Xoorath Doesn't Exist

Dreams Of Sand Alpha 0.0.1 from Jared Thomson on Vimeo.The game...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:12:54 -0400

Dreams Of Sand Alpha 0.0.1 from Jared Thomson on Vimeo.

The game previously referred to as ‘Maze Ball’ is now called Dreams of Sand.

Windows: bit.ly/10V1g8o
Mac: bit.ly/ZCFLb1

This video shows the progress I’ve made since the last video (vimeo.com/59927434)

Some of the cool new changes include:

+ Maze is built out of models with floors now instead of a bunch of scaled cubes.
+ The player can now control a ball inside the maze that can be pushed around.
+ Both keyboard and Leap motion controls are supported.
+ I now have a build server for mac and windows so updates can be made more frequently and consistently.
+ Mac build now runs from a single app file

The music in this video is pulled from soundcloud. The track is called Brainstorm by Royalty Free Kings. Link here: soundcloud.com/royaltyfreekings/brainstorm

AMOK

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:10:04 -0500

Hello friends, This weekend I had fun going to the...

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 17:48:00 -0500

Hello friends,

This weekend I had fun going to the WinterBrewed beer festival, watching documentaries with Miss Menard and writing some code for this game I’m making.

In this weeks edition of the Maze Ball Alpha you can expect the following changes:

- No more spinning cube in the menu (aww!)

~ The leap visualizations now colour each hand and tools differently; tools show up as rounded squares instead of circles.

+ There’s a maze in the game now (woah!)

+ The game solves the maze one frame at a time which you can see in the video.

That’s it for today’s update. Sorry if your facebook or twitter got spammed by me as I tried to figure out vimeo. Thanks for reading!

MAZE BALL ALPHA 0.0.0.3

Download: WIN32, OSX, SOURCE CODE

Requires: LEAP VERSION 0.7.3

Maze Ball - Almost A Thing

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 01:28:44 -0500

So I haven’t been working that hard on Maze Ball. This is only my second day of coding but at least things are looking like (almost) things.

The above is a screenshot of my windows build so far. The cube in the background spins and the things that look like buttons are actually buttons. Those blue circles as you might have guessed are my fingers.

Some of you might be wondering how I hit print screen with all 10 of my fingers in the air. Well I’m not going to tell you… because that’s funny to me. Ha. Haha. Ha.

On that note I also got the mac build up and running again which you can also download below.

Stay tuned friends and while your at it check out this dev log that’s far prettier than mine or this blog that makes me wish I had an artist for this game.

Changes in this version:

+ Finger visualizations

+ Main menu exists. It’s all data driven so it can be entirely themed.

+ A bottom overlay that’s going to be useful later. It lies to you and makes you think you can hover to hide it.

- Cube no longer moves with your finger translation

MAZE BALL ALPHA 0.0.0.2

DOWNLOAD: WIN32, OSX, SOURCE CODE

REQUIRES: LEAP VERSION 0.7.3

Maze Ball - Hooking into the Leap Motion

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:03:00 -0500

Some time before Christmas I received an early present from the nice folks at Leap Motion. They added me to their list of beta developers and shipped me an early version of their device.

Since then I’ve been dilly dallying around and I’ve finally gotten something up and running. I call it Maze Ball, and I’d like to post about it every so often here.

Right now the plan is to spend some of my spare time developing this game and then offer it to my employer. If they want to monetize on it then great but if not I’ll release it for free and possibly even open source if everything goes well. That’s all political though so for now let’s just enjoy the tech.

Woo tech!

So here’s what I’m up to and some of my thoughts.

Last night I got it integrated with Gameplay the 3D game engine being developed by RIM. I’ve written about this game engine before. Those who know me would testify that I both think highly of this engine and think it’s a horrifically bad idea for a business to use it for commercial 2D games. That’s really all my opinion boils down to. Since I’m not really interested in platform stability as much as I am cool things to play with, this engine fit the bill!

Without re-writing the design document here’s a down low on what maze ball is. It’s a game where you have a maze and you are a ball. You push your character along the maze and eventually when you get to a hole in the maze you can push yourself through it. The board flips around and now you’re on the other side of the maze. The object of the game is to play a game of capture the flag with another little ball in the maze.

So far I have a mac and windows build running with version 0.7.3 of the SDK. There’s a spinning cube and you can make it translate all over the place using the leap. Right now it’s not moving to the position of your finger but rather it’s moving BY the position of your finger using only translation.

Just at about that point I decided to watch Adventure Time with Kaylee. So things de-railed.

More on Maze Ball later. Stay tuned kiddies.

Maze Ball Alpha 0.0.0.1

download: win32, Source Code

Requires: OpenAL, Leap version 0.7.3

These keys are made for walking

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:29:00 -0400

That’s the last time I reference Nancy Sinatra, I promise.

On friday I was thinking to myself ‘Lets get this character on screen and walking around’ to which I quickly realized what I had to do. Cocos2d-x has really shitty PC input support. I already modified Cocos2d-x to handle mouse input more sensibly by posting move events regardless if you’re clicking and to set the touch id to the mouse button id (1-2-3). But now I had to handle input a bit nicer.

Now you can become a keyboard delegate and listen to key up, down, press, and release. It should have been a trivial amount of work but I had a couple hick-ups here and there. Now it’s done and I’m really happy with how it works.

Above (old blog) is a demo of what I did on friday, adding a player MVC. The model can subscribe to input directly in my implementation and move it’s parent (controller) as need be. Because the view is also a child of the controller it can simply listen to the current state of the controller rather then having an idea of what the model looks like. So basically I’ve shuffled some of the roles between the view and the controller. It’s just as organized in my opinion and offers me more benefits with similar constraints as a traditional MVC (if you can say there is one, even). The biggest downfall to my approach is any modification of the controller will result in pretty substantial model and view changes. I’ve encapsulated everything so if I’m careful I can avoid that overhead.

Right now the model is handling input and keeping track of all math required for movement, changing the state of the controller for the view to later listen to and update the player sprite. Because the model will be moving the controller (which is a CCNode) outside observers can see the position and states as needed. So hopefully this will keep things manageable in the long term.

That’s it for this weekend!

Thanks for the read,

-Xoorath

OSX pain continues

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:28:00 -0400

Hey guys,

Just a quick little update: I’ve been busy. Sorry.

A slightly longer update: All I’ve done with spirit-age is add a nicer menu and continue to try and integrate awesomium into the mac build. They share the same code base, but I was able to safely remove browser dependencies because of the wrapper class I wrote.

The problem is that while trying to link awesomium properly I used the install_name_tool command and broke things pretty bad.

When I get all that funny business finished I’ll be adding in sprites exported with texture packer and writing a post about that nifty little piece of software.

Thanks for the read, I’ll be back with more soon.

-Xoorath

OSX Support

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 16:28:00 -0400

So this is Spirit Age. The game isn’t much yet and I’m just doing a prototype that will consist of the starting area and some basic mechanics with the artist Zane I mentioned in my last post. I don’t want to talk too much about the game now as we’re still in the very early stages but I’ll talk more about the tech.

So when deciding on what game engine to use I was toying with the idea of doing something similar to Ben Kane with DLC quest and go for an XNA title that I could then port to Linux and Mac. That’s cool and all, and I dig XNA (probably about 60% of my college experience was XNA) but I also happen to have grown a love for cocos2d-x. The dilemma until recently was that cocos2d-x had no OSX support, but luckily version 2.0.2 fixed that! Now I can create a C++ game with openGL that supports Mac/Linux/PC without having to do it from scratch (which I’ve done in the past at a snails pace).

So now that I’ve got the Mac and Windows versions working nicely together I can move onto linux. I plan to develop 70% or more from OSX because thats what I use at home, but I would really like to have periodic builds for the other platforms until a beta release where I’ll likely invest time in creating a build server for the game.

Thanks again for the read friends.

-Xoorath

In game browser with cocos2d-x

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 11:03:00 -0400

So last night I decided for a little side project I’m working on that I wanted an in game browser. I can have it be responsible for most of the UI similar to what Wolfire has going on. I can also use this to link to a live registration page and in-app purchases if those end up being in this projects future.

At first I decided to go with Berkelium which was hard to get going because I didn’t really understand how things worked. The above screenshot is using Berkelium.

After which I decided to give Awesomium a try, which is the tech wolfire uses. I’m much happier with Awesomium mainly because of the documentation and community it has behind it but both are honestly fine choices. I think I’ll continue with Awesomium, but the wrapper I wrote functions for both, so I could just switch at any time if I felt like it.

Oh, and that awesome art in the background? Yeah, that’s some good shit right there. This side project is a prototype game with the artist Zane from tigsource. More on that later.

Thanks for the read.

-Xoorath

Love me I’m beautiful

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 11:02:00 -0400

Hello there friends.

Since my post last night doesn’t really count I think I’ll start off fresh with a design post. I’ve been thinking about a game I want to make for a while now called “Love me I’m Beautiful”. Which isn’t half as cute as it sounds. Not even close.

The game consists of the player being an insane blobby creature with twiggy arms that’s very lonely. The goal of the game is to find other creatures in this world and sew them to your body. As you sew more and more creatures to your body you get increasingly larger and slower until you eventually stop moving. When you stop moving you win! You collected all of the creatures in the world.

I picture the body of this creature moving kind of like a slug. Maybe some soft body physics that would leave a trail of slime and blood behind it. If the game is too easy I could also see it having walls and corners which would cause the player to strategically go to certain areas first so they don’t get stuck. Maybe bending your body around corners too tightly could cause your disgusting body to break into a revolting mess? Sounds like fun, but this game is starting to get a bit bigger than initially anticipated.

I did a prototype for this game during a 2 hour game jam, but that only gave me enough time to get the basic mechanic down without any sort of speed changes or level design. So I didn’t learn much from that prototype unfortunately but it was only 2 hours of work. I’m planning on doing another prototype soon when I’m a little less busy (lots of appointments lately).

Look forward to a disgusting game prototype in the near future!

Thanks for the read,

Xoorath

Welcome weary traveller

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 11:00:00 -0400

So here you are and here I am. The first post on a blog is always the scariest because the reader and writer never know if it’s going to ever happen again. Or if it does for how much longer? Will I post here for a week? For a month? A year? I don’t know… I suppose that’s the beauty of the internet. It’s mysterious and exposes how flaky some of us are. It’s kind of like a window into our true selves and I have to admit the venerability is a little bit exhilarating. It’s not as easy as being anonymous or just lurking without presence, it’s a pseudo social commitment that takes guts I may or may not have. Let’s explore this together and see how things unfold, shall we?

I’m not going to commit to a schedule or anything like that, I’m going to post as frequently as I find it fun to do so. I’d like to make some tutorials here on request from my student friends, post artwork, review/promote games I find neat, and so on. Some days I might just post about what’s on my mind because I’m feeling a little blue. I don’t know, but at the very least this blog won’t be forced like some of my past blogs.

To stay up to date on my posts follow me on twitter @xoorath, and weed through unrelated tweets about music and bad puns. You can also use some fancy things like feed readers for the blog addicts out there, but you type of folk don’t need me to tell you how to do that.

Anyways, I’m doing some exciting stuff right now, so look forward to posts in the coming weeks.

Thanks for the read.

Xoorath