by pixelpusher on Tuesday 7 September 2010
[Blog, Software]
Today (for Creative Pact 2010) I took my little game engine and created a fully working game out of it. I finished some more assets – rocks and shells and things you find near the water, traced from some pictures I took on the banks of the Thames. The goal is to collect the buried treasure by clicking on it, as fast as possible. It’s a start – the next version will have shake sensors and other moving characters you need to click on.
Writing a game, you realize that the coding part of the time is tiny compared to the “figuring out what the heck the game should do and creating all the visual assets” time. Especially the visual assets, mostly because I prefer to draw them by hand and not take from other sources. I like that cartoony aesthetic in a video game, as you can probably tell.
If you have an android phone, you can install it from here.
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by pixelpusher on Monday 6 September 2010
[Blog, Software]
I have this idea of doing a game where you dig in the sand and find buried treasure. Trying to get it done in a day is tricky… I basically finished making some assets today (only have about 1.5 hrs or so to do it in). Here are a few cute lil’ images I whipped up in Illustrator. Please be aware that, as of now, they are copyright Evan Raskob 2010 (and not free – yet).
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by pixelpusher on Thursday 2 September 2010
[Blog, Software]
Result – this is actually game-like!
CatFishTron Creative Pact Day 3
Today’s lesson in that things are always more difficult than they seem. Tried adding a MotionEvent.ACTION_MOVED detector to the onSceneTouchEvent() method of my TouchSprites so they could detect when a finger dragged over them and subsequently would knock them about, but had a bit of trouble. Apparently, as I’ve learned on the excellent AndEngine forum, an object needs to first catch an ACTION_DOWN event before it will start to receive subsequent ACTION_CANCELED or ACTION_MOVED events. This makes sense in hindsight, but it also make things a bit more difficult when you’ve started thinking about it from the other way, as if these events were just globally propagated down the chain of objects that are subscribed to receive them, until one steps up and handles it.
The solution is to create another physics object that’s hidden, and move it about to knock the other objects around when necessary. Also, I had to update it in a different thread, and I still get some crashes occasionally due to memory errors. Need to look at those…
So it looks like “kicking” an object (a cat, in this case) is going to be all I can get done today, because tonight is the opening at The Brick Box in Brixton Market and I’ll be showing Drawn Together there amongst some other visual and artistic goodness.
I did add simple scoring to this version – this should be handled by a GameLogic class, which I’ll work on a bit tomorrow if I get a chance (have some other stuff to do).
Here’s today’s code.
Here’s today’s app. (I overwrote yesterday’s, because, well, it sucked)
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by pixelpusher on Wednesday 1 September 2010
[Blog, Software]
Creative Pact Day 2
Today I’m going to create more of a “game,” eventually called CatFishTron. No, really. I’ll be learning how to add sound to a game, a moving background, and maybe, if I have time, add some self-removing sprites (for explosions, etc!)
First task – to make a sprite “blow-up” in AndEngine you use a SequenceModifier and attach it to the Sprite:
this.mBlowupModifier = new SequenceModifier(new ScaleModifier(1.0f, 1.0f, 0.2f));
final IShapeModifierListener listener = new IShapeModifierListener()
{
public void onModifierFinished(IShapeModifier arg0, IShape arg1)
{
// this is a function in my main Activity that removes a sprite entity and physics body in a separate thread
destroySprite(_spriteEvent.mSprite);
}
};
//set a listener to listen for the modification having finished
this.mBlowupModifier.setShapeModifierListener(listener);
// attach it to the sprite entity object
_spriteEvent.mSprite.addShapeModifier(mBlowupModifier.clone());
Here’s today’s code (again, it’s not complete, just building on the previous day, but you might find it interesting…)
Here’s the app itself, you can open the link on your android phone to install it.
It’s a work in progress, remember. It take a bit to make a video game… even a crappy one!
Also, I promise that at the end of this I will write a tutorial.
Now go play MeowTron.
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Marching Rocks, Gloves & Code
Experimental electronica: new, old and somewhere in-between.
Saturday 24th October
7pm – Later. FREE
at SPACE, 129 – 131 Mare Street, London E8 3RH
SPACE and Culture Lab (Newcastle) come together to bring you an evening of experimental electronica, featuring performances from: Jamie Allen’s CircuitMusic, Jo Kazuhiro, PixelH8, Massive Black Mountain (Will Schrimshaw & Nick J Williams), Adam Parkinson(Rare and Glorius) The Cane Toad Orchestra (OpenLab) and Dave Griffiths(Slub).
DJ RE:ROOT (Marc Garrett) from arts collective www.furtherfield.org provides punk, new wave, no wave, post punk and early electronica from 1976 – 1984 and Dean Baldwin’s “Minibar” the smallest bar in London will open its doors for one of the last times.
Tell your enemies, friends and family- this is going to be good.
More info at: http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/All_Content_Items/Media_Arts/MarchingRocksGloves&Code/
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