Shawn And Brooke :

RubyWeekend #3

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:06:00 -0400

Voting Post on official rubygame forumsrubygame.org/forums/viewtopic.php

#1) Ant Frenzy
#2) A Tiny World
#3) Mite Makes Right

Ant Frenzy was my wife's favorite. Quick action and easy controls, but still very challenging.

A Tiny World was fun in a squish little guys and watch the blood splatter kinda way. The physics on the house blocks felt a little off and the blocks could have squished the little guys too. Overall I liked the game and the sound effects were great!

Mite Makes Right ran a little choppy for some reason, but was such a fun idea that I had to vote for it.

I didn't vote for Droplet, not because it wasn't a game, but because it didn't feel complete. I am apparently the only voter that thinks simulations count as games. The sounds were kinda fun, but to just be able to grow and kill trees didn't feel like enough to play with. I do however love the fact that Jacius was able to successfully navigate the unexplored waters of Gamebox. I received great feedback from both Jacius and kiba on this contest, most of which has already been added to Gamebox.

I felt that 72 hours was perfect. I was able to sleep full nights, keep the wife happy, and still hit the beach and go surfing. Because of all that, I found myself sweating in the last 40 minutes to complete and my level design suffered because of it. I definitely think the games came out better because of the open art/music policy. Being that nobody actually participated in teams, I feel we could probably drop that clause and have individuals compete for the next RubyWeekend.

This being my first contest helping to run and first to participate in, I think it turned out well. Look forward to the next one!

Here is my timeline during the competition:

Timeline:
Thu Jun 25 17:43:02 PDT 2009
- idea FreeRadicals
- research started
- got initial github account
- got atom actor on the stage

Fri Jun 26 09:21:04 PDT 2009
- two bug fix releases of gamebox
- got mouse clicking/holding setup

Fri Jun 26 16:57:23 PDT 2009
- got electron rotation working
- added free sound effects from flashkit.com

Fri Jun 26 19:16:36 PDT 2009
- got bouncing electrons
- atoms now flag themselves as inert
- atoms attract electrons

Sat Jun 27 12:14:18 PDT 2009
- added scoring for inert atoms

Sat Jun 27 15:30:33 PDT 2009
- cleaned up nucleus drawing
- added element abbr to inert elements

Sat Jun 27 15:50:59 PDT 2009
- added loading of actual levels

Sun Jun 28 17:00:37 PDT 2009
- added timer
- inert atoms now repel
- fixed score passover issue
- added intro/help "level"
- added credits "level"
- submitted final w/ only 3 levels :(

The new game created: github.com/shawn42/free-radicals/tree/master

Snelps gets a level editor

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 11:17:00 -0500

After more than a year of work on the game (wow it's been that long), Snelps finally has a level editor for doing the tile layout portion of map editing.

rake edit

will bring up the editor, you will be prompted for a map name to load. You select the tile group and tile they want to "paint" with. Then, you click all over the map to stamp that tile all over.

To select transitional tiles (ie from sand to water), you just click on sand, then shift-click on water. This will bring up the tileset of transitions from sand to water. To turn on the grid you use the G key and to save you use the S key. Saving isn't quite finished yet, so it will just save to temp.yml in the maps directory. This editor should really help Snelps graphics designer and map builder, Sirgazil.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

TF2 Guide updated.

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:42:00 -0500

My work in progress Team Fortress 2 guide has been updated.

Its Cold Season again

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:57:00 -0500

A four day run of working on a new game, cold season, has resulted in new knowledge of chipmunk physics and git/github.

Cold Season:

Cold Season's goal is to infect a kid and keep him home from school. You (the bacteria) must infect all the red cells, while avoiding the white blood cells. It has unique and fun controls in a constantly moving and flowing environment. Levels are defined in SVG format, allowing for any SVG editor, such as Inkscape to operate as a level editor. I would like to thank Karlin Fox for remastering the graphics, and David Crosby for lending me SVG loading code.

Why:

I started writing Cold Season to try out the NetBeans ruby IDE. I wanted to write something small and fun that could be coded quickly. I also was looking for an outlet to play with physics in ruby. As I built Cold Season, I realized how many similarities existed between Cold Season and Snelps. Looking at what I was able to pull in from Snelps, I decided that when Cold Season is a little more stable (mode changes/story/main menu stuff), I will extract the common elements into a "new game" template and try to release that as a gem. Much in the same way rails was extracted from BaseCamp, I want to extract the commonalities into gamebox. This would allow a user to do:

gem install gamebox

gamebox zappy

This will create a zappy game with the basic scaffolding of a game setup very simularly to Cold Season. There would then be rake tasks for creating stand-alone apps. (exe/.apps/linux binaries - including dependencies). This would all be configurable. Do you want keyboard, mouse, networking, sound, etc. This will be much like environment.rb in rails land.

What about Snelps:

Snelps is continuing its development. I just needed a break from large scale RTS game development. sirgazil is doing amazing work on the graphics. Take a look at this mockup he did:

Stay tuned for more info