Tag snelps, everything about snelps

Snelps gets a level editor 2

Posted by Shawn Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:17:00 GMT

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!

Its Cold Season again

Posted by Shawn Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:57:00 GMT

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: