May 30, 2010
Vacation Time
I'll be in Florida next week, starting tomorrow. But I plan on
tinkering with Bwock on my laptop when I'm at the hotel. In the
meantime, here's hoping that contributers start to appear!
May 26, 2010
Bwock Jump-Start
After a year of actual work and learning in a
programming environment, I have decided to come back and try this thing
again with a more professional attitude. I am persuing the Bwock
project, my block-pushing puzzler which has sat in a playable state for
ages. The source code is over at Google Code and I am actively working
on it. Yay.
For more information, please visit the "Projects"
page.
Project has undergone an immense amount of change. As I
am not musical
or good with sound in general, I
am pleased to have discovered soundsnap.com,
where people with such talents have gathered to
help out people like me. I still am not certain which ones I will be
using, but the community in general is what has helped me. I also
appreciate the honesty and ethical practices of the website's staff.
The file size is currently 7 megs, but 4 megs of that is sound and
music. I will probably compress them to ogg. I've compressed the
once-massive bitmaps to TGA format, which I'm beginning to prefer to
JPGs.
I don't expect the entire program to be over 3 megs, though even 10
wouldn't be expensive these days. The production value is pretty high
considering I'm alone on it, I'm proud to say. It's not Cave Story, but
I haven't spent five years on this thing. What I am proud of most is
the graphics, which have come out just about as perfectly as I could
have hoped.
Most people reading this will not have been to the site
before, because
it has been stale for over a year. Unfortunately, the entire team left
for different reasons, meaning that I (Joseph Austin) am now the
company.
The "company" has been hard at work, however. College is murder, but I
have been working on a project on my own which will be released as an
open source game. I've built it nearly ground-up using Allegro. A link
to their website is at the top right of the page.
The project Im working on is called al_invade. It's named after a
function in its source code, which will be distributed in the package.
It's basically a Space Invaders clone with nice graphics, which is a
bit outside the company theme but a good learning experience. A lot of
modern game techniques have built on what that program did.
It's extremely far along. As you can see in the screen shots, the game
is pretty much functional, if lacking in features. Click an image to
see it at full size. The final game will be played full-screen.
All tools used on this project are open source. They include Gimp,
Allegro, and Blender. It's been programmed on both a linux and a
windows platform interchangeably, depending on what I had at my
disposal at the the time. In other words, it will be highly portable.
I expect al_invade to go gold by the 24th of this month. If it gets
stalled, it's because these stupid memory leaks won't tighten....
