College

Here I am again - writing an entry into the blog after quite some time of silence. Many things have happened and changed during this time - including my game projects.

As you may already know, I started my college education two weeks ago. My education is 5 years Master of Sciences in Computer Game and Program Development. For that, I have moved to a whole new city.

The Side World project therefore has been put to a stop, hence my teammate is now 400km away from me. The project wasn't really moving on either - I got the physics working, but didn't find the inspiration to fix anything more than that since then. Unless I find some inspiration to continue Side World and/or find a convenient way for working in a team of two over internet - the project remains frozen.

Ok, this was the boring part of the post, I guess. Now comes the more fun part: as a part of a course at the college, we've made a game as an exercise and last night I created another game for my examination (we have small examinations each 3 weeks, so expect more games to be documented ^^).

Collisions, collisions...

Have been struggling with collision detection for the past few weeks now, it's beginning to get on my nerves. Luckily I found a ready-to-use 2D physics engine for XNA - just what I need! The engine includes not only basic collisions, but a whole realistic physics including friction, forces, edge normals etc.

Well, now the problem lies in understanding how the engine works and implementing it in the existing code. So far it's not been working as expected :D Oh well, let's hope I manage to solve it :P

Added support for an Xbox 360 controller

Tab had loaned me his XNA book and his Xbox 360 controller here for me to play with a bit. So, what is it I'm doing first when I decide to code something more on the game? Of course, I add the support for the controller to the game :)

It was not hard at all, generally only these few lines:

GamePadState gamePad = GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One);
bool moveLeft = Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.Left)
    || gamePad.IsButtonDown(Buttons.DPadLeft);
bool moveRight = Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.Right)
    || gamePad.IsButtonDown(Buttons.DPadRight);
bool run = Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.LeftControl)
    || gamePad.IsButtonDown(Buttons.X);
bool jump = Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.Up)
    || Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.Space)
    || gamePad.IsButtonDown(Buttons.DPadUp)
    || gamePad.IsButtonDown(Buttons.A);

This and poof, the controller is now working with the game :) The rewriting of collision detection still remains -_-'

P.S. Yes, the controller works with Windows without any weird unofficial drivers or adapters. In fact, the controller is designed with a USB contact and has official Windows drivers for full support on Windows.

New game project - Side World

Hello again! I've not been very active here on my blog, I know. Despite that it's summer holidays for me, I've had pretty much to do anyway.

Many hours of my precious time took the Order of the Stick webcomic (Warning: Do not begin to read the webcomic if you can't afford to loose many hours reading it!). Also, I've not caught up with the webcomics The Phoenix Requiem, Dreamless and Ctrl+Alt+Del comic; I've in fact not read any of these three for like 2 months, I'll have to find some time to catch up with them.

Apart from that, I've done some upgrades to the FireSquare website, so it looks more professional now :) Last night I was fixing a glitch that took me 2 hours to fix (when I had finally found the most likely cause), because of another glitch with the webserver's configuration -_-'

Also, during this time, I've met a hobby game developer, just like me, living in the same city! ^_^ (Which is quite surprising, imo :P) You can call him Tab ^^

So, we've met a few times and began working on a new game project together - for fun, for experience and for making a good game :)

Well, generally speaking, my browser-based game project is still on a freeze and will be so for the whole summer, and probably longer. But there's another game project going on that I will try to document in this very blog as well, as the project progresses. So, here goes the introduction of the project itself.

Yay for the summer holidays!

It's been like three months since my last post. (No, I'm still alive =P) I've been very busy during this time with other things, school taking the most of my time. However, now I've finished the gymnasium and have summer holidays, yay! ^_^

Well, it's been a week since the beginning of the summer holidays. I've been looking for a summer job to secure some income for me so that I'd have some money in the pocket when I move to another city to study. I have to move because it's the only city that offers the education of Master of Sciences in Game and Software Development, which is exactly what I want to do. Yes, I'm serious about becoming a game developer (as you can notice by the blog I made solely for sharing my game developing experiences.