Summer time

It looks like that a few months have passed since the last post, so I'd say that I could update the blog with some current information.

Summer work

As I said two posts back, I got a job offer in Ireland. I decided to take the job, since it's a real difference from previous summers and I can see how it is to work on some real software and not my projects. I have been living here for a month now and the job is nice. It's interesting stuff with something new every week; it keeps me working all the time, and gives me a sense that I actually do something useful instead of just sitting at home on my computer doing who knows what. All in all, it's great; but I won't write too much about it. I have a month too go and then I return home.

College

I haven't updated anything about this ether. I successfully finished my first year and start my second in October. I have to say that college absorbs most of your 'will power'; and kinda leaves you with no motivation to work on personal projects. But that's just how studying is, what can you do. This year I have to decide on course selection, it's ether 'enhanced reality' or 'intelligent agents'. I think I will go with the latter, since I prefer artificial intelligence and language interpretation. We will see how this year will go. All together I still have two more years till I finish.

Personal stuff

There are a few things that happened in the last months. First of all, the book that I was reviewing was published. I have no idea how it's selling and stuff like that, but it's not really in my interest. Let's just leave that topic.

A bigger thing I did was that I made my Udemy course paid again, 9$ this time. I kinda decided to give one last go on the paid course thing, and since I gathered over 5000 students while it was free I thought that maybe now it could go. And it works. It's not a lot of money, but it really helps a lot. I know some people don't like that it's paid, but I also have to get some income somewhere and it's the cheapest it can be on Udemy. I think that my Youtube subscribers got the course when it was free, so that shouldn't be a problem. Currently it will stay priced until the sales more or less stop.

Even though most of my time here is focused on the job, I was still playing around with some ideas. I'm planning on switching up most of the libraries I use for game development, and learning OpenGL 3 while doing so. I think that I will have to know it sometime, so why not now. It's quite hard moving from intermediate OpenGL 2 into the new pipeline, but I will manage it somehow. I'm also planning on discarding SDL, SDL_image and FTGL for more lightweight libraries like GLFW, SOIL and plain FreeType. It's a lot of work and I will see how it goes when I actually start working on that. This also means that I will kinda have to close up RedFramework. I was still planning on adding Box2D to it, but it seams that will have to wait for RedFramework 2.0, or whatever I will call it. It's quite a thing again and I don't know when I will start with it or when I will even be close to finishing, but it's kinda on top of my head now.

That's all folks, I hope this shed some information about my whereabouts. I will see when my next post will be, I could try posting more often with content that's not related to me, but I'll see. As you also noticed I changed the blog theme to something more simple, the dynamic template was slow to load and use, so this works much better. Bye.

Where am I?

This blog has been like a desert for quite some months now, and I think it's time that I finally post again about what I'm doing and where the hell I am.

College - the final frontier

Or whatever is the equivalent of visiting an university in your country.

I always knew that college isn't going to be easy and that it takes time and discipline to get through it. But somehow I'm still surprised at the amount of work I put into it. The main energy drain are not the exams, since I have them all in a 2 week time-span every month and a half; where I devote my time into learning. The main thing (at least for my choice of study) are the constant exercises that you have to complete in order to even take the exams. Every week you get some exercises to do at every class, and that adds up to a nice package that takes quite some time to complete, so it's best to so something everyday. And that leads to a state in my mind; where I simply don't have the will to do additional personal projects and rather relax playing games.

But let's stop here. I don't want to bash my college, since learning by exercises is by my opinion the best way to learn. And the classes cover a lot of different topics. Well except math is always math, always harder. I just wanted to point out that it doesn't go well with my personal projects, so I have to put many things aside in favor of college. And it will probably stay that way until ether things cool down or I change the way I think and work, and that's something I want to achieve.

Life and living

I don't want to write much about my personal life, so I will just make this short.

I quickly got used to living in a city and I really like it here. My roommates are also great, we understand each other nicely. The weather currently sucks, we haven't had a nice warm day for a few month now. It's just snow and rain. Everyone is waiting for the real spring. And I have had a cold for a week now. And that's  mainly it, life is good I guess.

Current project, plans and personal

Even though it's hard to find the time to do something concrete I still do a few things here and there. And there are some plans for this year.

Currently I'm a technical reviewer for a book about SDL game development. I go through the chapter and check if the code and terminology is correct. It is using SDL 2.0, where there are not many tutorials about it on the web, so the book will be an addition for those interested in this topic. I don't know when the book will be done, I just review it as it comes.

Subscriber amount on Udemy and YouTube is constantly rising. I'm happy that people find my tutorials useful, even though the planned 'make money with Udemy' failed nicely. I'm not planning on creating any new videos. I don't know what I should cover and I also don't want to go into more advanced things, since it's hard to teach, specially on YouTube where you have people from all knowledge levels.

I even found some time to work on the framework this week. I fixed and added some things. I was also shocked that FTGL (the library I use to render fonts) has memory leaks when using pixmap fonts; that just shouldn't happen with a framework like that. So I had to change to texture fonts, which work nice. The framework is now ready to integrate Box2D for physics handling, and then it will be more or less done. I don't want to complicate too much, I hate it when frameworks constrict people. I will try to work more on the project, but who knows when it will be done. 

I had a big idea at the start of the year, to try to make one simple game every month. But it just didn't work out. I have one small game in production, but I will probably abandon it, because I just can't find the graphics  appealing. I really suck at graphics. And thinking back to my complete projects, all of them had really simple and abstract graphics, but in the last year or so, all I tried was more 'pixel art' stuff. I think it's time to return to my roots with silly programmer rectangles and make something that is more fun mechanically and gameplay wise, but probably lacking in fancy arts department. 

(2x0ng, an interesting game I found here)

The last big thing I want to mention is that I got a job offer for summer in Ireland. I would live there for 2 months and work on a project. I won't tell anything about it, but it looks really interesting. I would really like to work on a real project with a team, so I could experience how it all works out in the real world. The time there would be dedicated to that project only. It would be a real change from the standard summer slacking or shitty jobs that have no relation to CS. I'm still haven't accepted the offer, since moving and living completely on my own where I wouldn't know anyone for 2 months is a really big change for me. But I think it's a thing that I should get used to. I still have to think about it, but the more I think about it, the better it seams to accept the offer.

And that's about it for this blog post. I haven't posted for quite some time, so it's quite long; but I felt it's necessary to tell the main things. I hope you enjoyed the post, and that you enjoy the new blog design. I know it takes a little longer to load, but hey, dynamic pages. Please, feel free to post any comments regarding the post, or any general questions. I will try to post more often, but you never know; I usually don't know what to write about.

Some general new information

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.

Bye for now.

School Jumper

It’s time that I release this to the public.

About the development

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.

Download 1

Download 2

 

The source code

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.

GitHub page

About the course, school, videos, life and other stuff

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.

A new course and some additional information

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 :)

A little older again

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.

Some new small games in development

Technorati Tags:

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.

Episoded 9 and 10

After quite some time I uploaded episode 10. Episode 9 was on YouTube for quite some time, but I rather wait and then post them in pairs on my blog. Episode 9 shows how to load images into the game and then blend them on the screen. In #10 we do some refinements. I don't yet know what the next episode is going to show, so if you have any ideas, post them.





I think that the episodes are going well and that each new one gets better. I had some video/mic problems in these episodes but I think that is now fixed. I also got many subscribers which is a good positive feedback, because I know that people like the series.

On the other hand my projects have stopped. I am not working on any game right now. But I must say that I made nice progress with the framework and it's currently heading towards milestone #2. To get from the current state I have to add handling images and rendering fonts, which will require me to learn FTGL. I think that after I will reach the 2. milestone I will begin working on a new game with the framework. Because it's going to be usable at that state. I have many ideas for the next project including a sequel of "Squared Shooter". Yea it came so far that I will make a sequel, but people really like the game and I know that I can make it better and bigger. I also need to give more polish to all of my games. I think the last game that got "polished" was Space Invaders Versus. But back then my programming skills managed to create quite some bugs :)

That's all for now, goodbye.

A year in review: 2010

First of all, I wish everyone a happy and successful new year. A new year has came and I decided to post a short review of it, mainly about my game development in 2010.

When I look at my posts and the release dates it is clear that I only released 3 games this year. JAHP the only bigger game, E.T. GO HOME NOT - a 4 hour experiment and Mr. Blocky - my first LD entry. All together I am disappointed. I also made a AI showoff game for someone and got paid, but that doesn't really count.

The main struggle was that I was in some kind of creativity stop. In 2008 and 2009 I was learning how to make games and I also made some clones, so it wasn't hard to make something. But now that I make games that are completely my own it is hard to come up with something interesting. Currently I have 2 projects stat are at a complete stop because I just don't feel that they will make something interesting to play. I will probably never finish those 2 games. The other big struggle for me is that... I can't make graphics. I such at drawing and I clearly can't make any kind of animation. The best of my art can be seen in "Me and my shadow". So I clearly have to change the art style I am going to work with in the future. More vector style and more really simple art, because I can't really manage much more than that.

I also decided to start making more games overall. I will try to go with the "One game every month" thing. Petri Purho had a similar method of developing games and now I will try to do the same thing. The deadline for every game will be the 30th/31st of each month, and there will be a timer on top of my blog and on my phone to remind myself.

I hope that I will make more interesting games in the future, that will make me forget about the year 2010 that was a total letdown for me.

Wish me luck. I also recommend following me on Twitter because I post there what I am currently doing in game dev, this blog is only for mayor things.

Red's Game Development Episode 2

Here it is. After such a long time period I made a new video. Watch and comment please.

I recommend going to YouTube and watch the HD version. I hope you like it.

I also started working on a new project. It is a simple 3D strategy. Nothing special just something to test 3D.

Bye

Happy new year?

Hello there. First of all happy new year to everyone. I know I am late. I also know that I didn't post anything on the blog since the 23th. That is kinda sad, considering back in the days I made posts more frequently. I will try to change that now (kinda new year promise), I also have to start working more on game developing. I need to put a notifier on my desktop so I will post every day.

About the new project. Well I started on it all the platforming works. I will scratch the shooting part of the game because it kinda does not go together with this style of plaformer. I also hope it won't be to Meat boy-ish. But many developers said: if you remake something, then add something in it so it will be totally different. But I think that the game isn't like Meat boy it only has similar platforming gameplay. 

Little what works.

-platforming ( yay wall slide and jump )

- sloooow motion, I like it

- and some eye candy

I start further work on it tomorrow. The last 3 days (and I really mean it) I have been working on something for school but now I done everything and have like 2 weeks of chilling. Enough time to finish this. I start working on advanced platforms tomorrow: spiked, moving, eee oscilating and a level editor. I won't post a screen because the graphics look strange, I have to change them a little but don't expect more from me than lost of cubes and simple stuff.

Here is a little vector art I did for the game (main character)... not named yet :D

(that is not slime at the bottom.. it is a badly drawn light)

I will post some screens of the game tomorrow. 

Bye

Gimme themes

Hello there. I have really pushed game developing away. I said that I will do a game till the end of month but I didn't. Not I need your help. I am going to do a theme game. Something like from LudumDare. But it won't be done in 48 hours :D. I just don't want to think about a game idea so I want to get some and make a game on it. You know the drill :D

School is going fine till now. But it gets repetitive waking up every day at 5 AM and soooo onnnn.

Give me some themes NOW

I will post tomorrow when I get some idea :D

Welcome back

Hello there. Well is has pased 1 week since the last post. Now it is time to write something. It was verry nice on vecations. I was just laying on the beach all day and relaxing. I completly turned of my brain for 4 days. I sadly don't have any intersting pictures ( i will check again tomorrow ), because we only have like 15 pictures totaly ( on a new digital camera that holds 600 pictures :P ). Well yea.

So the bad news is I didn't do anything on the project. Yea I know I said I will but I just didn't get to it. My brother was constantly bothering me every hour that he wants to play and it is realy hard to work on something 45 minutes then wait 1 hour and then continiue. You lose the will to do it. :S. But that is all about to change, because I ordered a new computer :D. And my brother will get my computer in his room. That means that I will have all the time on my own computer to work on it. A dream came true :D Noooo mooorrrreee bothering. You would have to be me to understand how hard is it to share a computer with a brother and you have to switch every hour. I will but the computer on friday. I will probably get it ready to work on it till the night. Also everything will be set for my brother so on Saturday everyone will have its own. If you want to know the specs: Intel® Core™2 Quad Q8400 2,66Ghz ( OMG ), 4 gb ram, 640 Gb HDD, and GeForce GTS 250 1GB. I won't go to specific into the motherboard and all but as you can see it is a nice machine. It looks like this ( on the site ):

Some quick update on the project. I will start working on the project on saturday. If I will get some hours together to work on it tomorrow then I will. I will try to complete it in 3 - 4 days. I hoped to make a another game till the end of august and maybe I will make it. I hope the games will be good for the experimental gameplay project.

Bye all and good night.

Another delay ( numereo 3 ) big delay :S

Yea a big delay again.

But first the report. We had a LAN party till friday. Friday was a weird day and I didn't work on the game at all. On sunday we had family visitors from other country the whole day... sooo. There was other work today. A lot has to be done before we go to vecations ( on the see ). Yea that's right. On thursday morning we go on vecations to Croatia. And we come home late Sunday night. For the next 2 days. Well I just don't know if I should work on it. When I come home on sunday I will continiue work on monday. I am realy lazy :D. I wish I had some realy good phone so I could make pictures on the sea and write blog posts :D It would make it more interesting. 

Bye for now.

Project delayed 2nd time.

A realy quick one. Friends told me tha today is a LAN party. Till friday. So Project is delayed until saturday. Bye all. 

Quick update

Hello there. First some update on the project skedual. I started on the project on Sunday night. I was on a picnic so there wasn't much time. I mainly did the bacis framework and some player stuff that day. I had tuts and help opened the whole time, because is takes some time to get used to openGL state tipe of work. There is also many stuf you have to know. But I will get used to it. 

I didn't do anything yesterday because I was on pool with friends from 7 AM to 9 PM. :D

Today was also a rather busy day. I slept a lot. I worked few hours on it throught the day. The big problem is that I have to share the computer with my brother. We switch every 1 hour and it is realy hard to work on something. I rather like it that I take some hours for the project and not to work on it for 45 minutes then go and do something else and then get back to work. It just doesn't work. I also wasn't home most of the day. The player movement is done and the rotation. I had some problems with angles because it's the first time I am working with angles and direction. But I managet to get a smooth movent. It is a acceleration time of movement so it takes some time to speed up and slow down. A picture of it:

Simple graphics huh. It will be only quads but I think it will have a nice look at the end. Experimental projects augusts there is "Bare minimum". Maybe the bare minimum of graphics in this game will be enough so I will maybe post it there. :D who knows.

I will try to get the game done till sunday ( in the 7 day deadline ). I WILL.