Well, that was was pretty easy once I got over the initial hurdle of having GL state destroyed by shadow mapping. Rendering and input both seem to work ok with this first hack at using Thingle in JME.

Cool beans:

Next, um.. pretty motivating scenes :)

Here I go again on my own... going down the only road I've ever known...

Better performance than last time it seems, go JME! :)

Damn, pixel art is hard. I wanted to give it another go - my past attempts have not been good enough for me to even post. So an evening has gone by, following a few tutorials and trying to design a character I want for a future game Pobo - Galactic Explorer. After hours and hours of pushing pixels onto the screen I get this:

Static and walking. It's um, good for me and probably good enough. Does make me realize quite how much time and effort artists put into these things. Kudos guys.

There's a new version of Putty Puzzle up. It contains:

- Levels filled up to 36. Some might get swapped yet, was just nice to see the board full.
- 6 new level features to play with
- White putty is now transparent to help hint it might not be normal Smiley
- Some visual tweaks to add a little polish
- Bunch of bug fixes (probably introduced some too Smiley)

It's late, and I'm tired. 2.30am and for better or worse I've just put up the new version of Putty Puzzle. It has:

- 18 Levels - 6 of which are optionally tutorials (frank will help you out if you ask).
- Instructions Page
- Lots of bug fixes
- Some usability fixes
- A few new level features
- Undo during the level
- Undo, restart and quit visible options

No apologies for bugs and/or typos. I've still got a lot of work to do. Thanks to the people who contributed levels.

When working in a team of developers, or even when hoping to succeed with a single developer project it's important to have an overall common shared concept of what the final game is going to be like. Of course, this being games development, this is open to change during the creative process, but the specification of the game describes what the game is, how it's going to work, whats going to make it fun and what's going to keep people coming back. This is especially true when working with distributed group of contributors.

Before the Java folks start jumping around, I'm not talking about software design/specification here. For small games it's often not worth worrying about software design documentation since the majority of it is just following known patterns that most capable developers don't really have to think about. For larger ones software specifications are still only largely interesting to the developers. The game specification sets the mood/feel of the game which should feed into every aspect (art, sound, development, etc.)

Anyway, this came up due to yet another conincidence. Yesterday someone was asking about how to write them, and today I was hopefully joining a team thats developing a game which needs a specification. So, while I'm not terribly proud of them here's the examples I have of some game specification:

Two reasonably complete ones from a while ago :-

Retailopia

Battle Scape Armada

And one that I posted recently thats still in progress :-

Into the Expanse

They might not be great but at least they might stir some mental juices.

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. Please note the game is still very much a work in progress, there will be plenty of bugs.

EDIT: There's a new pure Java applet available, it's much smaller and is probably more compatible for running in the browser.

EDIT 2: The game has been updated. Lots of levels have been moved down and a bunch of optional tutorials have been added. Please note that most of the previous comments we be slightly out of sync with the game.

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.

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.