It’s been a week of school, and I never really ended up posting any more over winter break. I was pretty busy with work and all, so not much happened. However, back at school now. I do, however, have a minor rant about this whole Facebook issue (where they were going to let Web Apps that use facebook access to users’ phone numbers).
Facebook reminds me of one of those pre-school bullies. They poke and prod you, to see how far they can go before you call the teacher. Then when the teacher yells at them, they claim they didn’t do anything, and they’ll never do it again, and go right back to it. It’s always the same with these privacy issues. They slowly give up more and more of our information, then suddenly all of our purchases are appearing on our wall, and users finally realize that something bad is going on. They complain, facebook apologizes and provides some new security toggle hidden amongst all their other security toggles, and then a couple months later, our phone numbers are being shared. Users realize this is bad again and complain, and facebook apologizes again. But in the meantime the friend feature has become a follow, advertisers have everything, and the user-base only complains about what they can actually perceive as invading their privacy. Everyone knows what happens when their phone number becomes wide knowledge (telemarketers anyone?), but not the rest of the privacy concerns that pop up in between. Â I do have a Facebook account still, because it doesn’t actually matter if I delete it or not, the data is still in their system, but I very rarely use it, and do not use my Facebook account to log in to any other website. I hope I never have to. It just tires me to read every couple months about another outrage from Facebook, and wonder when anyone will ever learn.
So, the school portion of my game is now complete! Four weeks of pretty steady work does not, unfortunately, yield a complete game to me, but I think I have a pretty good start and a lot of code that I can work from. Luckily early weeks I spent on making reusable classes like my Image class (which wraps the Texture2D class) for drawing images easily and efficiently, an Animation class to hold any sprite animations I have, and others. The past two weeks, Thanksgiving break included, have been spent working on the Entities of the game (player, enemies, objects), and collision detection. My collision is still a bit ugly, but I can work on that more. I do however have Keys the player can pick up, which can open chests or doors. (An idea I came up with while designing the levels, is not to let the player have enough keys to open all doors/chests, so trial and error is required to find the best routes). Portals transfer the user to another level. All level objects/enemies are defined in the map file, and there’s even a simple menu. Overall, I’m excited to have some time over winter break to work on the game with the base I have right now. And of course, more screenshots!
This is just a quick update, but I was working on my map class and it now will load a level from a JSON file and also render it to the screen. The json file was kindly provided by Keith Bauer from when he used some similar tiles. I do not have the shading working yet, however, you can scroll around the map by touching the direction you wish to scroll. There’s also no collision detection yet, however, that will be coming soon. I hope to have a player wandering around the screen by the end of the day. Here’s the screenshot!
Yesterday I was working on getting sprite sheets into my code. I used zwoptex to condense all my images together, and they output a nice plist file as the control file as well. From there I used my previous established Image class to chop up the image via the control file and set each sub-image into a dictionary by its original name as the key. This allows for easy and fast access. Now I just have to utilize this in making my tile-map scroll around, and for animating my character. I haven’t yet found a decent sprite for this, but I’ll see how it goes. I’ve been combing through all the free graphics sites without any success, maybe I’ll just doodle something up real quick. I may have to write another class for regular spritesheets. My class only really supports those with a control file, not ones that are all the same size without a control file. Hopefully I’ll have a more interesting screenshot to post later today, but with my homework load, probably not.
School has been crazy busy lately so haven’t had much of a chance to update. However, finally decided on my final project so I figured I would update this and maybe track my progress on it. The name of the game is Mystical Spatula Relic: The Narcoleptic Octopus Scandal. You play a young man called into an alternate dimension to rescue the mystical spatula from the narcoleptic octopus. Â It’s a sidescrolling adventure game that will be out for the iPad within 4 weeks (if I do well 😛 ). Hopefully it should be fun to do. I’m using graphics from the lostgarden, so it’ll look kind of cartoony, but that’s what I’m looking for. I’m a bit nervous about the amount of work required, but hopefully the whole grade issue will motivate me. I guess I’ll see how it goes.
So, this has been sitting in my non-edited posts for a little while. I’ve made some pretty good progress. Had the first in-class review on thursday and it went ok. Progress so far has been wrangling with OpenGL. I utilized  a version of Apple’s Texture2d class to load up UIImages into OpenGL textures, and made a wrapper Image class for it. I made my render loop and had it draw using the DisplayLink. Currently I simply have a couple tiles drawing. Looking to the future I want to have a map loaded and drawing, and a player who can move around and scroll the screen.
Also, screenshot!
Just gave a speech on DRM in my ethics class, following a speech on Video Game Piracy. Let’s just say our speeches overlapped a bit, so I was a bit out of sorts for mine. And my remote app for my iPhone decided to not work (which was going to display my notes), and I had to move back and forth from my machine. Ah well. Still think it went ok. I almost had a link to Richard Stallman talking about DRM in there, but ended up against it towards the end. Day’s looking up!
