To quote from yesterdays post "I'll be adding the rest of the baddies in one big hit, which should be fun."

Oh dear.

Today has been spent adding the mutated Rabbit ( I'm 35 and writing phrases like that ). I was struggling with what to do with him, as I've been told we've not got any budget left for animation and we've only got running frames, so... he now fires lazer beams from his eyes. As mutated rabbits do.

I think I've written far too many shooting routines as it didn't take long at all ( Worked first time too, aside from some alignment issues ).

So pushed on and added a bird baddie, who throws stones at you. That was quite straight forward too, until I decided it may be cool that the stones he throws ( Drops ) should detect platforms and bounce around a bit if they hit one.
Not exactly rocket science to get working, but took longer than I'd planned to get it looking nice.

That's about it for today, which seems bugger all really. I've got another flying / stone throwing baddie to do, which hopefully is going to be mainly copy and paste, and then I think 3 more baddies left, so they should be done tomorrow.

The game's really hard now, as on my test level I've got all the baddies tightly squashed in together for easier testing, and I'm looking forward to having some final levels designed that play to the games strengths.

Squize.

Following on from yesterdays post, this one is going to be a little bitty.

Yesterday before calling it a day I dropped in another baddie and wrote the mutation routines for them both, so if you shoot the hell out of them without trapping them in a heart they'll turn bad, and be even more intent on killing you.

Today has been more of a consolidation type of day ( Read, boring but necessary ). Dropped in the game over screen animations, and the pause mode ones too.
Ripped out the last remaining presentational assets from the last game, so the hi-score input / display is reskinned now.

Major thing was getting the game to realise when a level has been completed, and bump it on to the next one. Got held up for a while as the Toxic engine was designed for a different tile sheet for every level, whereas this game will just have the one ( Although all the map / object data is still loaded externally ), but got it after about an hour of swearing.
The game also knows how many levels there are now, so the game complete screen has been dropped in and works too.

All quite boring, but it means that it's passed the milestone of being a real game now. Not too much fun, and still quite rough, but a game it is, and that's always good.

Did the preloader too, which involved coding on a movieclip, which is totally alien to me these days, and felt very very old school, but it's only a simple "duplicate lots of clips then move them" routine, about 15mins and it was done.

And that's about it. Tidied up the player dying routines and fixed a bug where the camera wouldn't follow your body correctly if you were killed and fell off a platform. Bonuses at the end of level are all in ( Re-used from the last project, which stole the idea from the JBJ Sisters way back ).

Tomorrow I've got a couple of bugs I want to get out of the way ( If I don't manage it in my last hour today ), and then I'll be adding the rest of the baddies in one big hit, which should be fun.

Squize.

Thought it may be a nice idea to do a bit of a diary thing on here for the current game under development. I'm not sure how long I'll stick with it, but let's hope it's fun whilst it lasts.

The new game ( Let's just call it "Another NDA protected game" for the time being ) is based on the Toxic platform engine for the platformer thats still dragging on behind the scenes.
So getting the basics in there and running was nice and easy, strip the odd asset here, remove the odd class there and it's up and running. At present it's still a bit bloaty ( 1.7 meg swf ) but there's more to come out of it, including a lot of sfx.

As this is a themed game, for Valentines, it's a boy chases girls heart premise, based in a vertically scrolling platform world. Bubble Bobble and it's sequel, Rainbow Islands, have been strong inspirations for this project.

K so it was started last Monday, and we've got the title screen / loading screen / pause screen and game over screens in place. The first baddie took his first steps yesterday, just a nice and simple back and forth bad guy.
Last Friday I was tied up installing Eclipse etc. on a new machine ( I'm office bound til the end of June, so all the joy of travelling in London, and none of the getting up whenever I like that was the beauty of freelancing at home ) so I got very little done, but made a start on the shooting ( Hearts, what else ).
Yesterday after the baddie was put in there it was then time to enable you to shoot him, which worked a treat. The longer you hold down the fire button the bigger your shot. Little shots just stop him in his tracks, but if you save up a max shot you can trap him in a heart.
From there a collision routine was added to test for pushing the heart ( Using a couple of nice and simple circle-2-circle checks ) and a further one for jumping on the heart, which will make you jump that little bit higher.

( A core feature of the game will be to trap baddies, move them whilst encased in a heart, and then jump on them to reach those out of the way platforms / collectables )

Today so far has been spent giving the bullets a range. We came up with the issue of the lower powered shots just stunning the baddies, and then in theory the player could just sit there shooting the crap out of one baddie to earn a hi-score. Ok, you'd have to be pretty anal to do it, but it does happen ( Some people just love seeing their name in lights on a hs-table ), so we've decided that the more powerful the shot the shorter it travels before floating upwards and exploding ( In a shower of hearts naturally ).
Joy of joys first time of testing I stood on a platform beneath a baddie and fired a big shot, for it to rise up and trap the baddie above me. Things like that never ever work first time.

It's not really fixed the problem of anal gamers just shooting away, it's just opened more game play avenues. We're thinking it'd be cool that if after x number of shots the baddie mutated, like in the old Mr Do! games for anyone as old as me, so that's what the rest of today is going to be spent on, making the cute baddie Panda a nasty sod when he gets angry.

Hopefully more tomorrow.

Squize.

Whilst we've been talking about tinkering with Flash on the Wii this month, we've got this handy link that Amy kindly sent us to pimp here, and we appreciate the art of pimping, so here it is

how-to-homebrew-wii-games-73-tips-tutorials-and-resources

A really excellent list of links which should be a good starting point for anyone wanting to look into the subject more.

I promise we'll be back to normal service soon, it's just that things are waiting for sign off behind the scenes so we're like a swan, serene on the surface but hidden away it's a flurry of activity.
One way or another, there will be at least one new game posted here before the 14th of Feb ( Guess what the theme of that will be ).

Squize.

So I had a long night yesterday, finishing off some unloved project that I've been delaying for some time now and as some sort of personal reward for being so brave I played a bit with my "play media on the wii" idea...

I had written the service for getting drives, dirs and files a few days ago (don't try this on real a webserver :) ), so I *just* had to do some flash frontend ...

Oh well, I should have known better ....

To give you a basic idea of what I was thinking of, here's a (sized) image:


I thought that fiddling with scrollbars would be a no-go on the Wii, so I came up with the idea of a dragable "canvas".
So you can click on a drive, which opens the folder list for it, clicking on a folder... you get the point.

Now here starts the tricky part ...
Once I had the drive list done, I noticed that it lists floppy disks and CD/DVD drives, too. I either had to give the drive type when getting the list from the service or don't show them (in both cases this means to mess with the service's code - that for quick and easy).
The next thing I noticed that the service currently doesn't care if a directory is hidden or not (and if it is hidden, I might need to know in my flash file).

Well, it doesn't end there (of course not), because I might need to know some more about the files inside a folder (size is obvious) - oh and what is if there are some more files/folders (say you have a folder with 1000 images or mp3s) ...

That clearly killed my idea of a quick solution, I'll have to heavily modify the service (although I had to do that anyway) and there are some quite important things to consider for the swf (I may have to drop the drag idea).

We will see.

nGFX

It's so long ago I've posted something that it's untrue. It may be because there was nothing much to say during that time, that is projects not really game related or so absurdly NDA protected that even to mention the general direction would be ... well expensive.

You surely remember my last (!) post where I have a bit of a rant about the media capabilities of the Wii (still no games on it for me, though). Right now this neat piece of hardware sits beneath the TV left of it's bigger and way more often used brother the xbox 360. All I do with it (you remember: playing Wii Sports after a lot of coding) is using it as TV based web browser.

Webbrowser ... well that brought the idea.

(OK, that and the fact that we had some friends here and wanted to look at some photos from the last party. One of them (a "no gamer") asked if there would be some music to play along and I had to admit that it's not working anymore (due to the glorious photo chanel update))

So inspired be the fact that I got the 360 playing my mp3/fotos/movies from my pc in no time, I started to set up a small test environment webpage on my local IIS to see if I could use the browser to browse my pc's hdd. And of course it works.

So I wrapped the output with some XML and viola I had a flash 7 swf that I could use to browse the directories on my pc. Well done.

The only drawback atm is the fact that there has to be a webserver running ... I guess you can't convince most people to install an IIS on their PC to get some media on the Wii. After a few minutes of thinking it came to me that I could write my own - or better integrate cassini (an open source micro webserver) - to host the services for the Wii ...

Well, let's see where that leads to ...

nGFX

[edit] just found this while hunting for informations about the Wii browser flashplayer ...
http://my.opera.com/[..]flash-7-and-not-8-or-9

Exactly one year ago today Olli posted on this here blog. Ok, the post was rather bland, and re-reading it now I've got to be honest that it makes me taste sick in the back of my mouth, but it's not ( Thankfully ) the content which matters, it's the intent behind it.

Yeah, as much as I enjoy being a shit to Olli on a public blog, the real reason for this post is to say that GYW is 1 today. We made it.

I can't actually believe that Olli has put up with a year of me saying "Yeah, it's great, perfect almost... but it'd be kinda cool if it did this..." without tracking me down and killing me.

We're really proud of what we've achieved so far, we've got a pretty cool portfollio of work built up in our first year, and we're both even more buzzing about what's to come.

The site went live just the other day and we're both greased and ready to face the terrible twos, so let's have it.

Squize.

Well I've been freelancing for over a year now, and GYW must be due it's first birthday, and what with it being the start of a new year I thought it'd be cool to look back at what's gone before so we can look to the future.

Well I was going to do a review of the year just gone, but time's against me, so I may be lame and do it tomorrow. Only a day late.

As regular readers will know finding the performance drop in the official release player compared to the beta's was as welcome a surprise as waking up next to your mum, so I thought I'd try and be a bit pro-active, rather than just bitching.

Firstly I posted at http://www.kaourantin.net/ although my comment wasn't posted ( 1 about the performance drop was at least, although no response there ), so I posted a comment over at Emmy Huang's blog, and Emmy was excellent and put up with my slightly wingy emails about the subject with some really helpful replies.

The up-shot is,

"@ Squize - I've filed a bug - you're right."

So the good news is it's on a bug list now, rather than just being moaned about by us game devs.

There seems to be quite a few bugs with the latest release. Normally I wouldn't even care to look, Flash player bugs are normally just things you stumble across as you work, so I don't know if there's more with this latest build than normal due to the big changes going on under the hood.
Looking at it positively if there are a lot of bugs we may get another update before F10 rather than people just coming up with work arounds.

Have a good New Year everyone.

Squize.

We just want to wish all our readers a Merry Christmas, and what the hell, a Happy New Year too.

Have a good one, and we'll be back soon with a cheeky platform game and maybe a slightly ego driven review of the past years output.

Squize.