Let's address some changes that have happened in the past month.
The move and school
I moved to the city at the end of September. And till now it’s been great.
School is also going good, we will see how it will be in the future. Mathematics is going to be hard despite the fact that I always enjoyed math. Well and that is basically is. I don’t really have anything to say on this topic.
Plans
It’s hard to stay focused on my projects right now, school is taking me quite some time. There are always some exercises that I have to do, or seminars, or just plain learning. When I don’t do stuff for school I do something more relaxing, like playing games, guitar or going out. I haven’t worked on the framework for ages. I have to get into the new rhythm. The framework in the main project now, games will come after that (I hope).
I am also thinking about some new side activities. I am thinking about making a new blog for ‘writing’. Stuff that isn’t connected with computing, game development and stuff. Just some random word ramble. I’ll see. I am also trying to get into pixel art. Everything depends on how much time I have.
I’m also in the process of organizing all my previous work. I already sorted all my previous school stuff, and now it’s time to sort my projects. I have to check the source of all projects, clean all the useless stuff that IDEs make that isn’t really required, etc. There are a lot of small projects that need cleaning.
And that’s it for now. I just wanted to post some information here. Bye
Hello again. This is just going to be a short post with some information and a new video.
Last two months
I actually tell this in the video already, but my blog is primary, so here it goes again.
For the last two months I have been doing completely nothing computer/programming based. July and August are a games only month for me on the computer, at least for the past few years. I am not proud of it, but my roots are still in the gaming community, and I enjoy every moment. Nothing else really to say here, so for fun I will just give you this summers game check list: completed Sleeping Dogs, lots of La-Mulana, got from zero to max level in Age of Empires Online, replayed all Half-Lives (except 1, waiting for Black Mesa) with the crazy achievements, lots of TF2 and Diablo 3, got to complete Beyond Good & Evil, and played a lot of other games like CoH, Dota2, L4D2, Mount & Blade, Deponia, + random stuff.
Also I’m always open for online play, so feel free to contact me for a game :)
Free course
As I said before, the course on Udemy will be free sometime in the future and I won’t talk about it until it does. And now it’s the time. If you wanted to take the course but didn’t want to pay for it then check it out here for free
Current plans
I’m currently working on a new framework. I’m combining all the lessons I learned from before to make a final framework that I can use to develop games. The “framework” uses SDL, SDL_Image, OpenGL, FTGL, Freetype2, irrKlang, Box2D and GLEW. I’m not planning to add networking (never did any networking) or a scripting language like LUA. It’s going to be modulated, so you will be able to select what you want to use, and still have decent features. I’m going to put it on GitHub when it’s ready.
So that is about it for this post. Here is the video where I talked about this really quick.
The game was made for my school’s final exam or finals. I had to create something that would show what I learned in the past 4 years in IT. So naturally I decided to make a game, because I love to make them.
I’m not sure how long it took me to develop the game, since I don’t track the time I spend on something anymore. But I will say about a month to two of passive development. Meaning I was on and off the project. The total lines of code is around 2000, but that’s just numbers, it doesn’t matter.
I lost interest in the development really fast with this one, because it wasn’t really something I wanted to make, I just had to make it and I wanted to make it really simple. So I just went for a simple platformer.
But the project has 2 things I never done before. First is a somewhat solid animation for the main character and the other is a much nicer level editor than any before. You still have to scroll through the objects but with a right click you get a menu, where you can nicely save, load and test the level. You still have to manually add the level in a text file if you want to use it in the main game, but I’m OK with that.
This is also the first time I used irrKlang. It’s a really solid sound library and I prefer it over FMOD for my needs. I’m not sure but maybe I also used FTGL for the first time, which is a font rendering library for OpenGL, which uses Freetype2.
The game has two download options so choose yours:
Download 1 is an setup I made for easier use. You will need administrator rights to install it and it also comes with Visual C++ Redistributable which you need to run the game.
Download 2 in a standard zip file containing the game. No setup required. You will probably prefer this one.
I also GPL-ed the code and published it on GitHub. The assets are under Creative Commons BY-SA license. So if you want to modify the game go ahead and try it out. Or just use the code for some project.
I’m writing this for the 2nd time today. It was already done but then Live Writer crashed on me. Here we go again.
Let’s talk personal.
The first thing I want to say is that I finished school. I’m now officially a “Computer technician”. I still haven’t used that title anywhere, but I hope I will someday. It feels great that after 4 years I have finally finished the school. Come to think about it, I started this blog when I started with the school. So this is something of a milestone to me. When I’m reading my first posts I almost have to laugh every time. Not only how my grammar and pronunciation looks like, but also about what and how I was writing. It brings back many memories of when I was younger and had a totally different mind set but similar goals like now. All I have to say is that I have come a long way, and a longer path is still before me.
In Fall I will continue my quest with education. I’m going to an IT university where I will try to improve myself. I’m already accepted in the school and have a “check in” next week. The program will last 3 years, so that could be like the next milestone. The new school also means that I’m going to move to a city. I will live there during the week and probably come home during the weekend. I’m probably going into public student homes but it’s not settled yet. It will be a big change in life and I hope it will be fun and interesting.
So that’s some personal things, let’s go to the projects.
Well I can’t really say I have done much in the past month or so, but there are some things.
Udemy
The course on Udemy is now finished. It was a different experience than YouTube. I made all the videos I wanted the course to have so now I’m just commenting and helping others on the course. I had to drop the price of the course many times. With the starting 19$ to 9$ and a few days later to 4$. It’s like that for over a month now and I will leave it like that. Considering that Udemy recommended me to price it 10$ for every hour of content (The course had over 3 hours of content), that’s a huge pricing difference. My course is probably the cheapest (except the free ones) on their site and it’s kind of weird seeing some courses get away with less content and quite higher prices. But that’s just how it is. The main thing is that 30 subscribers have learned something from it. And I made 80$, which I’m really happy about. If you are still interested in the course then you can find it here. I will not post about it anymore until I decide to make it free, which may be later this year.
YouTube
While I was working on the course and finishing school I was also uploading some older videos. They came from an abandoned Udemy course. At first it was about SDL but the I switched to SFML and that left me with 7 videos. I decided that they still may be useful to someone so I uploaded them to my channel. The playlist is here and here is the first videos in the series:
Keep in mind that I won’t continue this series of videos.
Now let’s talk some future plans.
One of the first things I’m going to do is release and open-source the game I made for my school finals. It’s nothing special, the gameplay is something like “Me and My Shadow” but without the shadow. I will make a separate post about it so I can include it on the “Project” page, which is on the top right if you didn’t notice :)
I’m also planning on open-sourcing all of my games. They will all be published on my GitHub. All the images and sound will be under the Creative Commons BY-SA license and the code will be under GPLv3. All this basically means that you can use the code for your projects or just modify and improve the game as long as you don’t make it commercial. Meaning that you make money from it. I made everything in my spare time for free and now I’m giving it away and I don’t want that someone makes money from it. I hope this makes sense.
I also want to bring more stuff to this blog. Even though I say this every holiday and every start of a new year. I will really try. Because a few posts every few months is too little. Some of my favorite blogs went down (well they are still online) because no one posts anything. I don’t want the same to happen here. This is after all my personal blog where I can see what I was doing and when. And many posts help. The problem is I don’t know exactly what to post about. So please give some advices or wishes in the comments or email me.
So that’s about it for this post. Expect a new post in a few days with the game, and then with more stuff. Have a nice day.
Hello everyone. My new course is now public and I have some general information.
The new course is done. Now the first thing I have to say is that it’s a paid course. It costs 9$ to buy (it was 19$ at the start) and once you buy it you get full access to it forever. If you don’t like it there is a 30 day money back guarantee. The course is about C++ game development using SFML. It’s structured into learning parts of SFML first (window, graphics, sound) and then we actually create a simple game. There is currently over 3 hours of content and more is coming. So if anyone is interested, take a look here, check out the free introduction video and then if you want you can buy the course and support me.
Now the course is a side project of mine and it should be completed in June. I was contacted by the Udemy team and I just tried it to see if I can make some money from it, because that really helps. Here is a video on YouTube where I made the announcement:
I hope the video was helpful.
Now to some general information. I’m currently finishing my school. I have finals tomorrow and in the following 2 weeks so that takes away quite some time. In the last month I was busy with school, getting the course ready and playing Diablo 3. I also haven’t found the time to make games or do any other programming but I hope this changes once I get the school out of the way. After that summer break starts and I will try to find the time to post more on the blog, make more videos and make games. I’m also searching for a summer job. I’m trying to find something computer related, but we will see how it goes. Here is a second video I did containing some general information:
I hope this gave you all an idea what I was doing and some plans for the future. Have a good day :)
I haven’t posted quite some time so I will post a small update.
On 10th of May I celebrated my 19th birthday. Yeah I am that young/old for those who didn’t know. It was more or less just a normal day with extra chocolates coming in my way.
Not my cake obviously.
I’m currently working on finishing the new course. I decided that I will scrap SDL in favor to SFML which is easier to teach to beginners. So I had to redo everything I had with SFML. I’m using the new 2.0 version. My deadline is somewhere this week and then I will release it to the public. I will still add additional videos once it is online but first I want to publish it when I have the main parts done. I hope that people will like it. I’ll post it here once it is online.
Well as most of you may know it’s May 15th and the Diablo 3 box is standing here on my desk. This is going to take quite some time from me but I hope that I will be able to work on things as normal :) If anyone following my blog is also playing D3, then fell free to contact me in any way and we can play together.
Now back to slaying some monsters, also expect more updates soon.
A new video was released where you can see them in action, but let’s talk “business”.
I will try to be short in this post. As I said before I’m working on the documentation as always. I have to finish it this weekend so I hope that I won’t have to mention in again. I hate it.
The two new games are Deep Green and Vuzball!. Vuzball is a game I made in a day and now I’m just adding some final touches so that it’s fun to play. It’s a simple clone of another game and it was just something I did for fun.
I already posted the code on GitHub. It’s a quite ugly code so don’t expect much from it.
The other project is Deep Green. It’s a game that I have worked on some time ago and I decided to finish it. I ported the whole thing from the old quick code to my box2d “framework” and now it works even better. I’ll try to make something out of this one but you never know.
So that’s about it for this post. Now off to work on the documentation.
