Atoms

Well, almost.

I’ve been working on the multiplayer code to allow 2 people to update the board, and the mechanism is in place, the only 2 bugs left now should be sorted tonight or soon after!

After that, i just need to do some tidy-up, spend some time testing it, and add some sound and i think its ready

My last article generated some traffic and attracted some interest in my remake of Atoms, i got my first link from another site as well!  So now this is being read by more than me and my mum, I’ll update with what i have been up to more frequently.

I spent some time last night looking at adding a user interface, i added a class for handling the front-end, developer splash and other user interface gubbins and the first thing i tried to implement was a straightforward pause mechanism.  Turns out i needed keyboard input code for that, and after a failed attempt at adding one as a new class, i realised i had to merge it into my mouse class and make a generic input object instead.  Seeing as I’d gotten a little better with C++ since i originally wrote the mouse input, i took the time to rewrite the whole class and make it more consistent, all i need to do for it now is add joypad support for future projects, but I’ll do that when the time comes.

After adding the new control code, i got the pause mechanism working, this pleased me, and so i committed what i had to my codebase and went to bed.

I should point out if i haven’t already, I’m a firm believer that when working on something, you should commit it to your code repository as soon as you have it working, then, if you toss it up later, you can come back to it later, and not have to also re-write a bunch of other stuff you didn’t commit till you had to.

I’ve learned this the hard way, its not much fun.

Later tonight I’m going to do some more work on adding the mechanisms for a front-end and a splash screen, my goal is to get a functional menu system up and running.

Seeing as i’m getting some visitors now, i’m working through tidying up the site.

I’ve updated the “Atoms” page in the links above; over the next few days, i hope to make a few more improvements around here, if you look to the right of the news, you’ll now see i’ve got my links sorted out!

I’m close to a release, very close, but theres still so much to do!

I wont give a date, i’ve tried that and it doesn’t work, so i’ll adopt the famous mantra “When its done” and see you next decade!

lol, i’ll have a more interesting post when i’ve finished the bit i’m working on at the moment.

So it occurred to me that as i come closer to releasing something, I’ve not yet ventured out of the debug environment of my IDE (Visual C++ 2008, which apparently coddles your code to a great extent.)  I decided to try a release compile and see if i could get it to run outside of the development environment, what fun that was!

First of all, it highlighted a bug in my code that the debug compile never did, I’d only assigned 5 surfaces for sprites, not the 9 that i was actually using, that took a few attempts to figure out!

Then i found a couple of people couldn’t run it, this confused me as I’m writing in plain C++ and SDL, and I’d included the SDL DLL.. Anyway, to cut a long story short (too late?) people who don’t have it installed, need to install the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable, its only 1.8mb and I’ve had commercial games that have forced the 2005 redistributable on me in the past, so i don’t feel so bad about that.

After all the fuss, the 3 people I’ve sent it to have all got it working

I’m especially proud of the fact my game currently occupies 14kb as a release executable (either i write efficient code, or games are worryingly more expansive than i dare think about..)

So shortly after my last post, i had an accident and had to format my pc.  I put off setting up all the SDL dev libs and everything, then just when i was about ready to get it all sorted, i had a hardware fault (which in hind-sight, could have been what caused the crash that meant i had to re-install in the first place..)

Turns out i had a bad stick of ram, so while i wait for its replacement, i’m on a meager 1gb

Anyway, i’m going to get it all setup again tonight and i have tomorrow off, so i hope to spend a bit of time getting back into things.

Seeing as theres no point in not showing everyone the only screenshot of Atoms i have at the moment, here it is!

I’ve gotten to the point now where i have a pretty decent class based engine that handles most of whats needed for Atoms.  I should be working on the actual game now and as soon as i have anything interesting to show, i’ll put up some screenshots

Bah, curse you Haowan!  Your suggestions have caused a reboot of my codebase, but its all good, this one shouldn’t take so long.

Before i abandoned it, i’d made significant progress on the last Atoms codebase, the next one will incorperate these improvements

So i’ve started doing a little work on Atoms while in my lunchbreak at work and progress has been steady.  I’ve renamed the project “Atoms 2008″ as i’d like to update it periodically, and because i’d like it to be a progression of the original, not a replacement.

Pretty soon i’m going to take some shots of it to show everyone, i’m jazzed at how its coming together now and i’m even having ideas on how to add AI to make it single player as well! (the original didn’t have single player)  This is made more interesting by the fact i know nothing on the subject, but thats not stopped me before (lol?)

More soon…

Progress is slow, i’d forgotten how much i dislike webdesign nowadays, so i havent done the webpages yet, even though i’d decided thats what i was going to do this weekend.

I have been doing a little code though, not much, its been a pretty boring weekend, low motivation.  I’ve been working on the game engine, i’m keeping it generic as much as possible so i can use it as a starting point for future projects, today i added framerate control, and thats all working very nicely now.

Over the next week, i need to try to get a tileset renderer up and running, so i can build levels, not that i have a game to play them in, but its what i want to do next

While muffing about in #tigIRC as usual, I was insulting someone and misspelt astrologer as astroliger, this tickled me as i love Ligers and we started to riff on the inter-species thing that ended with me finding out there are such things as Tigons.

Well, something turned on the idea light bulb and a name came to me, “AstroLiger versus the Space Tigons from Mars” - such an awesome name deserves a game, and so I have to make it.

This gives me two active projects, and one on the backburner for now, my codebase is still a little messy, so i’m re-writing it all again to accomodate a range of genres, to make it more generic.

This means that Atoms will be another 2-3 weeks, which is ok really, because at that point, i’m hoping to have some music made for the game by one of the guys in #tigIRC - this is a good thing, it saves you from programmer music.

AstroLiger versus the Space Tigons from Mars is going to be a shmup where you control AstroLiger, in his efforts to iradicate the universe of the scourge of the evil Tigons from Mars, you’ll be land-locked, scaling the hilly terrain with the ability to jump and fire the laser cannons he has mounted on his saddle, the closest i can think of is a mix of Saint Dragon and Revenge of the Mutant Camels

Thoughts welcomed.

i’m gonna get some beers, do some code, make mai game.

*update* Did less that I’d like, but I managed a few member functions.  I’m looking into sound at the moment, personally I’d love some 80’s chip music, but I don’t fancy figuring out how to get that going, so I guess its good old wav files for the moment (or mp3, dunno yet.)   Watch out for some hilarious programmer sound-effects and music in the first release!

So i almost got to the point where a few simple gameplay mechanics would turn what i had into a functioning game, i was all set to finish up and get the prototype up and running and instead i decided to re-write the whole thing from scratch, making the whole thing class based, abstracting SDL into an object for easier interaction (at least for me.)

Anyway, thats almost done, i’m not far from where i was and Atoms might be playable at some point this week

So I’m a n00b game programmer, I’m working on my first project, a freeware remake of an Amiga puzzle game called Atoms and as I’m starting to make reasonable progress, I thought I’d set up a blog to keep track of the events that make up a game (or two.)

Not used Wordpress before, so dont know what i can do with it yet, but when i have more time i’ll look to jazz it up a little and make it more like home.

More information on Atoms soon.