Game | Simple Path Studios

A capstone course required for CompSci majors at RPI is Software Design and Documentation. Throughout the semester students engage in the process of building a piece of software that has little to no limitations. This provides a foundation where computer scientists can let their minds unwind and imagine exciting new applications to construct.

Group focused software development is at the core of this class. In my group we decided to make an image editor that doesn’t use a mouse. This little project started as my brain child, but was quickly taken in a different direction than what I’d envisioned.

In my mind, there existed a program where I could execute a short number of keystrokes and quickly generate decent looking graphical mocks for my 2D game projects and edit images pixel by pixel. Since starting documentation and development, we are instead working on an application that doesn’t even support raster graphics anymore.

I’m working with a group of very bright students, but this semester is teaching me a lot about project management. At Apprenda, we are all allowed to some extent the opportunity to be cowboy coders. Anyone with an interesting idea can dive into their project and show off how useful it is. Due to this development lifestyle, I was not prepared to properly cast the vision of the application I’d imagined and will now be left to develop it on my own time.

In other news, the input management system is developed for Bombard360. I will shortly be moving forward to tests on the XBox now that the meat and potatoes of the underlying game framework is complete.

I’ve been more time trying to figure out how to make games in C++. Up until now, the focus has been learn C++ OO principles and grow a game as I learn. I found that teaching myself how to do these things was frustrating compared to in Java, so I quickly lost steam on the project. Now, I’ve had another game idea that sounds ecstasy inducing to produce, and will be using that as the motivation to learn these things. It seems like its 1 step forward and two steps back with every idea I try to implement in C++ (as opposed to the time it took in Java), but the performance gains are impressive enough to tempt me.

Multiple flights are going on next week, so that should be enough time for me to be locked away in a cabin pumping out code. One of those flights is for an interview at Microsoft. As of yet, there aren’t specifics on with whom I’m interviewing. Still looking forward to the trip out west nonetheless.

The entire experience of preparing to interview with them and trying to get this understanding of C++ to a level of competency is very eye opening. The more I’ve learned about programming the more I feel there is still to learn. Hopefully my excitement to never stagnate never fades because life is pretty exciting in this state.

9:36 PM

Every week for the past month I get an idea to blog about but cannot find the time to so do. In an effort to break my currently hectic mindset I am going to spend the next few hours developing, if nothing else, the concept for a new game. I want to demo an SFML based C++ game for a couple of friends that want to learn more about gaming. Time to start brainstorming, and open up GIMP!

12:04 AM

Looked into using Sprites in SFML and found a simple collision detection class built around SFML Sprites. This should serve as a nice based for me to extend in the future. I’m also attempting to build a C++ based game from the command line and Emacs alone (never before attempted this). I took a 45 minute break to take my girlfriend home and then peruse Reddit, so now I’m getting back to navigating the world of SFML sprite manipulation!

9:11 AM

I just woke up. How long have I been asleep? No idea. All I remember is that last night was reallly…really fun. The last thing I was working on was a simple makefile to speed up compilation, but I was running into linking errors. I might do this again tonight and record a screen capture during the process.

Junior year is fast approaching, but I’ve been away now for almost an entire week in Sea Isle City, NJ. The ocean every day and lots of relaxation have been the main itinerary. Thanks to a lack of ability to sleep this morning, I’m going through and updating a few more aspects of the website. Once that’s done I’ll be doing some more work with the next game. It doesn’t look like I’m going to make the Kongregate contest deadline, but the MochiMedia and FGL contests are still available candidates.

The next project now has a fully functional UI the navigate between different states and the beginning architecture of the main gameplay engine. Looking forward to posting an update soon with more explicit details.

Back before Lyrics Lasso existed I had taken a quick look at Flixel and tried to make some simple games to get a feel for how it worked. Sadly, I lacked the time and technological understanding required to fully utilize this great tool when it was first made public. Thankfully, this past three month period at Apprenda has given me more time to program than I’ve had in the two years since I began attending RPI.

Thanks largely in part to the many hundreds of hours spent programming this summer I’ve re-opened my interest in developing with Flixel. I’m not looking to piggy-back off of the samples floating around like many of the Flixel based games I’ve seen, but utilize the underlying infrastructure to handle things like state management and UI components so that I can focus on the game I want to create.

After playing with Flixel for a single night, it appears to fit the bill nicely. It handles everything I need from an ActionScript framework for my next project. Currently there are three concurrently running Flash game development contests, all co-sponsored by Adobe. I am planning on releasing different editions of this game for each contest. More details on what the exact gameplay is like will be released closer to game completion. However, the entire roadmap is finished and much up the functionality and UI are mocked up. I’ve also already constructed the XML data handling classes that the game will require.

With all that said, I haven’t yet made any more updates to the website. I’m in the process of redoing the old logo from scratch so that I have a nice vector-based formatted image to fall back on in the future should I run into host migration issues like what happened when moving from IX. The website is a lower priority for me, but I MIGHT get around to fully updating everything before school starts. One of the higher priorities is seeing what data can be saved from the corrupted database export files I have from the old site.

Lastly, I have some more improvements that I’d like to make to Lyrics Lasso. That might prove a project worth pulling in some friends from RPI once the semester kicks off. Time will tell.

Being a Cowboy Coder in an Industrial World

Grasshopper

SFML – Game Log #1

Beach Before College

Mobile Flash Game + Flixel = Awesome

^_^ ADS ^_^