The forest at night.
A distinguished gentleiguana.
Some other progress: a friend of mine is willing to do music for Platformer. I also implemented support for background music in the game via XACT, and I’m going to add support for normal sound FX as well soon.
So I haven’t worked on Platformer (directly) in a couple days. Spent the past several days working on a C# networking library (something like the basics of Twisted for handling TCP and UDP sockets in an event-based way, so I don’t have to think about threading.) The plan is ultimately to make a fancy-pants networked debug console for Platformer or other future games.
It’s a somewhat vague idea, but the general concept is that the game could expose a tree of objects with associated properties and commands. The console would be a separate process that connects and lets you browse the tree, view and edit properties, execute commands, and present the game’s log. This would be a more comprehensive version of the debug menu that’s present in Platformer right now, and would allow me to have a richer UI like sliders, color pickers, etc.
Wow, that sounds completely vague and tangential. Way to get distracted, self.
Been doing some minor tweaks to get back into Platformer:
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but something else I did a few months ago was write a simple 2D scene graph in Platformer. It’s only used in menu screens so far, but it’s very helpful to be able to arrange sprites & text labels as objects instead of having to draw them in immediate mode. You generally don’t even have to write a Render() function for a screen any more, just a constructor & an Update() function. It’s fairly minimalist, but I’ve ported most of the code that does drawing (except for the game itself, because that’s more complex and is more performance sensitive) over to the new scene graph system, and it seems to be a win as far as ease-of-use.
This was all inspired by some Actionscript 2D game libraries that are popular right now, like Flixel and Flashpunk.
Working on some art for the Game Over screen. Iguana skull & crossbones.
I’m going to try to actually post new stuff (at least art) on here weekly, since I’ve been neglecting the blog so badly.
Here’s Lenny in a Hawaiian shirt.
Should Platformer be a run-n-gun instead of a run-n-slash? He looks so happy.
So I guess I missed the entire month of April. I have been rather busy with other stuff so there’s not much to report on Platformer, sadly. Hopefully I will be able to return to working on it soon.
I finally got around to making a portfolio site for myself. Also, shilbert.com now directs to the portfolio instead of this blog. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.
Rare art post day. Not pixel art this time, either.
Figured I ought to post some videos of what Platformer looks like right now:
I’m going to GDC this year. I haven’t been before — the GDC and NCSU’s spring break never lined up — but now that I’ve graduated it doesn’t matter. Should be interesting.