November 27, 2010 New Real Life + Bad News = No Updates
REAL LIFE
So real life has once again taken hold and my internet self has been bound, gagged and locked in the basement. In other words I’ve been back in full-time work, although currently it is only a temporary position. That has ment that game making and updating the blog has been put on the back burner for now while I’m getting back into the swing of early morning get-ups and getting in late, of course when my body is honed to this I’ll be busy beavering away on Construct once again.
BAD NEWS
My computer died on me 
Not a complete, buy a new computer died, but the type that means losing lots of files that I never got round to backing up, type of died. So you can probably guess that most of my graphics for my Construct projects and also most of my cap files have gone for a burton. It looks like Conway and some of the other projects may never see the light of day without a completely new set of graphics and a complete re-write in Construct.
Right that’s it for now. Hopefully the next post will be news of a new project or a new tutorial. Until then stay safe. 
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September 14, 2010 Conway Update 1 – Of Hopefully Many :)
Hello again.
I’ve uploaded a video to YouTube showing the progress I made on Conway as described in the post below. It shows the two versions I have working. The simple block level and the “Bitwise” number tiled level.
Since embedding doesn’t seem to work for me you’ll have to click HERE.
OK so thats the clever bit of Conway I have worked on, but I’ve also played around with the gameplay too. I have designed a quick and easy game mode around a well-known “Game Of Life” pattern called a “Gosper Gun” it is a pattern that basically bounces back and forth between to static blocks whilst firing out “gliders”.
That also means that I have the “Cellular Automata” level and the actual platforming working together perfectly. It took a while but I managed to copy over the events from one to the other, although I did have to get rid of an annoying crash that I couldn’t pin down. It took an hour of looking and an hours break, but I finally tracked it down to a “OR” that seems to be rather buggy at the moment in Construct.
Still it’s working now and thats the main thing. Just got to polish up the “Gosper Gun” mode a little and I may post the demo for people to have a play around with and hopefully get some feedback to help push the game along.
Tags: Cellular Automata, Construct, Conway, DevLog
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September 12, 2010 Cellular Automata Platform Level
Thought I’d share a little of the progress I’ve made on Conway. This update is mainly about the Cellular Automata level and added one suggestion from the TIGSource design forum thread. The suggestion was to make it easy for the player to see where and how the level was going to evolve. I thought this was going to be beyond my abilities in Construct, but after jotting down several methods/ideas and plenty of head scratching I managed to get it working as it should. As you can see in the screenshot below.
Cellular Automata Level
Same Cellular Automata Level Zoomed In
The screenshots are both of the same generation of Cellular Automata but the 2nd one is zoomed in so you can see it in a bit more detail. I’ll quickly explain what you are seeing in the screenshot. Basically there are 3 types of block:
- Block with a red outline – This is a block that will die when the next Cellular Automata advances to the next generation.
- Semi Transparent Block – This block will be created when the Cellular Automata advances to the next generation.
- Normal Block – This block doesn’t change. It will still be the same block when the Cellular Automata advances to the next generation.
While the graphics are a great improvement over the simple black blocks of the prototype I created some time ago, they are still a little bland so I had to either improve the graphics again from scratch or think of a sexier way to display them.
Continue reading this article ›
September 11, 2010 Going Back To An Older Project
So the feature in the gaming magazine Joystick has motivated me to pull my finger out and work on something again. I’ve decided to go back to an old project, to flesh it out further and hopefully make something nice, interesting and fun to play.
The game in question is The Evolutionary Adventures Of C.A Conway which I’ve now renamed to just Conway. It uses John Conway’s Game Of Life to generate a living/dying platform level. I’m going to change the gameplay a little from that in the video, although on the whole it will still consist of collecting top hats. I’ve overhauled the graphics quite a bit, well to the best of my artistic ability and at least to my mind looks a lot prettier.
Conway With Hopefully Nicer Graphics
I posted the prototype shown in the video at TIGSource to get a few ideas about how to expand the game further, and although there have been only a few replies so far, they were at least helpful and encouraging to someone still new to game creation.
In the coming days I’ll post a little bit of progress on the gameplay and the “Cellular Automata” level which at the moment are completely separate of each other. And hopefully I can keep focused on this project and keep up the development and the DevLog.
That’s it for now
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September 7, 2010 Memorized In French Gaming Magazine Joystick :)
I was recently approached to allow Memorized to be distributed on the cover DVD of the French gaming magazine Joystick. Of course I jumped at the chance. I’ve been waiting for the issue to be released before posting anything, but I received my copy today (September Issue) and thought I’d share it with the world. Not the whole magazine. Just the Memorized article.
Memorized Featured In Joystick
I’ve Google translated the article – “Five seconds is the time you have to memorize each table game platform before the light,., turns off. Then you have to jump the right places to reach the exit while avoiding obstacles. Whenever you die, the path appears again few moments to let you back on track. In a formidable efficiency, the concept attracted, especially it reminds us of the great moments of galley when the show off the Light to reach the bedroom while trying to avoid embedding itself in the knees furniture. A catchy title, really thought and taking that deserves some attention here, as it confers its playability good life.“
Well that has boosted my morale Maybe now I can find the enthusiasm and drive to work on Bit Hero or one of the countless other partially finished games, engines and prototypes I have festering away in the darkest reaches of my Hard Drive.
Tags: Completed Games, Construct, Featured, Memorized
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July 27, 2010 Not Much Action Here Eh?
Oh been a while since I posted here so I’ll let you know why.
Basically the World Cup. I love my football (not soccer we play football with our feet, hence football ) and with 2 or 3 games per day there wasn’t much time to work with Bit & Droid. I know what you’re going to say though “The World Cup finished ages ago”.
Yeah you’re right but I started a small side project that has become bigger than I planned, I haven’t posted about it or posted videos because I wanted to wait until it was nearly complete before showing the game. It isn’t anything special or something innovative, it’s just a small Thrust type collect ‘em up, that is hopefully going to be fun and challenging.
And just because there was no front page news doesn’t mean I’ve not been busy on the blog. Far from it. I’ve added a new section for my .cap files that I have created for fellow Constructors. Feel free to poke around, download any that interest you and hopefully learn Construct. You’ll find the link up in the top right corner.
A few I’ve added recently are:
- 2 versions of Platform Block Pushing
- Wall Slide & Wall Jumping
- A top down racing example with an AI racer
- Switching platform characters ala Bit & Droid
Keep an eye on the .cap section because I probably wont be posting when it’s updated I’ll just add them sneakily .
Till next time when I will hopefully have some news about Bit & Droid.
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July 9, 2010 BB@RT – Image to BBCODE Convertor
So I had a little idea the other day and decided to prototype it in Construct. The result came out pretty well so I added a nice little GUI and named the program BB@RT. “What Does BB@RT do?” I hear you ask. Well BB@RT takes a 32×32 pixel image and turns it into forum compatible BBCODE, you know the markup language that adds bold, italics etc to your forum posts. If you paste the outputted BBCODE into any forum post you’ll get a nice full coloured ascii image.
BB@RT GUI with image preview
BB@RT GUI with image preview 2
Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t use BBCODE so if you go to the forum post for BB@RT you can see what the above images would look like when outputted to BBCODE. The program is really simple to use but there is a Read Me file included in the download., the link for which is in the forum post and just below.
DOWNLOAD BB@RT HERE (1.45mb)
Tags: Application, Construct, Experiment, Freeware, Prototype
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July 4, 2010 I’m Learning Stuff
If you’ve read the “About Me” page which is, well, erm, about me you’ll know that I’m a coding language and maths simpleton. So I decided to learn some coding principles in Construct – Array’s and Loops. I decided to make a small map generator using “Cellular Automata”. Now you may be surprised here but I actually understand CA and have made a game prototype that used CA to make dynamically living and dying platfrom levels.
Things progressed nicely. But I was stumped by two things:
- I was using my Array to spawn tiles that represented land or sea, but it was spawning 5x the tiles that it should. A quick post on the Construct Forums and newt had the answer. Construct has a “For Each Element” loop for array and it was looping through the 5 “Z” depths I had set up to hold data. Problem sorted.
- If I couldn’t use the built-in loop. I had no idea how to structure my own loop, I downloaded an example that was posted to the forums but that didn’t help. My version didn’t work as planned and looped infinitely. Again another quick post the the Construct forums and I had two answers. An example by newt again with a fully working loop.
I’m pretty pleased with how the generator came out and with some of the techniques I’ve learned in Construct. I would post the generator but it is rather slow when there are 10,000 tiles on screen, and I’m also running a loop on the tiles themselves to run a basic height map. So I’ll just post a screenshot and a couple of generated maps.
Map Generator
Generated Map
Generated Map 2
Now I’m going to experiment with the “Perlin Noise” plug-in and see what I make using that. I may come back to this when I’m more familliar with the programming principles that Construct and other “game making” programs can teach.
Tags: Construct, Experiment, Learning, Prototype
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June 26, 2010 SkullKoBan – Construct Tutorial Game
I’ve just completed my first tutorial in Construct. It’s a 1 level Sokoban clone called SkullKoBan. I’ve commented all the events in as plain English as I can manage, which is some mean feat when I come from the North West of the UK .
A small note – I’m no Construct expert or programming deity so there may be things in the events that can be done easier, better or more efficient. I just evented it to the best of my ability.
Oh and you’ll need to have Lucid’s wonderful SpriteFont plugin installed for it to work correctly, there is a link in GMG’s reply in the thread on the Construct forums.
SkullKoBan Gameplay 1
SkullKoBan Gameplay 2
SkullKoBan Gameplay 3
YouTube Video Clicky Link
Construct Forum Post
DropBox Tutorial Link (.cap file, EXE & graphics) 0.89MB
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- Posted under Examples & Help
June 18, 2010 Bit Hero – New YouTube Video
I’ve just uploaded a new Bit Hero video to Youtube. Basically just shows all the additions I mentioned in the post below. I also added some sexy annotations to the video too, I’ve never tried them before but they work really nice.
Hmmmmm. Embedding the video doesn’t seem to be working for me so heres a clicky link.
Next on the agenda – Nail down the gameplay mechanics, write the basic story, plan a few levels and clean up my event sheets so they are workable when the game gets larger.
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