Posts about this and that.

måndag 26 oktober 2009

Back again!

Back from a cruise, will continue to work on the remake when my energy has returned. Being drunk on a boat really drains your energy, doesn't it? :)

Ippa got a lot of work done with the online highscore board. Sweet! I'm currently ranked as #3, while Ippa has the #1 position with about 3 times as much points. I think he cheats! ;)

fredag 23 oktober 2009

And another thing...

Must make game harder. Maybe I'm getting too used to it and therefore easily gets high scores, but it could need a tweak here and there. The robots must shoot a lot more often, for example...

I Blog Much These Days

Highscores is in! And a nify score name entry screen with a wheel of rotating letters. Looks sweet!

And Ippa, who helped me a lot with this remake, is also creating a website so we can send the score up there for people to see and try to beat! It will be great! :)

It's very very late now. Wife will wake up soon and go to work. (well, in a few hours but anyway)
Time to go to sleep. Got a lot of chores to do tomorrow, and then go to work.

On saturday we will go on a cruise. That will be great as well!

torsdag 22 oktober 2009

A List of High Scores!



Ippa did an update of his framework Chingu today, and in it was a highscore list class. Happy times! Tonight after work I will start hacking on a Highscore screen for the remake, unless he have done that one too. :)
The game have gone through a facelift as well. And a lot of bugs have been found and killed. I also tweaked this and that multiple times. It's a bit easier to get a high score now, but you'll also die pretty soon afterwards. ;)
Here's a new screenshot of it. It looks way better in the game.

onsdag 21 oktober 2009

I Hate Bugs

First real bug has surfaced. Sometimes the input stops responding a little. But just a little. I can move like before, I can shoot like before, but just not in that direction. :P
I had the problem at one time that I could only shoot to the left. And not like up, left or down, left. just left.

The really odd thing about this bug is that it disappears when some other, unrelated, part of the code is changed. For example, the laser shots was just simple lines in the beginning. I later replaced them with an animated image, and suddenly I could not shoot to the right... I then changed something else somewhere, and suddenly I could shoot right again.

Not sure why this bugs jumps in and out like that. I think it has something to do with us pushing poor old Ruby a bit too hard. That, or it's some Ruby 1.8.7 on snow leopard issue, since ruby 1.9.1 on windows seems unaffected by it.

Oh, well. Haven't seen it for a while. I hope it's dead now. Some nice optimizations have been made recently. :)

tisdag 20 oktober 2009

YouTube butchered video

Here's a video of the remake. The screen capture was of a poor quality to begin with, but youtube apparently decided at it needed a bit more blurry look. :P

And the audio sucks, since the screen capture program could only record sound using the built in microphone, so you will hear me press the keys as well...

Youtube

The Power of Tunes

We added a bunch of music to the game (well two tunes, to be exact). Surprisingly enough, it made the game a lot more interesting. I sometimes finds myself doing something with the game running so I could listen to the title menu music. I could just play the .ogg file, or browse to the Jamendo page and listen to it there... But that's not the same. :)



A lot of tweaks to the gameplay have been done as well, and I added a credit screen. And I replaced some graphics. It's even less stuff to do now! My next big project for the game is to implement the settings menu, but I figure that will take a couple of hours at most. (And then a couple of more hours to fix the bugs, naturally)

Enjoy the sneak preview, but keep in mind that the final game might look a lot different. I'm not quite happy with everything yet. (and I need to redesign the player graphics.)

måndag 19 oktober 2009

Zap, Kaboom, pew pew and laughter

Got a LOT of stuff done this weekend!
And we have tried to add a lot of funny stuff to it. Theres a pause menu with a nice scrolling text, the game begs you to start the game if you dwell in the main menu for too long, a nice picture is displayed as the game over screen, and more.

But other not-so-silly stuff have been done as well. I think all the major gameplay elements are in and working. There's a bunch of bugs to fix here and there. And there's always a need to tweak this or that, but It's basically finished now.

Still no highscore list, but that is being worked on. No settings but I will do that some day next week. And I have plans for the credit screen that hopefully gets done next week as well.

The deadline is fast approaching, but I feel that we're so far ahead on the schedule that if we miss this we are probably dead. Or drunk. Or so drunk we should be dead. Or a mix of them.

Should probably prepare a beta to send to a few people. No major bugs known, but there is probably a few lurking between the lines of code...

lördag 17 oktober 2009

Smileys are evil

Not much left to do now... The game is basically complete! It even has a main menu! Left to do is play testing, play testing, some more play testing, and filling in the missing pieces, and some more play testing.

The main menu is a black screen with some text on. Lots of missing pieces there... And there isn't a highscore list yet, but that will come. And a credits screen needs to be added as well. And the graphics could use some fine tuning here and there. Some parts needs to be redrawn completley. But it's all there. Everything that needs for it to feel like a game.

The rest is just fluff and shiny objects. It will be sweet!

How much is a robot worth?

Score is now in. And to answer the question in the title, it's 50 points. And a bonus if no one is alive when you leave a room!

I didn't have much luck finding a free desktop recording app for osx... I'm very low on cash at the moment so buying one is out of the question.

Now to eat some soup, and then to fine tune berzerk. Still need to add menus, but that will have to wait until tomorrow or something.

Google Wave is a lively place

Or it will be soon.

Found some friends on it, and more will come eventually. Yay. :)

Now to figure out how to connect this blog with it, to make things easier for me in the long run. :P

Anyone know how to do it and can give me a short tutorial? My google-fu is weak and I don't find much info about it.

Berzerk remake progressing well

Droids, explosions, an evil smiley (currently without a smile), blood, carnage, robotic voice that taunts you... The remake has it all!

Some of the most important things left on the TODO list is scores, and menus. And I have about 2 weeks left until the deadline, so clearly something is going to go terribly wrong any time now. :P

Now off to find some program for OSX to record gameplay video with...

fredag 16 oktober 2009

Berzerk remake

I started a remake of the old arcade game Berzerk a couple of days ago. It's written in Ruby using the Gosu library, and a game framework called Chingu on top of that. Turns out that the author of Chingu wanted to help with the remake. :) It's progressing well, and it's now possible to run around in a randomly generated maze and shoot at droids.

Next on my TODO list is to implement some AI code into the droids, at the moment they ignore the walls completely and cannot fire.


Links for people who like that kind of stuff:
The remake code repository (no binary files at the time of writing)
Gosu
Chingu

Google Wave is a lonely place

I need more contacts in Google Wave... But I have no invites. :(

Some friends are waiting for their invitations, so hopefully it will be a bit more action in the near future.

Google Wave

Finally got an invite for Google Wave and wanted to tie it with this blog, but I can't figure out how.

It's a bit difficult to think today since I got a swine-flu shot yesterday and it turns out that I'm one of ten people who react to it. :P