A successful weekend

A year has passed and we have visited our capital city to participate in the programming tournament again.

The tournament was held on Saturday in Ljubljana at the institute of Jožef Štefan (IJS). Our school organized the trip and we arrived there sometime in the morning. The competition started at 10 AM till 1 PM. There ware 4 groups as always: 3 difficulty stages where you had to solve tasks with programming and 1 group where you had to build a website.

I joined the 2nd group of programmers. It isn’t the hardest one but we didn’t have any real preparations for the tournament so it was better that I went into the 2nd group. We had to solve 5 problems using any of the more known languages (C,C++, Python, Java, C#, …). The website team had to build a pong game out of basic HTML using divs and JavaScript.

After the competition ended we had to wait till later for the results. A few talks were held to shorten the wait time.

The results (Slovenian link) were in and I was 4th with 86 points out of 100. I’m really happy with that. I won an 60 GB SSD drive and I plan to switch my OS drive today. A friend of mine (Vito Meznarič (Slovenian blog)) was 1st in website development.

I would call that a successful day.

In other news: I made a new video log few days ago and haven’t posted it here yet. Sometime it takes some days for me to post…

 

For those who are not in the mood to watch the video, here is a picture of the current state of my small Box2D framework.

I added collision sensors, filtering and ignoring into it. Most of the framework is done I only have to fix some rendering things and maybe add joins but I don’t think that I will need them so I probably won’t add them yet.

And that is all for this post.

Working on the new project

Hello, I haven’t posted for quite some time now so I think it’s time that I update the situation.

First let’s go through what I have been working on for the past 2 weeks. Well one of the bigger changes is that I started learning playing the guitar. Yeah, I got myself a guitar and now I spend at least an hour a day practicing. When I started last week I was practicing even more so I didn’t put much time into other things. But now I just settled on a “fixed” schedule so I can work on other things. I hope I’ll stick with it because I really want to learn it.

I also finished my school project “School Jumper”. I released it for my school class for testing and already made a new version fixing some bugs. I also found a mistake that I was doing from the day I started with OpenGL. I thought that using images for textures with a resolution different than the power of 2 was totally OK. But as testing showed it was not. Some graphics cards did not support those texture resolution and the result was that the users only saw white squares. This is a problem that appeared already in Squared Shooter and every other game that came after it. Back then I thought that it was a driver problem but now I know that it isn’t. So from now on I’ll only stick to the default (16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, …) resolutions.

“School Jumper” isn’t really interesting. I was getting bored with it early but it had to be done. But it’s a small little time waster. I’ll wait some time before I release it here because some changes might happen but it probably won’t take long. I’ll also make a Linux port when I will find the time. I will release the source code after my project it graded so it will be free to use. Expect the source code around end of May or something like that.

The main focus currently is on the “documentation” of the game/project. I have to write it and post it till April 14th and I still have a lot to do. It’s a pain to write it but it has to be done.

The other big thing currently is working on the new project. I’m learning Box2D for it and I’m writing myself a really small framework for easy creation and handling of complex shapes and things like that. I still have to look up some things but Box2D is really an awesome framework. But it also changes the way you handle moving, collision and rendering so it takes some time to getting used to it. I also switched from orthographic OpenGL to normal OpenGL so everything is a little different now and takes time to properly understand it.

And that is all for now. I also haven’t made any new videos so I will try to make an interesting test with Box2D and make a video with it so that you can see what it looks like. Maybe even today, but who knows.

Video log #3

No fancy post names. It is what it is: a new video log!

Well it does look like I missed the Wednesday upload date but now it’s here. I’m kind of lazy these days and don’t work that much. Who knows why. I’m probably in some creative block state or in super lazy mode. I’ll try to change that as soon as possible.

I just show the projects I have been working on these days. The game is almost finished. I implemented the instructions screen while the video was uploading which leaves just the levels. I’ll try to make the game at least 20-30 levels long so that it has some play time (more than 10 minutes). The OpenGL demo might seam silly for some, but I never really got into true 3D with perspectives, triangles only, no orthos and some silly lighting. Also as I said don’t expect 3D games.

Now that the game is almost finished and I’ll start writing the documentation. I hope that won’t kill me because I hate writing it. I’ll also start recording new videos for the course so that I can get it public in a month or so.

And that is all for this post.

Holidays over

And I am back. If you haven’t noticed I was kind of away last week. We had holidays and I totally took that time to take a break. Even if I planned other things.

A quick week

The week passed really quickly. I planned to finish the project during the holidays and maybe start on something else but it turned out I took a full vacation from everything. I also wasn’t home a few days so that makes even less time to work. So let’s just say that nothing was done that week even though I have learned some new OpenGL things but that doesn’t really count.

It’s Wednesday again and it seams that a new log will come out today. They more or less look like a weekly thing (being released every Wednesday) and if I am fine if I will keep it that way.

So that’s all the update for this post. Expect a new video soon.

Another week another video

And it has been a somewhat busy one.

The project: SM

The game is nearing completion. The level editor and the actual game is complete. The only thing missing is the menu, which should not be a big problem, an end game and saving the players progress. I also have to add some sound effects and some background music. And then it’s done. So that is all together about 1 or 2 days of work, few hours each.

As I said in the video I had to revamp some things I used from my framework. As I told before I’m not using my whole framework for this project only some small functions. The cause is because I would need to document then everything and that is something I don’t want to do. I fixed the font rendering system because it was working really slow. That’s because I was using texture fonts. Now that I switched to pixmap fonts it works much much faster.

I will add the changes to the framework when this game is done. I will probably add the animation system I’m currently using. But I don’t want to work on the framework currently so that will only be a small fix.

I have holidays next week and I hope that I will find the time to create videos for the course I’m working too. Now that this project is nearing completion I want to focus on the next one.

So here is a song for next week:

Have a nice day.

Video log #1

Not a really interesting post title but I'll let it be because it’s the first video log I created.

I had a sports “accident” on Saturday so I wasn’t really able to go anywhere which would have been a perfect opportunity for game development but I just suckered in and played Resident Evil 4 on my Wii again. Oh well.

But the “School Madness” project is going nicely. I added platforming and all with double jump. There is still lots of work but I’m getting there.

While recording the video I noticed that the player didn’t jump as high as normal. The game did run at 10-20 fps but I’m using delta time for everything so that should not happen. It works fine at higher fps but there are some weird anomalies at low fps. Don’t know what it could be I will have a look at it but I don’t really worry about it.

At the start of the video I do some explaining for those who are not following my blog but the rest is just showing the game.

I would appreciate some comments about the video

Week update – School Madness

Well not real madness, but the name of the project is “School Madness".

The project

I haven’t really talked about the school project I’m working on. To complete my school we have to take certain tests at the end of the year. But we also have to create a “product” that has to do with our education. Since I’m learning for a computer technician (translated) and we are doing different programming things in school I decided to create a game. It’s something I’m best at and it suits me. I probably have one of the most ambitious projects in our class. The standard also isn’t very high and so creating a simple game out of pure C++ using many different libraries (SDL, OpenGL, Freetype, FTGL, irrKlang) is way (waaaaaaaay) above it. So I’m not concerned by the fact that the game is really simple platformer. But I’m still trying to do my best.

The projects is really organized with much emphasis on OOP (Object Oriented Programming) and using the languages more complex features everywhere. I’m also writing short comments everywhere on my mentors request and so that if I will need to discuss the code I will immediately know what is where.

 

(A screen of the current project running)

Edit the level editor

Currently most of the work is going into the level editor. I’m making it user friendly and easy to use. I’m planning on making it the bigger thing in the game promoting creating your own levels. And I think it will be more fun than the simple platforming game. It’s clearly the best level editor I made so far with easy to create levels, test them, and saving/loading works from in-game.

Here you can see the editor menu opened up. By clicking Save/Load Level a “menu” pops up where you input the name of the level. It works really well and it’s the first time I done text input in a game.The red boxes around the objects are collision boxes. It adds a fancy/technical look to the editor.

I still have to add a camera to the editor and some more objects like the player spawn and exit. I will make the rooms a fixed size so that level creators can’t go crazy with it. After that is done I will focus on the actual platforming part of the game. I still think I have to add some kind of power to the player so that is adds some challenge to the game. I think that a double jump will do which the player will then use to do some of the more tricky moves. That way the game won’t be too boring because I’m not planning on adding enemies or moving (deadly) objects.

And that is all about the project for this post.

I have been sick in the last few days and wasn’t really able to do much. I have been learning some 3D modeling with Blender and it’s really interesting. Maybe in the future you will see some low poly models on this blog. But don’t expect any 3D games  

I also thought about starting to make video logs. Nothing complicated just a 1-5 minute video where I show you what I’m currently working on. For example on this post: I would show the code a little and how it’s structured, then I would run the game and show some of the features of the level editor and maybe run the player animation. Really simple. I think it would make a really nice addition and it wouldn’t take me much time to make them since I would make them totally spontaneously with no real goal. Fellow YouTube subscribers might appreciate new videos. Please give me some opinions about this idea in the comments. 

If you don’t know what I’m talking about here is a video log from Chevy Ray Johnston (An awesome indie game programmer/designer). If you can’t see the video click on the empty space and it should pop out.

Hollow's Deep - Ledge Grab & Tile Stitching from Chevy Ray Johnston on Vimeo.

Thanks for reading.