TACS Games

Here is a screen grab of something I’m working on, It’s a rocket launcher! I hope you could tell that without me having to say so. 

The Interesting thing here is that I’m testing some animations out in animata which is a lightweight animation tool. It’s more geared towards performace, since there’s no timeline but you can hook up all sorts of data to OSC (think of it as midi+).

I did have some turrets hooked up to some wii remotes yesterday, but this turned out to be just fun and not helpful at all :).

I’m sure you already know about osculator which lets you bind all sorts of signals to and from OSC data. It makes this kind of thing quite easy.

The reason I use animata to test rigging like this is that it’s just so very easy to use. I can have a rigged puppet set up in less than a 60 seconds  and I get to see how new assets might feel when in motion without having to do much work.  Plus I get to make pew pew noises while sitting at my desk.

I backed the spriter project a few days ago hoping that I would get a tool like animata that’s more geared towards gaming asset production. You can too, since at time of writing, there are 28 hours to go. The beta is functional enough. Enough to get me to back the project, anyway.

I’ve spent all day so far drawing turrets like this one. My hands are all cramped up. How do people deal with tablet fatigue?

With both ‘Shark Ahoy’ and ‘Meltdown Moon’ nearly ready for their android releases I’ve been working on something a bit different. Here is a sneak peek at some of the asset production that’s been going on.

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It’s clearly a space themed top down game. It’s the tiles I’ve been working on. I’m quite pleased with how their turning out.

Morning is the time for me to be working on arty stuff. So I try (sprint willing) to reserve mornings for art, music and brainstorming. In the afternoons I tend to be more focused and can get on with bug fixes and optimizations.

Last night I was in a basement restaurant and was left to my own devices so I thought it would be a good Idea to wile away the minutes with a blast on meltdown moon. However, when the game tried to sign in, I was left waiting for the process to fail. With only a few moment to get  a game in before my pal came back from the toilet, I abandoned meltdown moon in favor of shark ahoy, which ASKS if you want to sign in before it tries.

This is obviously important. When a player whats to play, they should be able to. That oversight stopped me from playing my game of choice when my time was restricted. So, this is my first fix of the afternoon. I will get right on that.

This afternoon will be the time for final feature tweaks for the two aforementioned android games. Some play testing has also suggested that it’s hard to gauge when and where the shark will bite in ‘shark ahoy’ so it’s been suggested that I make this far more explicit with a targeting reticule. I’m up for giving that a try and then doing some further testing.

Well, I’d better get on with it then.

It was my birthday yesterday (woo-hoo!) and I woke to the best gift in the form of an email. Sony have gone from closed to open beta on their PlayStation suite studio.

It looks like visual studio2010 with some re-branding, but what’s important is that it lets you write software (in c#) for certain PlayStation approved platforms. One of these platforms happens to be the PSVITA, one of which I’d just acquired.

I spent an hour or so installing the tools. Windows only so I got my crappy old vista laptop and used that. The install was fairly painless, it required constant attention as it installed a whole bunch of stuff but nothing went wrong (even on my messed up laptop).

I wrote some demo code to display some graphics using a quad. Trashed that as soon as I realised they had a more 2d suited suite of classes under the name of GameEngine2D. I build another demo using this and then set about doing something more substantial.

So I set to work porting my android (touch) version of meltdown moon to the platform to see what it was all about.

The IDE was very familiar and I was pleased to see even included support for Git (something the free version of visual studio doesn’t do) everything worked just fine apart from the installing of the software onto the vita.

To get your games onto the vita it’s required that you install a special app (a bit like the xna connect thing for the xbox) which was fine. The problems come when trying to get software installed using this. It’s kinda temperamental, works only some of the time and requires frequent restarts of the vita software.

I eventually got a process down that worked every time. This involved unplugging the vita and plugging it back in again  for each run. Sounds clunky but it worked reliably after this. Once I had a process that worked it no longer bothered me. Although it would be nice to see this addressed at some point.

So with a cool optimised scene-graph approach to sprites some cludging was required to get meltdown moon’s own particle system to play nice without having to rewrite the whole thing. Once I worked out how to do this I set about porting the java to c#.

So with the bulk of the effort done, I was left with an upside down version of meltdown moon with some corrupted assets.

The origin for the graphics engine was bottom left. Oh. Simple fix and it was all the right way up.

The corruption I’m still not sure about as the cause was a single sprite, the backfade image (lots of alpha 300x200px), which was effecting every sprite below it. With the backfade removed everything was back to normal (sensa backfade).

With these fixes the game looked fine but with more than a few particles on the screen it was running like a dog.

I read the documents that came with the sdk and found more information on SpriteLists. By grouping similarly rendered sprites you can save mucho time in the render loop and it’s encouraged heavily in the documentation. It boiled down to a mechanism by which you can push multiple similarly textured quads to the graphics card in one push, saving on time. With each of my sprites grouped into their own lists and pushed in groups the game was running at speed with a full complement of asteroids on screen. However I was still suffering from slowdown when explosions were going off. I tried a few things but ended up shortening the time to live for most particles which did the trick but, I admit, was a bit of a cop out.

So here it is: My half ported version of meltdown moon without any text or menus:

I plan on finishing this and perhaps even adding a few VITA inspired features and trying to get it released once the time comes.

On the whole I’d say that Sony have done a good job here, the process has a lot in common with the XNA game development process for the XBOX 360 but with the simplified deployment process, powerful 2D games engine and lightweight input management I’d say this is slightly better. I hope you’ll be seeing more VITA from me in the future. 😀

Good, then. Well done.

Here we are with the promised mobile update to meltdown moon. It’s going to be available for android real soon! Here is what you can get excited about:

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Where have you been I hear you (no-one) ask? Well we’ve (I’ve) been off doing lots of other things. In the interim I’ve created this fun new way of browsing your tweets in a lovely first person forest.

It’s available for Mac, Linux and Windows, so why not give it a try now. If you like it please do let me know!

Controls are as follows:

[w,a,s,d] – move you around while the mouse is for looking (ever played any FPS on a PC ever?) Left mouse will print out a ‘tweet cube’ and give it a good kicking too. Right mouse will refresh the tweets.