Future « StudioFortress

Archive for the ‘Future’ Category

What am I working on? SSG!

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

It’s been a while since I’ve added some proper content to the site, so what have I been up to? Well mainly…

It’s a full complete remake of SpaceSnake. For a while I’ve wanted to do two things for my next project. First make a complete game, not another small 1 level title, and second base it on one of my existing games. SpaceSnake is easily the most popular game on my site. It’s also the only one of my games where someone other then me has blogged about it! Making it the obvious choice.

It’ll have multiple levels placed in a large universe map that you play across. On each level there will be achievements to complete in order to unlock the later levels for building a sense of progression and development. The levels will also get consistently harder as you go through to push your snake skills to the limit.

an early shot of the universe map

previewing a level on the universe map

When finished I am planning to try and get it released onto the (still quite recent) JavaStore. It might not be Steam or the Apple Store, but having a full game finished and published will give me more credability and gain experience I can use for the next title. In many ways it’s like I’m building my first game again because it needs to meet a standard at of completeness that is far higher then any other game I have built.

levels now overlap across the sides of the screen

There is still lots to do, so I’d better get back to work!

Posted in Future, Projects, Space Snake | 1 Comment »

Java, with no Java!

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

A few weeks ago I saw this video on channel 9 about the new hardware acceleration features being added to IE9. In reality this is nothing new, I saw news reports of Mozilla talking about adding similar to FireFox at least a year ago. But to see it in action brought home a certain reality.

One of the key selling points for me using Java for building my games is that all of the graphics are hardware accelerated, all thanks to the OpenGL bindings. There is no worry about the number of images I’m using and if they are transparent. With hardware accelerated support in the browser this advantage is just no longer true.

The need for hardware acceleration is apparent if you look at some of the current high-end HTML 5 examples. There are some great ones over at Chrome Experiments.com, my favourites being a partial port of Another World. But some others make my PC grind to a crawl. However even with HTML 5 I’d then have to write all my games in JavaScript; a language far more combersume and limiting then Java.

Java to JavaScript

So next enters GWT, the Google Web Toolkit. A library for building GUIs in JavaScript. But what’s interesting is that it’s written and compiled from Java code.

I’ve been playing around with it over the last few weeks and if you’ve got any experience using something like Swing then you’ll find it a synch to use. They have a nice page showing all of the core widgets included here, but even nicer is their mock mail app example.

The potential here is that I could write a game in Java and not have to rely on the plugin being present. But even if the graphics are hardware accelerated it’s still not the same without the OpenGL bindings. Lots of little effects and tweaks I’d like to perform for which I need them to be able to perform. The solution? WebGL!

GFX FTW!

A new standard in development (here) and already supported by FireFox, Chrome, Opera and Safari (although it seems only via experimental nightly builds on FF). This would be perfect and is what I’d love to be using. It’s just a shame that only one of those browsers has a percentage of users in the double digits, and even then nothing compared to IE. Until that changes it’s just not practical to use. That pains me.

Any JVM bugs users experience automatically get blamed on my games (that is where the user saw them occur). It’s also not as cross-platform as I once thought (although still excellent at this). I’d ultimately love to have the same environment I have right now, writing Java code that uses OpenGL, but with no actual Java backend. That would be heaven.

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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.

This 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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Incomming!

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Over at 2BeeGames.com they are running their 2nd Indie Game Development competition, which I am planning to enter. A quick look at the entries in their first competition and you can see the standard is very high, so I don’t expect to be coming very high up. But I do intend to make my most complete, fun and advanced game yet.

So what am I planning to build? Like the rest of my games so far it’ll be another clone, this time it’s based on Missile Command. The difference I’m making is to make it more of a shoot-em-up with different types of weapons to use and enemies to destroy. I’ve settled on a few but unique weapons;

and some enemies:

Although there are three types of missiles they all work completely differently. For example the smart missiles target the remaining people on the ground and travel horizontally to avoid bullets. The trident missile explodes into a spray of miniature missiles before impact.

So far the whole game is comming along nicely. The game mechanics, levels, graphics and background are all built. The only big job left is sound which requires rewriting all my sound library code. Currently all sound and music must be fully downloaded with the game before it can be played, which is bad for one that will be running in the browser. Instead I want the music to be streamed in real-time which will allow a much faster start up time.

Joe.