Last friday, I got married, to the wonderful Kayla! She’s so awesome and the day was absolutely incredible. Sorry for interrupting the game development flow (which will now start to be more regular) but I’m so terribly in love with my new wife! (yes, soppy, once in a while)
I get a few emails each month asking me about what process I took to get “so good” at coding. It’s really appreciated but doesn’t really make sense if you take a look at my code.
Here’s today’s response:
Dude, Mr Glass is my father, I’m Kev
I’m really not that skilled at coding, I’ve just been doing it a long time. Like you I started young (I was about 5) and now I’m 37. So I’ve been coding about 30 years. It’s mostly about the amount of time you spend doing it, but it’s not a short process at all.A few things I’ve found over the years:1) Morale – theres only one way to keep going, because you enjoy it. If you don’t stop. If you do, you’ll keep going rain or shine.2) English – make sure your english is good, having a good vocabulary and knowing how to abuse the language makes coding easier. It also makes it easier to read later.3) Technology – pick one and stick with it. There’s always another technology coming out and by all means play and learn – but take the decision to change your main technology very very seriously.4) Learn by doing – don’t be afraid to swap projects, to experiment to learn. The fastest and best way to learn anything is to sit there and “just do it”.5) Respect – always respect everyone you interact with. There are many many bright people out there that will help you if you ask nicely. Don’t expect them to, and don’t get mad if they don’t, but you’ll get much further faster if you keep respecting everyone.6) Life – don’t let code be the only thing in your life. Without all the other things going on you don’t get stimulated for innovation. You need to expose your mind to other things in the world to be able to see where technology fits in.Best of luck to you,Cheers,Kev
Just very very very busy with day to day things. Legends 2 is ticking along but as always I got obsessed with a smaller game that I might have a chance of implementing with my spare time at the moment.
So I guess it’s official, I’m starting to work on Legends of Yore 2 – which I’m subtitling Rise of the Darklings. I’ll post some concept shots etc in a minute but I’d like to talk about the process I’ve been taking during the interim for a minute.
As you’ve seen if you read my blog or follow on twitter I’ve been knocking out lots of little game demos, this is how I work. I try stuff, lots of stuff, over and over again until I feel comfortable I’ve got everything down. In this case the projects were:
Voxel Based Engine – Experimenting with different graphical styles
Carubloc – Looking at LibGDX across platforms
Matchnik – To look a procedural puzzle generation
Turn Based Platformer – To look at turn based mechanics with a bit more action
Mega Melon Adventure – To play with gamepads and the OUYA
Sub-pixel Sprite Animation – Obviously more tailored towards Legends, just needed to find a way to generate enough graphics.
There’s actually been a few others that never saw the light of day, including a very random bouncing game. This is I’ve come to understand my process. I experiment a lot before I actually go anywhere. It’s not intentional but I can see the pattern looking back. I’m hoping this is going to make Legends of Yore 2 a better game.
So, enough waffle, Legends of Yore 2 – so far I’m coding and spriting like crazy. Here’s the concept art that I’m currently working for. This time it’s all my own art – I intend to license some music/sounds but everything else should be from me:
The plan for the game is do something similar to last time while fixing as many of the things that I learnt along the way. So the game is intended to be epic in size and scope – hopefully bigger than last time. Things I liked last time:
So there were a bunch of things that I did last time but I want to be better this time:
Finally bits that I want to add that I didn’t have last time:
So.. yep.. on the way. As always and especially with last game I appreciated all the player feedback and ideas I can get. I’ll be running graphics competitions and other things (oooer) as we go along.
Hope you come along for the ride!
So, I love pixelly graphics. It’s pretty obvious from my games that not only is it the only thing I can draw it’s also the main thing I like to use. I always scale them up 3 or 4 times and get that big clunky retro feel.
However, I’ve never really been happy with the movement in the sprites – specially how long it takes me to do animations. I was looking at Cube World and thinking about the difference in resolution of the character voxels to the rest of the world. Just because you’re working in a theme doesn’t mean you can’t bend it to suit what you want!!!
At that point I’m starting to think above my pixel creations, what if I applied the same logic there. When I scale up my sprites each pixel has 3×3 actual pixels so in the animation there’s room to move parts of the sprite at a higher resolution – neato! Hmm, but how to do I allow myself one resolution for animation and one resolution for pixels? (I want to clamp myself to the right retro feel). Skeletal Animation!
So I rapidly take my existing sprites, rip them into separate limbs and body parts and re-spritesheet them up. A little bit of coding later and I have a skeletal model that allows me to rig them all together!
So now I’m back to my original sprites only with them being built out of smaller pieces. That in itself is awesome since it means I can create lots of variations for a game I’m planning on writing shortly.
Next, what about animation? Once the links between bones are defined and the skins attached all I need to do is apply transforms. Excellent! I can even rotate tiny pixelly weapons to give nice stylistic effects! Me being me, the next think I do is build a Java Swing based tool to support test out different configurations and animations:
So, having defined animations against the bones, I try out a few skin combinations and what do I end up with? Well, awesomeness thats what!
Check out my current cast:
Here’s some tips if you want to write a Java API thats really hard work to use. Doubly so if you want to hit it with the “object oriented for evar!” ugly stick.
We all love object structures and we all love “beautiful” code. However when you’re writing an API it’s about matching the use cases and make the developer productive. Please don’t make them jump through hoops for the sake of your “elegance”.
Another game experiment starting with me wanting to try out turn based platformers. Could you write a game that was platform based but had the turn based nature of Legends of Yore. So I set to work:
The other thing that I wanted to try out was procedural generation for platformer levels – this turns out to be reasonable to implement once you represent everything as a graph. The significant difference between platform generation and dungeon generation is that links between nodes/rooms/platforms aren’t always bi-directional – i.e. you can fall from a platform to another but that doesn’t guarantee you can jump back up. I’ll probably write a blog entry about that later.
Anyway, heres the current state as a web based games (required WebGL), infinite exploration – not much gameplay at the moment:
Treasure – Turn Based Procedurally Generated Platformer
I’ve started a little indie game review site over at Mash the Pad. The intention is to review games from a developer/cynic point of view and keep things honest and constructive. If you have any games you’d like to get reviewed or previewed just send a contact over from the site.
Let me know what you think!
So, still waiting on my OUYA but decided to improve the instructions on using a MOGA game pad in Legends of Yore. You can now get an image depicting controls for both types of pad by pushing the MOGA labelled button in the game.
Update coming to you soon!
So I wrote that daft Super Cute Kitten Killer thing as an example of games that should not be made right? So a few people asked for actual game play! Talk about missing the point!
Right, so now, there’s some minor game – you have to kill every kitten every time, three misses and the game is over. Kittens game faster and faster as time goes on.
Let me know as always.
