 pixel square. And THEN it saved. All my work was lost.
This isn’t the first time that the editor has acted buggy on me. For a while, every time I saved the title level, it would move one of the buttons over to the center of the screen. And sometimes it would try and save the level as a particle effect file, instead of a Torque game level.
That was the last straw, though. I decided that a re-imagining was necessary. The next morning, I sat down and started writing an isometric game engine for the waking portions of the game, like you’d see in the old Fallout games for PC, or Diablo, or XCOM. I’m extremely satisfied with how it’s turning out, and I put a link to the Isometric Test executables on the Download page. The Download PAGE! The little tab up there takes you to a page where I’ll keep the most recent builds of the game for testing. The site design still needs a little work, but it’s better than relying on an incorrectly-named blogspot. The blogspot will redirect here, in case anybody still has bookmarks they need to change.
I also went digging around last night through my old game stuff, and found some really early builds from way back when I was still experimenting with different engines and game design. For amusement’s sake I’ll upload them here, and you can see how far I’ve come.
My first attempt was in Adobe Actionscript, and while it did a great job of introducing me to serious game programming, it just wasn’t what I needed to be able to create the sort of game I intended. It’s still buggy- I seem to remember realizing as I was trying to fix the bugs that the scale of my ideas just wouldn’t fit into something like ActionScript. Attempt 1
My second attempt was more of a test than anything else, and I’m really only including it because I love the cookie sprite I was using as a test character. This was my introduction to Scirra’s Construct, which uses minimal coding and is a very visually-oriented programming style, where you create actions, behaviors, and triggers and attach them to objects. Attempt 2
This is also a Construct program, and you can see that I actually made a lot of progress with it. It still looks very unrefined, and I’m glad I gave up on it when I did, else I probably wouldn’t have done a whole lot of legit programming over the last couple years. Working on this is actually when I started this blog, two-and-a-half years ago. Attempt 3
This is what I spent most of my last deployment working on. I was using Python 2.5 with the Pygame libraries for importing graphics and sound. It was very rough, but then I also didn’t have access to any sort of online forums or searches. All I had was the Pygame documentation and a Python phrasebook, so I’m pretty proud of what I managed to accomplish. You can read about it in the older entries, starting here. In the end, my laptop just gave up the ghost, and again, I’m glad that it did because it forced me to look into other options. By the way, this game is inside a folder; the executable is named ball5.exe, and it won’t work if you change the name. Don’t ask. Attempt 4
You can head over to the Downloads section and see how far I’ve come- it’s pretty amazing. I like that I still have all my old builds; it’ll be amusing to look back on them when I have a fully functioning, distributable game.
That’s still a long ways away, though.
