New Build Soon

Why not? I've done a fair bit. I'll probably post an ubuntu version in a couple of days. It should run on most linux out there.

Email from Penny Arcade's Greenhouse!

Say What!?

I fired them off an email awhile back asking what it takes to get on Greenhouse. They got back to me with the answer of a "quality game".

I'm most definitely a ways off from that, but it's awesome motivation. Some day I'll have the game they're looking for... some day.

Likewise, I don't suppose anyone out there wants to crank out some cool music for this project? I suck at cranking out music, but you could and then you'd be on the ground floor of this enterprise.

-Liam

Dspeech - On the Fly Cypher Machine

A few years back, I had drank a lot of coffee and envisioned a way to make a "language" using a pretty simple find and replace machine.

Basically it would have a dictionary of English words and their translation and go through a text document and replace all the words with their new equivalent.

Ok, I know some of my friends know multiple languages and may be sort of passionate about this sort of thing. We both know this isn't an actual language. Hence language in quotes at the very start.

The coolest thing was that when it stumbled across an undefined word, you made it up on the spot and added it in to the language. Slowly a vocabulary would build and you'd have something.

At the time, I couldn't quite get it to work. A few months ago, I wrote the entire thing from scratch in about 15-20 minutes.

The source code can be downloaded here

Now, I don't know what use you'll have for this.

I personally use it to make a fake language to throw at the people in my D&D game. Basically they find script written in what I call "Dark Speech". This provides a solid way to write stuff in English, and make it impossible to read, yet possible to decode.

You could use it to send secret messages to your friends, but you'd both need a current copy of the dictionary for that to work. Then you'll hit issues with concurrency.

Anyway, maybe someone in the whole of the Internet can put it to use.

Also my second piece of beer-ware - still no beer, but maybe one day.

-Liam

Added sound!

Well mostly just a song which plays while you go through the text level. We've got a long, long way to go to get sound for everything, but this isn't half bad.

There isn't really a screen shot for this, so you'll have to take my word on it.

Anyway, all the songs are going to be in the format known as "ogg". This means you should be able to replace any of them with songs you like.

It turns out the entire development team is composed of sub par musicians, so we will never make you listen to what you don't want to.

Regardless, when it comes out, you might as well just go ahead and replace the songs with something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXRUTuq_pvo

or

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8rZWw9HE7o

-Liam out!

Slightly Nicer Hud

Check it:

I sometimes wonder why I post these to facebook too. It's automatic, so no real work. I do get the feeling most of my friends are much cooler than me and don't really care for this kind of thing.

Anyway, I really like how this looks.

It's almost, almost, atmos, starting to look like a game.

Did I just say Atmos? Yeah I did. Those be scary.

Next stop sound, but that'll be sometime after july 10th.

Currently my big project is building a small water management system for remote first nations communities. It's more just a proof of concept, but it's been a lot of fun. It's also not very often I get to say my work might - just might- help someone out.

P.S. Kylan should write me a riveting plot.

Control Change + HUD

I decided the original control scheme was a bit too difficult, so I revamped it.

No it plays kind of like an fps on rails. You use wasd to move around and the mouse to aim. I like it a lot more than it used to be. The big reason for the switch was:

1. The game was difficult to play
2. I wanted to take advantage of platform known as the PC. The mouse is an awesome. I think people who play lots of game's on console have either forgotten or don't know how slick a mouse is.

I also added a bit of a hud. This was pretty easy to do, I just hadn't figured out the quite how to keep it in the correct place all the time. This has been fixed. I also implemented a simple scoring system (SSS)

There is a little wire sphere which is acting as a cross hair in there too. I'll have to make a real one soon.

OpenGL hates text

It's almost as if it was designed for something else!

Anyway, rendering a standard room, I can get about 3-6 fps. It has to work pretty hard to do it too. I'll probably try and do some profiling and figure out where the performance is being lost.

This is actually crazy cool. Usually your tools to do a specific task are really rock solid.

How many times have you ever had to optimize something: pretty much never.

So basically OpenGL sucks at text, and this means I can break out things like loop unrolling, macros and whatever else to try and get it working faster.

Should be fun!

Thunder: Heroism on Steroids

So, on the TI-83 graphing calculator I once made an rpg that was all text. You played as U and you went on a fairly short adventure to save your lost love V from the evil wizard Z. On the way you encountered your arch nemesis F and had comical moments with E and C.

You fought deadly enemies like pi and even a snake at one point I think it looked like this: ==( 0_). Basically it was the best you could squeeze out of 26 letters, a bunch of math symbols, 26 variables and the BASIC programing language.

The game was called Thunder: Heroism on Steroids, and now I'm gonna try and make it again: For computers everywhere.

I couple days ago I threw together this picture:


It's a black triangle (thanks James!) - everything is running in the games "engine" and it spits out this image.

I'm doing everything in C++ with OpenGL - because I like overkill. It won't be a very long game, but hopefully it'll be fun and give people a chuckle. It should run on damn near anything which means hopefully everyone'll be able to play it.

I'm mostly just working on it so I can try out some stuff. I want to get experience making a battle system, an overworld, an inventory and a way to switch nicely between them.

Right now, you can move around. It'll only get better.

Once it's done - or I'm tired of working on it - I'll probably release all the code. Everything is probably going to be hard coded, so people with a good grasp of C, should be able to change just about everything about the game.

Anyway, wish me luck. Should be fun.