Pariah Dev

So I kinda made this.

I know, I know. One project at a time, damnit.

But anyway. Here it is.

The Crux ( Click ‘View Full Screen’, just under the flash, on the right. )

This little weird experiment app has no purpose but it can make pretty pictures. The controls are all there and playing with them will be the best way to figure it out but here’s a quickstart:

1. Find the Nodes -> Add menu and change the ‘New Def Type’ to Gravity.
2. In the same menu change the ‘Trail Colour’ to something that will look nice against the background.
3. Click add a few times.
4. In the far right ‘Trails’ menu click ‘Draw Trails’.
5. In the far left menu, click pause to unpause the game or just press space.
6. Press M to hide the menu.

If you want to save your image you can but you’ll have to add “.jpg” to the end of the filename and it may take a while when saving large images.

Hopefully that’s enough for you all to get it. I’d love to see any pics you make with it.

Here are some simple pics made with it.

Back to the games.

Just for sheepofaith a status update. Every post is a status update it seems but may aswell show what’s stealing my time.

The candy wars game is coming along slowly, I’ve been hacking away at some more artwork but I hate doing it so it saps my enthusiasm. Rest assured though, when the art is complete things will start coming together and I may put up a demo soon.

The other project I’ve been working on is a clone of the classic Dwarf Fortress. Now this has been re-written five or six different times in one long learning experience but I now have something quite funky that works fairly well with only a couple of bugs.

You’ll have to experiment to figure it all out but the numpad keys should move the camera around the map. Everything else can be done with the mouse. ( Building walls doesn’t work yet. )

Play the prototype here. ( click view full screen )

Still havn’t decided if it’ll make a viable game but I’m hoping some sort of ‘Create A Colony’ game, a little homage to DF, will be fun.

• Getting arrested now works with the mouse controls and takes you to a police station where you sleep for the night.
• You can actually get arrested if you’re seen dealing by the police. (previously only when a test button was pressed)
• Mouse control now works in all aspects, including getting on trains. ( You even stamp your foot if you miss a train. xD )
• Added critters to the maps in varying amounts.
• Punters and critters are now pre-spawned into the locations.
• Fixed an issue with the scrolling background images used in some locations.
• The different drugs can now be hidden from the player so that they can be introduced slowly during play.
• Cutscenes! ( Quite a biggy. )

Might not seem like too much but mouse control forced me to re-write aspects of the game. I spent most of the time doing that. The other large thing was the cutscenes but I have them working nicely for when you get arrested, you can now literally getting thrown in jail.

In other news, I believe I have the name. ‘The Mean Sweets’.. Kinda cheesy but hey, you come up with something better!

Just a quick post to note that I’m still working. I’ve been pretty ill since Boxing Day so little has happened but I’m feeling better now so it’s back to the grindstone. I should have something to post about soon.

Smileyface.

So I suppose I should update the blog with what’s happening. More for my own sanity rather than actually telling anybody. Only a handful of people know about it at this point.

I decided to add mouse control to the game. When FuturCabby (my previous game) was sponsored, the company told me they preffered games that were playable with the mouse and so I hastily hacked mouse control into the game.  When starting CandyWars I was very much interested in giving it a retro feel; That meant keyboard control. The keyboard controls have been fine but looking at it now I thought that it was time for the mouse control.. I think it’s the right move.

At current the mouse works for everything except getting into trains. I need to sort out some extra triggers to make that work. When you click on the ground or a door, the player walks to it. If you click on a punter the player walks over to the punter and they initiate a deal. Mousing over a punter will reveal what drug they are interested in.. If any at all.

In other aspects: You can now buy and sell between two dealers that use a global offset for the current market. Every day the offset will change so if prices are bad today you can come back tomorrow (they may be worse! ^^). While extending the life of the game somewhat, the aim is to push people into playing the game a little each day, thus yielding larger ad revenue. Whether this is a good idea or not.. I don’t know. Portals seem to like games that can be played entirely in fifteen minutes for the same reasons: Players go off clicking around for another game and yep.. more ad impressions.

That’s the blessing and curse of being truly independent. You get to do whatever you think is right but ignorance is only bliss until reality slaps you in the face.

So I thought I’d post a little about my current project.

The aim was to make a fairly gritty, Flash adventure game. With a nice steady pace and build up, it’s essentially a more stylish version of the DOS classic: Dope Wars.

You start off as a low level candy dealer and slowly build your way up to the top, avoiding the police, making deals and learning a little about the main character: PixelHead.

Why Candy Wars?  Well, after thinking about it, I realized that the advertisers I will use in the game would never be happy with the content. In order to deal with that I’m simply cloaking anything risky in a shroud of candy. Drugs are candy, prostitutes will bake you cakes and some people will do anything for just another sniff of sherbert.

The game is built on Flixel, although at this stage of development (almost feature complete) I think that I’d have been better off making the bitmap engine from scratch. Encompassing everything into one sprite has limited some funky effects I wanted to add. A little too late to change now but food for thought.

I’ll be posting updates about the game here in some noob attempt at keeping a changelog.

In the mean time, I need a good name for the game, all suggestions are welcome.

Peace.

Self taught programmer trying to move to advanced coding with the aim of making games. This blog will be for code snippets and musings on intermediate game programming, OOP and the like.