There are 6 whole levels of putty challenge in game to play now! An in game level editor and a walk through tutorial. Go on, give it a go!

You can either Webstart it or play it as a slightly beta LWJGL Applet

Look out for the bonus typos.

Off on holiday next week, to the sea side. I'm really looking forward to it and believe it or not, no laptop, no internet, no code!

So, next week, might be a bit quiet.

Slick has just been moved onto LWJGL 2.0b1, which gives us access to the new awesome applet stuff. Essentially there is no long some hack to render to a Java canvas, at the native layer the good old native display is connected to the canvas directly as a child - rendering smack over it, lovely.

What this means is we're starting to see much more stable LWJGL applets, with fantastic performance (going all the way up to JME based stuff) and of course a new focus on getting the download size smaller for applet use. It's all a good thing I guess :)

Anyway.. since we just moved.. I thought the prototype could be tried as an applet. You can view it over here.

Many thanks to kappaOne for some great tips and scripts to make the whole thing look a bit better than just an applet splatted on a page.

1) It's prototype, the game might not be perfect :)
2) The applet code is still new, last few kinks being worked out, be warned.
3) THE LEVEL IS POSSIBLE AS IT STANDS! If you see something that seems to stop you, it's probably part of the puzzle.

The 3rd prototype is now playable, so if you have a moment give it a quick go. The level thats available was just a random test case, but is completable and does provide some challenge. It looks a bit like this:

You can play it via the prototype's best friend, webstart. It's just a quick mash up of the idea done in a simplified way, any feedback appreciated by the normal channels.

The putty prototype is continuing. Prototype #3 (see previous entry) is being refined to use a couple of new features and have a goal.

I've just been testing out #1 again (the one with physics and morphable shapes). It's the only one that really floats my boat so I think I may go back and try and solidify the engine so the response on morphing is crisp. Still can't quite see the game but I definitely preferred the full control - at least thats how I feel today :)

In other news, never do anything but assignment in a constructor. It's bad, and wrong and evil - especially when you then try to convert that system to make use of a IoC Container.

To improve stability I've gone to a tile based system. I'm trying to simplify the game down a bit so I've focused on the merging and morphing, removing the different shapes.

Another quick prototype is done, it's still not "fun", so I think I'm going to go back and try something with changeable shapes but no merging... or something..

Webstart Demo

Putty, it's a good name for what I'm coding atm. You have little blocks off something that can merge with each other and form other shapes. It's putty.

Unfortunately theres a very popular telnet/ssh client called Putty, so as names for a game go, it's not good. Damn that useful and free tool!.

So, whats a good alternative name fans?

Click on the image for the full thing..

You can control any of the blobs, they can morph into different shapes, they can combine with each other (ok, thats doesn't work yet).

Phys2D really doesn't like you changing the shapes underneath it :) Interesting stuff tho, might have to skip pure physics, morphing shapes into spaces they shouldn't fit doesn't always work well.

Try the buggy demo to see how bad it gets :) (click to select a puttyion, click to move them when in tube form, press 1 to morph through different shapes).

Some sort of reach the goal on each level thing should be done, but the space trading game still looms :)

She's still ill, or at least sad. There doesn't seem to be anything we can do to cheer her up and the throat is still keeping her up. I haven't slept properly for a week now. She's generally better, but still not eating.

The last two days have been long work days, around 11 hours a day. Finally work is coming back up, I'm starting to get somewhere - but the lack of sleep is starting to make it hard to focus. Understand that I spend a lot of the night coding anyway, so it's not that unusual for me to get 4 hours sleep and be fine. Right now, it's just not even reaching that stage. Still, at least I've made some progress this week.

Now, home stuff is really suffering. I've done no game stuff since the weekend, apart from update the spec for the *big* game. Now I check the Slick forums, and while people seem to be using it theres a definite trend away - I guess thats to be expected given how long it's been going.

What I need is a little game to write now, tonight, to get me awake and alive again, but the lack of sleep just isn't letting me think of anything. Time to hack..

So, the new game idea is a space trading game based around PSI 5 Trading Company. In some ways similar to Elite but without the complicated to implement bits ;) I'm guessing given my track record it won't go anywhere, but it's fun to think about.

You're a space trader in a sci-fi universe filled with corrupt corporations, planets, mines, pirates and all that good stuff. You're task is to fly between stations buying and selling cargo, or completing missions to earn money. This is of course online, with a bunch of other people flying round the same universe who you might run into on your travels - or on sub-space chat.

So what makes this game not Elite? Well, primarily the way you control the ship. You don't. You hire a crew who you order to take actions. Each of the crew has can be viewed as an RPG character. They have a level in each of the crew posts and can be leveled by using them in your ship to carry out missions and cargo runs. You can read more on the spec page which I'm slowly filling in.