Cyborg Central

So, after a cursory examination into game writing libraries for Javascript, I picked crafty.js, which seemed fairly easy to learn and well-written. I'm banging together some code for EDS, and will be publishing what I code when it seems to work. There's a link to the current code on the game page.

Also, the son of a friend of mine asked me to start working on another game, this one being a physics-based skateboarding game. I'll be putting up a page for that as well.

Today's Firefox update for android has added support for full-screen html5 apps, so I need to look into how to write my apps so they can use this mode. :-)

Due to some recent revelations about direction at Canonical, I've started to worry that if I continue writing in C and SDL that the games I'm working on will never see the light of day, so I'm going to switch over to HTML5 and Javascript.

To do that I have to dust off the ol' web developer books, and for practice I'm throwing together stupid little booger-pages like this one.

Maybe what that means is, once I get my games moved over, people could also play them as they're being developed. o_o;

Edit: please don't draw dicks with it.

I've been ignoring my game lately, mainly due to an enormous backlog of Humble Bundle games. Now that I've beaten Aquaria and Waking Mars, I took some time today to write code to enable animation from a script. So far, it's working pretty well. I probably should have picked a day that I was a lot more awake than I am, though. :P

I debated the relative benefits of splitting frames up into separate surfaces versus having a single large surface for the entire frameset, and I ended up going for individual surfaces. The memory use of one versus the other is relatively the same, the blit speed should be the same, but one large frameset requires more work on the user's end to make a working animation.

The other bit I've been doing is some simple code to get basic information in and out of TCL code from the C engine, such as what image an element is going to display, and the location the element is at. I've probably got just enough brainpower to do an image translation function for motion, but we'll see when I give out.

Since I'm posting most of my game-writing updates on CC, I decided it might be nice to turn on cross-posting for LJ and Twitter.

I have no idea what this thing will do if I post pictures or video, so your mileage may vary on these...

Whoever it is that is spamming my comments, please stop. I'm never going to approve any of that crap so you're just wasting your time.

I've continued working on the Phantom engine and have added the first steps to support sound and in-game music. You can now load sounds, play them back at any time, and specify how many repetitions the sound should make (including infinite repeat).

I'm currently adding a new animation type for doing text-based stuff, like dialog boxes, menus, and overhead labels (like are used for characters in Guild Wars or PSU). Since this also requires loading and specifying fonts, it's going to take some work. When it's done I'll post a video of the title screen for EDS. :)

No screenshots this time either (though, if I can figure out how to capture a video, I may well do that later!) but Phantom has gotten basic animation and it works wonderfully. The most interesting thing about it is how you can apply multiple animations to a screen element, with the end result being determined by all of their effects put together. :) So far, there are two basic animation types:

• Direct control, which will do U/D/L/R controls on an element based on user input.
• Timed animation, which allows you to specify a vector of motion, a duration, and how many frames between "steps" of each motion.

What I've used this for in the demo is having a clickable item that triggers a few screen changes, with elements sliding across and down the screen in response to the click. Next will be collision and "buttons" - and then I will write a very simple space invaders demo to show how you could use these features to make a simple game. :)

Sony is bringing out a new touch-screen Vaio tablet with a slide-out keyboard called the Vaio Duo 11. It has Windows 8 but I want to blow that away and put Ubuntu on it. Even if I have to go to war with EFI to do so. :D

This is gonna be awesome...