Another weekend means another bunch of work done on Zep's Dreamland. Well, I didn't do too much. I've made some more levels which are semi-challenging, which is good. The one big addition I made was an options screen. The new demo reflects this little addition. You can now set the volumes for the sound and bgm. I find this nice, since sometimes you don't feel like listening to midi - but would rather have your mp3 player blasting some music in the background while you play Zep's Dreamland. ;) Grab the new demo!

On the art side of stuff, Johan is here in the US visiting for a while, so the art production has come to a complete halt for a bit. Once he get's back I'm sure I'll be receiving bunches of tiles, etc. Right now I'm just building all levels with basic tiles. I'm going to go back into the editor and fix them up once I get some more tiles!

I've been able to do some good work this weekend. I've basically compiled together a new demo of my puzzle game, which now is called "Zep's Dreamland." I've added such stuff as saving and a title screen. I've also fixed up some of the maps. Please note that a lot of the maps may not ever even appear in the final version of the game - so don't get too upset if they are impossibly hard or extremely easy. Right now there's only ten levels to play, all of which take place in the "forest" setting.

Anyways, go grab the newest demo; it features the new art!

Well, I've started classes. So far, it's not that fun at all. I woke up at 6 and didn't get back home until 5. Thie is excluding homework time - since I didn't really get any after my first day of classes. To me it looks like things are going to be grim in the programming world (this programming world).

I'm going to try and keep my hopes up. Maybe after a full week of school I'll get into the flow and be able to do more work on my games. Right now I'm just trying to get a lot of stuff straigtened away.

Another two days have gone by and what has happened? A whole lot, actually! I have loads of information to dump on you today!

As for the programming aspect, I've added a lot of things to the puzzle game. Now tile creation/destruction are animated, and the win tile is animated. I added teleporting to the game. The teleporting works very simply. There is a teleport pad and a teleport destination. When the player walks onto the pad they will be instantly teleported to another location on the map. The teleporting does not work in reverse, however. This may change, I don't know. Right now I think only one-way teleporting is best. Also, the telporting pads are animated. I added in code to show different backgrounds, and scroll them either horizontally left/right or vertically up/down according to how the user has specified it in the level editor. Everything is customizable, so levels can be very original. The background datafile can be expanded upon and the editor will do all the figuring for you, so if you were a super level-making junkie you could use your own graphics for backgrounds. I also fixed a bunch of bugs that were hiding around in the code!

Now, onto the very juicy news! I actually had an offer, yeah - you read that right, an offer from an artist to do the art for my game. It's not every day you get an artist asking to do work for a programmer. Actually, this rarely happens. Usually it's just the other way around. Anyways, the talented guy who is now doing basically all the art for the game (except Zep) is Johan Peitz (http://www.freelunchdesign.com). He is also a programmer as well as an artist. I suggest you check out his games sometime, they are quailty stuff.

We have already been working collaboratively over the past two days and we have accomplished so much. It's incredible. The game looks so awesome now that it has decent art. (Sorry, no download yet. All you get is a single screenshot for now). Because of the modularity of my editor and the engine, graphics can be changed and swapped rather easily. Even adding new tiles can cause no effect to any part of the game if you do it in a certain fashion. I guess making everything super user friendly really paid off because no bumps have been hit in the road. Everything is going nice, smoothly, and according to plan.

The only thing I worry about is my starting school (tomorrow!) This will greatly limit the time I have to work on the engine - but it's practially all done anyways (the core stuff). It's my first year of college so I've got no idea what the workload is going to be like. I'll just have to ride through it, I guess. I'll try to plop out a nice demo with all the new eye-candy shortly, but I only have two working levels right now. All the extremely new and complicated code that I added in over the past two days has now broken all the old levels. I'll try to get more screenshots by the time the next demo is out, too, if I can.

Well, I've finally decided to upload the second demo of my little puzzle game. Check the page to get the download. What it added is exactly what I have mentioned in the last post.

I'm thinking for the game's future I will probably just add some sort of teleport system, and then all will be set. I may add some other things. I still have to think about how much time I want to spend on this game. It already is really fun, and looks really good. Changing tile art would be no problem at all. Making levels is no problem at all. It's a very modular game that doesn't require much to be fun and enjoyable. I'm leaning towards definitely adding teleporting into the game. As for some sort of enemy or something, I'm not really sure. I'll have to think out the process a little better.

Anyways, have fun!

I did a bunch more work on puzzle game. I added new types of blocks that restrict movement even more. Now there are blocks that will stop you from building in a single direction. For example: if you've got the up restriction block - you can build in evey direction but up. It's pretty sweet. I also added some levels, and there are now 10 levels. I'll probably scrap all of them for better and harder levels, but for now they will do.

I'm going to give some time before releasing the next demo. I've still got a nice thread in a forum up all about the first demo - I want to give it a little time to die down. I don't want to have double threads for two different versions, and I also don't want to make a super long thread pertaining to both versions. So, in due time you'll have your next demo.

It has been too long without an update. I'm really sorry about that everyone. I'm not dead, really. :)

Lots of things have happened during this big duration of time. I have obviously wasted a lot of time playing games, but that's not really important right now. What is important is what I've been doing with my games. I've done some work on Lune, although I couldn't really tell you exactly what I've done since the last update. I've been fixing up the buttons as much as I can, which is kind of a pain. It's not that hard, it's just a long process. If you haven't already noticed, you'll see a new link that says "Puzzle Game" under the games section. Now, woah there! Don't go jumping to conclusions. Lune hasn't been put on hiatus, or anything like that. :)

I guess my brain made myself take a break from Lune. I was just fooling around with a new project and this game popped out. Now, after making a simple engine with it, I realize that if I converted Lune to cartooney and cutesy characters it would be so much easier to complete. I think half the struggle I'm having is with art and the fact that the game just doesn't look good at all. No matter how hard I try I just can't get things looking the way I want them to look: real. It's hard enough to draw a base character, but animating it so that the movement looks human is really hard. I guess this is also why I ended up playing around with this new project. Either way, I'm still thinking about what I should do to Lune - change it to a nice cutesy game, or just try and keep it the way it is. I'm not sure.

Anyways, let's get onto the Puzzle Game. I wrote it in basically about one day with the exception of animating the character, Zep, the day before. It's a simple block game, but not like PushPush. Instead, it's sidescrolling and uses a lot of the trickery and mechanisms I used in Lune. It was very easy to write. You control Zep and must travel from point a to point b. Sounds easy? It's not. There are pits and ditches that you must get around, and you do this by creating blocks in a certain fashion.

The game is based off of a game that I played on a Macintosh a long, long time ago. I unfortunately can't remember the name of that game. Anyways, you should go check it out. It's come so far along that I already have a test demo out for it. I'm sure you'll be pleased with something new to play with. At least I'm getting more downloads out!

Have fun. And make sure to please read the readme file. The technicalities of the game are a little complex, and it will make much more sense if you read that little file that explains everything for you first.

Well, I've done a lot of work since the last post. I completely converted the floating text (the text which was to appear when killing something and show experience gained) into vectors. Why? Well, because I changed the enemies over to vectors as well. Before the change, the floating text stuff was very dependant on the enemy code. Now it isn't at all. This is why I converted both.

It's really neat, since there is no wastage of memory involved when using vectors. Now, if there are no enemies on the level no memory is wasted in an array holding all false data for enemies. When I want an enemy I just expand upon the vector, and when it's dead I just delete that node. This stuff is insanely amazing and is allowing me to do so many things. I played around a bit and added a little code to constantly add enemies onto the screen with the touch of a button. I was observing just about how many enemies the engine could process and still function. I was still playing around while there were over 1,000 spores and 1,000 flyer enemies floating around on the screen: all processing perfectly.

After converting the enemies to vectors in the engine, I was going to add enemy "stuff" into the editor. I had to hold off on that, however. Integrating the enemies into the editor would also mean that I would have to create more "buttons". I figured I might as well take the time now to port over my old LS buttons to the new LS Buttons. I've started that process and it's not very painful at all. It just entitles removing some code, and condensing most of stuff into one function. Later on in the future I will have to create one bitmap extra per each button, since my new button class requires three bitmaps for each button state: up, down, or mouse over. I still haven't completely converted everything, and I still need to make the change to the level editor; which is going to be the longer of the two processes.

Well, a new month, as usual. This never changes; time will always pass as usual and I will always say something like "well, it's a new month! Look for the old stuff in the archives". That's just the way I am, I guess. Anyways, that's where everything went, into the archives. Maybe I just feel better if I say it. I wonder if I would receive weird emails saying "Who set up all your post?". Probably not.

It's been a couple of frustrating months for me, and for the main project: Lune. I kind of strayed off path a bunch of times and started thinking about lots of things. Earlier this morning I was talking with one of my buddies and basically told him I was getting depressed about this whole thing. He told me to just throw out all my ideas of other stuff out the window and just complete Lune because it's an awesome game. Well, for some reason, just hearing that made me want to work on it just a little more. It was pretty sweet. I totally chunked out a bug I was having major problems with because I had a totally different mindset when going into it. This got me very excited. Just watching the cool things I could now do with the fixed up code just made me smile.

So, the code conversion and dissection is nearly complete. Lots of files were split into smaller and more specific files. No longer will I have my main logical processing code within the main source file; or no longer will I have the main drawing processing code within that same file, too. It can make things a little too widespread out, but in general I think it organizes everything a lot better. Sure, sifting through 60 + files just to find the one you need to edit can be a bit tedious, but it's much more worth it.

Now that the conversion is basically complete, I will start to work on converting the enemies into a vector instead of a constant array. This will be totally awesome, and I can't wait to do it. I can't wait to be able to just push a button and make as many enemies on the screen as I want, and delete them as I choose - without the annoying crazy and memory wasting static array style mode that I've been using for so long.

I guess it's really hard to work on the game when, all the time, I keep learning new methods to do things and better ways to process ideas. I have to keep on going back and changing old things that worked perfectly find back into the same state of working perfectly fine, but with different code. I suppose it could be the fact that I am no longer really seeing any graphical output of the new things I am making, because it's all internal stuff that you can't really see. Either that or the fact that the game really isn't that pretty at all. :)

All in all, I think the motivation is gaining bit by bit. The only problem I forsee now is that I start school on the 19th. College is going to eat a bigger chunk of my time than working. I may even be doing both at some point. Hopefully I'll be able to smush in progamming time in between the whole ordeal.