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Sneeze's Blog
| 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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| 16th Jun 2011 - 20:17 | Progress | |
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| I've had a go at drawing, and it's a lot harder than I hoped! After a few goes I've got a background that I'm at least a little happy with - it's by no means perfect. The enemies have proved quite hard too, and I've had what is probably my first real go at technical animation (trying to get a walking animation that looks fairly natural). Features and ideas are dropping by the wayside all along to try to fit this in before the end of the month (although to be fair, I blame Civilisation 5 for most of this) - I'm not sure I really want to release it as a full game any more but rather a prolog or an engine test. Probably the latter. However, it'd do me good to get a release out even if it's not the perfect result and you never know - I might be able to pack in a few different levels and a few more enemies in the last couple of days.
Anyway, with some basic backgrounds and enemies, it's down to drawing some towers and bullets (including upgrades and animations) and designing a user interface. Then I can get back to the actual game - there's all sorts of issues that need tackling still, but most of them are relatively minor engine issues like tower placement permissions or user interface and gameplay things which are very much dependent on having a working game engine and graphics. | ||
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| 9th Jun 2011 - 18:31 | Progress | |
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| So, I've been doing a bit of work towards the idea of my competitions. The aim of all this is for me to actually get on with a project by means of an absolute deadline. Unfortunately, I can't enter my own competitions, but if I'm going to set a challenge I do at least need to prove that I could do it myself, so that's a good start. I'm trying to have a game done by the end of the month, and if I have time to sort out the competition pages before then too, my first monthly competition will be in July. If not, it'll be be in August.
I'm not going to say exactly the theme of my game, because that's going to be the future competition, but I've been working back on my tower defence game. I've put together some pictures I've drawn myself, and while they're not great, that really is part of the point - to have a go without the result having to be the best in the world all the time. The progress is reasonable; ive got some basic enemies wandering around including some animation, and ive got some backgrounds to draw. After that, it's just a matter of polish and balance; the engine itself was written, to some extent, a long time ago. I expect I should be able to have enough basic graphics by next week to be really looking at an end result, which is quite a nice position when I think about it. I've also been thinking about trivia. There's a lot more in some ways I could do with that site, but I probably only need one more feature before I let it out to the general public, and that's the ability to share quizzes. Originally I was going to share quizzes with the questions encoded in a URL, but unfortunately the maths doesnt work. It effectively takes four characters to encode a single byte in a URL, and with four byte question ids 20 questions is 320 characters, which just isnt nice to copy and paste into a blog and won't fit in twitter at all. This means some more database work and storing every quiz that's offered, but it's not the end of the world until I have more than a few thousand people per day, and if I have that problem I'll be very happy! Anyway, if I keep away from the computer games, there'll be a new release here soon :) | ||
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| 28th May 2011 - 10:21 | Another nice little bonus | |
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| I, finally, got around to adding mine 60 to mochi's distribution feed, and for the first time in a long time it's a featured game! This is a nice bonus, since a lot of people completely ignore games that aren't featured by mochi. With a bit of luck this will get somewhere, although I don't expect miracles. | ||
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| 26th May 2011 - 18:41 | Aside | |
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| Well, I've just noticed that for some reason, on the 8th and 9th of May this month I got a very large number of people visiting my mr men site. I had a look, but there just seemed to be a lot of people searching for Roger Hargreaves. I know I'm quite high up on the serach list for that (I used to be in the top five), but I couldn't work out why until I searched for it myself - it appears that on that day, the google doodle was of the mr men, and linked to seaching for Roger Hargreaves....
Anyway, I don't really have much advertising on that site, which is a bit of a shame since I'd have made literally hundreds of pounds if I had - there were tens of thousands of people who saw an advert, and that can't have been on the first page they'd have seen. As it is I get a windfall of 20 quid and an amusing story to tell :) | ||
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| 24th May 2011 - 13:03 | Trivia Update | |
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| I've changed the trivia site a bit recently and now it uses 20 question quizzes rather than endless quizzing. Hopefully this is a bit more suitable now, although you can't challenge your friends to the quizzes yet. One minor change I need to do soon is probably to stop the advert refreshing - the same advert is fine, so I can probably just keep server side state and dynamically update the page. Have to think about that. | ||
| Comments (2) | ||
| 23rd May 2011 - 17:25 | Back! | |
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| I'm back from my internet holiday with a shiny new broadband connection. This now means normal service will be resumed. I've got a few new things in mind at the moment; one of the things I need to get on with are more trivia questions and I've got an update to that to upload - I'm moving to a quiz based format rather than the endless quiz it was before.
Another thing is a few changes to Red Tower Games; I'm planning to have a competition section where I do a monthly competition for flash games, with a small cash prize for the one I (and possibly other judges) like the most. Each competition will have a theme, with the idea that I'll actually write a game in the month too (well, probably in a week or two before the competition starts) which should give me the money back in the long run from the competition - ultimately it's a motivational aid. Anyway, I've got some catching up to do! | ||
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