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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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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September 18th, 2009
The games displayed on StudioFortress can now be embedded in your site. At the bottom of each game you’ll now find the ‘HTML Embed Code’ box. Copy the HTML stored in this box and then paste it where you want the applet to appear on your site, just like you would when sharing a YouTube video!
The embed code is an object tag that embeds a special page built specifically to host the applet. This mean you don’t need any faffing about with any Applet HTML and any future changes to the applets HTML are automatically passed along to your site.
This is a feature I originally thought about adding months ago when I first started construction on the site but forgot until today. Now the site is all built it was pretty straight forward to add. It’s the sharing idea that I love about it, being able to push out content to users allowing them to use that content in any way they please. We’ve been able to do this trivially with pictures, music and video for a long time so why not games?
Finally please let me know if you experience any difficulties embedding applets by contacting me via the contact box on the About page. Then I can help and solve the issues quickly.
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August 30th, 2009
I’m about to go back to university to finish my degree in Computer Science. But before I go my mother had offered to make me a painting of anything I want, anything of my choosing. I very quickly knew I’d want to have the painting from a game, but which? Then it hit me, I’d take the image from one of my favourite all time games.
Here is the resulting painting along side the original image:
original
Click to see full sized version
I think it’s a very good job, especially considering how difficult a dark image like that is to copy. Can you tell which game it’s from?
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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.
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August 23rd, 2009
Welcome to my new blog: \o/ WOOOOOOOO! \o/
This is going to be a place where I will post various articles, thoughts, plans and general tid-bits that I write in conjunction with my site, StudioFortress.com.
To start I’m going to talk about ‘what is the point of StudioFortress?’. For a very long time I’ve been interested in game development but like many indie developers I have awesome ideas that get partly implemented and then just get passed around to a couple of friends (at most). I’ve always offered lots of advice on making games, but this is hard if you have nothing of your own to back it up (or more that you have nothing online to back it up). So the sites first aim is to be a place to host all my finished content. By building up a place with regular visitors exclusively showcasing my material; it helps to motivate me to show off all my work at a complete standard.
Note that last phrase ‘complete standard’. With StudioFortress setup and in place this is my second goal, to get projects finished. Not just so that the main gameplay is built and they don’t crash, but to a basic standard expected of any game. This is the 80% of the work that goes on top of the game to polish the graphics, sound, music, titles, endings, credits, splash screen, banners, instructions, high-scores, saving, multiplayer, player progression and much much more. Admittedly I haven’t added all the features listed in the previous sentence, but I intend to eventually add most of them as standard to all my titles.
Finally I intend one day (hopefully not too far away) to be producing games commercially. StudioFortress is my CV, resume and demo reel to show off my work so far: “You want examples? StudioFortress.com!” A ground work I can use to start building my own career or business on top.
But most of all, I hope people enjoy the games!
Joe.
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