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Sneeze's Blog
| 12th Sep 2011 - 13:38 | Trivia again | |
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| So, I've not talked to much about my trivia site for a while. Over the weekend I decided to buy a new domain, so we've got www.quizquiz.biz. It's not too bad a name, at least it's quite nice to say. So hopefully, that'll work out nicely. I'm not going to advertise it too much yet, because I want to finish off the branding and make it look and feel nice, but Google sent me a £100 voucher for advertising so hopefully I'll use that to get things off the ground. | ||
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| 8th Sep 2011 - 19:48 | More fonts | |
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| It's been another font day today. I never like looking for fonts, since so many people seem to be very worried that someone will make millions selling their font, but if you're giving it away for free, it makes it hard for someone else to sell it for millions anyway... all the serious money from fonts comes from site licenses where you can only use it in limited numbers of machines and print licenses, both of which are seriously undermined by the free version (it'd be impossible to prosecute on terms and conditions if you show the font is public domain), and both of which require extensive support which you're not offered by a free font.
I discovered the Open Font License today, which to be honest isn't too bad. It does allow you to get away with things like selling it as part of a bundle (with associated copyright info), and doesn't require you to do anything special with embedding (which is my problem). Now I know what it is, I know any font with that license I can use in my game. Or at least I think I can, but the problem with a lot of these things is... it just isn't 100% clear. Which, if you really want to allow me to use your font as I like, comes back to the first point. You might as well put the author information into the font and let it go either as freeware or in the public domain. It's easier for everyone. Anyway, I've found a font that I think is suitable, so my cards look a bit nicer now. So that's a start. | ||
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| 7th Sep 2011 - 17:18 | Card / Word game | |
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| I've been doing a card / word game recently, inspired by a request from my sister who quite liked a game she'd played on someone's phone and wanted something along those lines for the computer. Since I'm trying to be a bit more public with my demonstrations of games, I've put a preview version online on the alphas blog. There's not much you can do with it at the moment, but it does work a bit. Not that much more to do with the game engine, but a lot to do with the level select screen, graphics, level design, scoring and winning, the achievements, and I need a new font for the cards since this one is unreadable at times :)
If I actually get some work done for once, I might be able to get a reasonable game out of this. We'll see :) | ||
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| 19th Aug 2011 - 15:05 | Methodology | |
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| I've not posted for a while, mostly because I've not really got on with much lately.
I've attempted to try a new methodology of coding lately. Looking back at my previous projects, a lot of them get somewhere with the engine, but get bogged down with the UI and nothing ever happens with them, so I start something new. Ultimately, I'm starting from the bottom, and then pulling together the threads at the top. What I've started to do with my current project is start at the top. So the first things I've done are not write the basic engine of the game, but to do the main menu. And then put pieces into the main menu until I can start a game, and then put pieces into the game so I can progress with the game. For example, my current game is a word/card game crossover, so the first thing was the main menu, then to draw some piles of cards. Currently I'm working on moving cards around (mostly copied from my patience games). Then it'd be to think about how to end the game and get back to the menu. And only after that will the actual gameplay be built into the game with the restrictions on how you can move cards etc. The reason for this is that the feedback as to the progression of the game is much clearer, and this gives me a better sense of progress. It's a lonely job writing games by yourself, and a lot of the games I start never see anything close to the light of day. However, with this approach, I feel a little bit that things are moving on, even though the actual game is nonexistant at the moment! | ||
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| 9th Aug 2011 - 08:53 | Quick Load | |
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| Why do games have a quick load button that's easy to reach? Sure, quick save is a very useful feature, but if there's a reason why you would need to frequently and quickly load a game, surely that means that there is something wrong with the game? For example it may be too unpredictable or too difficult to recover from mistakes. On the other side of the coin, you'd not have a button that quickly quits the game, either - you'd expect an "Are you sure you want to quit" warning? I think I could argue that you almost never need to load so quickly that a single keystroke is desirable. The idea of going through a menu to do it isn't a bad option, neither is a warning that you're about to lose your current game a real hassle. At the very least, don't make it a single unmodified keypress.
(As you might have guessed, I've just lost a few turns of Civilisation 5 due to accidentally hitting quick load). | ||
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| 26th Jul 2011 - 19:40 | Alphas | |
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| I've been thinking that I'm far too secretive about my games, and that actually it's all a bit pointless - it doesnt matter that much if someone does look at my games before they're done, provided they don't distribute them. And to be honest, most of the people doing the distribution won't look at my test versions of games, I'd imagine. So I've decided it's time I started an alpha site for some early versions of my games, which i've put at alpha.cathelius.co.uk. There's still quite a lot to do to that site (especially putting adverts on it! I do need to make money from things...), but the basic idea is there.
The intention is that I'll put posts on there that mostly contain previews of one sort or another, but I'll maintain this blog for more in-depth discussion of what I've actually been up to. I would keep it all on this site, but I can't afford the disk space or bandwidth here ;) | ||
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| 19th Jul 2011 - 19:20 | Gimp scripting | |
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| So, the artwork that Jansic has given me is all very nice, but does come in the wrong size and with more than one image per page. This isnt entirely a bad thing, since i dont know what size i want. So I thought I'd just write a batch script to do this via gimp, which nicely provides a scripting interface.
What i want is: for each n in [0000, 0016)
Open name+n+".png"
Cut the right section out
Resize image
Save to newname+n+".png" Roughly. You'd have thought that'd be the sort of thing that should be easy with a scripting language... except in the gimp uses Scheme. It's hardly a simple, easy process to write the above in scheme - even the example page shows how complex it is just to do a "simple" script.
Anyway, Im sure there are good reasons for it in terms of scripting things, but it's been a huge source of fustration today, and it just doesnt seem to me to be the most sensible language to choose for scripting - surely the sorts of things people want in a script lend themselves to imperative programming, not functional? | ||
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| 16th Jul 2011 - 14:34 | Trivia update | |
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| I've had a bit of a play with my trivia site, and you can now share quizzes with other people. I'm not sure the implementation is ideal, but you can try the quiz I did earlier and see if you can beat my score of 18/20 :) Ok, I wrote most of the questions, so that's probably a bit unfair... | ||
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| 15th Jul 2011 - 18:45 | Progress | |
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| So, I've not really posted for a while.
Inevitably, I've changed plans again. Mostly this is because while I can draw a little, I think at the moment a game based on my artwork is not worth pressing for. So, any game I write at the moment should be more about the game than about the art, or should have art from an external source. I also look back to my early sucesses, and they're mostly from good, simple ideas and a bit of fun. I had also written a genetics game based on breeding flowers. It worked quite nicely, really, i might well have been able to turn it into a game if it wasnt for the difficulties in graphics. I might still bring this one out at some point, but I really do need to think about it more before I really do turn it into a game. Anyway, I had some new inspiration recently, mostly revolving around a name, but it's turned into a campsite management simulation (it'll make sense when I mention the name but I'm not ready yet :). It's only a little of the way through at the moment, but I quite like the feel of it and, provided i give it a longer term aim (eg get as much money as possible in a year) it might well play out nicely. We'll see though, in many ways it's more important I actually write a game than it's successful, since it's been far too long since I've released anything decent. I've also had some graphics from jansic, which might well work out nicely for the tower defence game. Some work to do on those, but they're 3d renderings rather than drawings and I think will look great, especially for this style of game. They may also be useful in other games, so we'll see where we go... | ||
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| 13th Jul 2011 - 10:53 | EA buys PopCap | |
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| This is a sad piece of news - EA is going to buy PopCap. Not sad for the people at PopCap since they'll get a fortune from it, but sad because it's probably the death knell for them. EA don't exactly have a good history of producing quality games, rather they seem to produce endless versions of the same thing - FIFA soccer, the Sims for example. I can't see that they'll do any more than take their existing games and just throw more versions of the same things out, EA seem to supress vision wherever they go. Successful, maybe, but they don't deserve it in my mind.
Still, this is probably good news for the smaller developer, since that probably means you don't have to worry about another hit from PopCap ;) | ||
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