Our crocodile game is getting pretty near completion; I just tested out the first playable build and I love it so much !!

I’m currently working on colourblind-accessible versions of certain sprites that we’ll probably add a toggle for because while I tried to keep it in mind doing the initial palette, some of the enemies and coins and stuff still get camouflaged against the background.

That’s according to Photoshop’s accessibility filter, anyway. The hunt for colourblind guinea pigs begins.

It’s kinda neat figuring out how to do this, actually. I totally took it for granted that I’m lucky enough to have ridiculous colour perception, but there is a lot of accessibility stuff that you need to keep in mind when you’re developing the visuals in a game.

Well it turns out I don’t like hosting public hangouts while I’m trying to work! It turned into a bunch of creepy arab guys trying to hit on a 9 year old hispanic girl while playing loud music in the background. I couldn’t concentrate and I’m surprised I let it last for the 20 minutes I did. Maybe next time I’ll try out the On Air feature. Anyways, thanks if you stopped in!

I haven’t posted in a couple weeks because I’ve been busy with other things and I’m also waiting to have the zombies implemented properly before showing them. I’m currently working on the AI. Hopefully I’ll be able to post something soon.

When a game studio requests gameplay underscore, it’s often best to provide several versions of the same loop so that they have the option have mixing in real time even if they don’t have the budget for a full adaptive/interactive score, so the game ends up with more music than the developer has actually commissioned. Here’s an example of how I did this on a recent project.

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Not much has been done this week. Mainly because I’ve entered an exam-period that will last at least two more weeks. What I have done is mostly details and optimizations on the Lighting and LOS; among other things making it multithreaded.

I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to work much on this project until the exams are over. (For those who are curious: I study computer science with focus on games, also known as “game programming”).

I few years back, I began developing a new framework called XPG. It stood for “cross-platform gaming” (meant to target Windows, OSX, and Linux). It was spurred on by several events.

First, I really wanted to begin using OpenGL 3. SDL 1.2 only supported OpenGL 2.1, and I still do not trust SDL 1.3. I tinkered with other frameworks out there (such as GLFW), but it was really about this time that I became genuinely interested in the low level details. I wanted to learn how to make an OpenGL context myself.

Second, I was tired of C frameworks. I appreciate that people just want to maximize the reach of their APIs, and it matches the fact that OpenGL is in C. Heck, I’ve even built a library in C for the same reasons, but I reached a point where I was tired of wrapping all that behavior in C++ over and over. I always do game development in C++, so I wanted to make a framework custom built for my needs, not someone else’s.

I made a lot of progress on XPG. I managed to create OpenGL windows in Windows, OSX, and Linux. I learned how to catch keyboard/mouse events. It was a very satisfying experience, but I eventually ran into walls. One day, my Windows build stopped working (just displayed a blank window). Not long after, my OSX build stopped working (same blank window). I really had no idea how to debug any of these things. I finally put the project on indefinite hold out of frustration.

Looking back, I see that I should not have jumped straight to building OpenGL windows. I missed a lot of important details. So, this past weekend, I had some quality time with the Win32 API. I put OSX and Linux out of my mind and just played with Windows itself. I banned myself from OpenGL for much of the exercise. I focused strictly on working the event loop and altering window behavior. I separated in my mind what a window class is, what a window instance is, what a device context is, etc. I learned to really control these aspects. I created a recurring timer. I posted a message to the message queue from another thread (‘message’ == Win32 event).

Ironically, adding the OpenGL from there was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. I was able to create a GL 2.1 context and a GL 3.3 context. My code was much more organized this time around too. I plan on revisiting XPG and deploying these improvements soon. Shortly thereafter, I plan on having these zen sessions with X11 and Cocoa. No XPG. No OpenGL. I will make an OS-specific window and mess with it. (Frankly, I’m surprised I ever got a window working my first time hacking it together those years ago.)

I have also learned OpenAL since my first attempt at coding XPG. I always knew I’d be adding OpenAL support eventually, but I struggled to learn OpenAL for a long time. Now, OpenAL and I are buds. I manage my own context, load my own audio files, and play the sounds.

I’ll post more about XPG soon.