Archive for October, 2009

Planetoids-Scores!

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

As I’m sure most of you have noticed I’ve just released my latest small title; Planetoids. But that’s not what this post is about. As a part of it’s development I have added a long wanted feature for StudioFortress: a highscore board!

You can now view the high scores of any game using a highscore board underneath the game, next to the embed form.

planetoids_see_highscoresThis is step towards making StudioFortress more complete as a gaming site and has clear benefits for users. Being able to record your scores, and to see the records of other users scores, encourages competition which in turn encourages people to play games more. There is a clear benefit from playing a second time because it might put you at the top of the highscore board.

The whole system has been built for re-use to allow multiple games so over the next few months I plan to revisit some of the previous games and add highscore boards to these as well. Space Snake and Pong Out are two that are especially score based, so a highscore board is almost a basic requirement for them.

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The SF Library

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

Today I uploaded the first technical demo for StudioFortress, Twilight. It’s a small implementation of a the Boids artificial life environment, and it’s also the first public demo that uses the latest version of my new library. The SF library.

I’ve been slowly building it over the last year and an early version is used for first 5 games on StudioFortress, but this version is built with the aim of distributing it soon. There is a big difference between building something for personal use and building it to production level. When released it’s going to be hosted as an open-source project on Project Kenai with my technical demos as examples. Others can then use and contribute to the library as they see fit.

There are however lots and lots of free game libraries for graphics and middle wear out there, so how does mine differ? First it’s aimed solely at rapid development for small 2d games. Second is that I found it quite difficult to find game libraries that did more then just graphics plus a few utility classes. There are some out there for Java, but they don’t quite do it how I want it. It’s more of a framework then a library designed to give you a structure you can use for all of your games.

More information will be released later closer to when it’s uploaded.

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