Stuff Tagged With "Development"

Having been away from coding especially c++ far to long I've decided to make some changes to T.W.T.P.B. to get into the game again so to speak

I actually had a chat irl with two of the current top players and they wanted more rewards (i.e. energy) for killing enemies. Also I've had been pondering this idea that when you kill an enemy the bullets from that enemy are converted to small energy pellets. So this seemed like a pretty good thing and I have started to implement it.

There are however some decisions to be made:

Converting bullets per enemy seems to make the game a bit easy Possibly this should be on a per formation basis instead. Or this should be the rule when playing on "easy" and maybe do per formation on medium and no conversion on hard.

Any comments or ideas?

I hope to get some time to experiment and get an update out there asap.

Some of you might wonder what I've been up to lately. Besides having a sprint on the site adding support for Twitter login I've been busy starting a research project at the university where I have my daytime job. The general idea is to take some of the experiences (10+ years) from game development and make further experiments to expand, enhance and validate & verify my findings in a scientific way. The result of this process will be a thesis and I'll become a Ph.D.

And without further adue I present my "hyper thesis", a.k.a. vision

Enhancing Quality of Software Architecture in Computer Games

The driving requirement of software architecture in computer games has since long been performance. However, focusing on performance alone often leads to problems in other areas; the software cannot be maintained or changed in an agile way and it becomes hard for developers to react to market changes or advances in hardware. Testing is hard or even impossible in many cases and reuse of code and design is minimal.

Modern approaches to software architecture in computer games, e.g. a modification of the model view controller (MVC) pattern, bear other qualities like changeability, maintainability, testability, and reusability without sacrificing performance. This is shown for a number of game types ranging from casual games to multi-player action titles. A standardized software architecture throughout many projects also enhances programmer productivity and project scalability.

Feel free to comment

Oh man I've had two very busy weeks in my "real" life. So busy I've hardly had the time to check the website and little less post anything new.

Things do look brighter now and I hope to get busy developing soon! I've got an update for T.W.T.P.B. in the pipe and also Project L needs some love

Oh... a new year has come and it's time for a view back on the year past from a Spell of Play perspective.

2009 was a social year for me. TWTPB launched late 2008 and much of my energy went into marketing and getting the word out there about twtpb, hUb and Spell of Play in general. This was also the time when I discovered twitter and I quickly took it to my heart... probably a bit too much There is even a way for you to connect your spell of play profile and twitter profile, via our twitter app Game Twtr

Via twitter we got a bunch of followers and visitors to our website, I tried doing twitter contests, blogging contests, appeared on some pod-casts and also a web show featured the spell of play homepage. We then decided to host a small game development gathering called SoPCon in Gothenburg. We also managed to end up on a list of Swedens hottest small game developers resulting in some local radio and tv-interviews. Things where looking good!

However, as it seems reality catches up sooner or later and I've felt quite uninspired, burnt out, call it what you want after summer. The end result was that I did not manage to pull through the latter half of 2009 and the result is that the number of visitors to the site is at an all time low Not much is happening and I've not been able to do much about it.

I also have not been able to get a real start on any new game projects this year. I'm torn between continuing working on TWTPB (I have some ideas for an expansion), Project L and some new ideas I have been experimenting with lately.

So what is my vision for 2010? What I would like to happen is to get the online community working and have some proper integration with our games. I want the homepage to feel more alive and kicking than ever! I would also like to at least start a new game project. I also have a number of improvements to the hUb backend that I would like to get on.

What will definitely happen is that we'll push our games to appear on Gamers Gate and also a port of TWTPB to XNA -> XBox is more or less done. So I hope we'll get accepted by Microsoft.

I will try to play more games 2010

I hope your 2009 was good and that 2010 will be even better for you!

As a result of some personal stuff, daytime work pressure, and mostly the need to focus on other parts of Spell of Play I feel forced to put Project L on a back burner for now. That is there will be no regular releases for a while.

For the above reasons I've barely managed to complete my iteration goals up till now, and quite frankly the focus on tech has delayed much of the actual gameplay. I feel I've made good, alas slow, progress and I've had a really fun time with the game and the code. But it would not be fair neither towards my vision of the game nor you gamers to force the development.

Anyways, I do plan to make releases, and I do plan to bring it back to the top of the priority heap.

So my focus will switch to marketing (we do need to pay for servers, tools, content etc), these web pages, the community and to further develop hUb. Streamlining the web and hUb experience is currently my top priority, and also making hUb Windows 7 compatible.

Hi all!

Time for another release of Project L! Woot! Actually the release is somewhat lame as I've spent most of this iteration debugging my intersection testing. This iteration adds lightmaps with ambient occlusion in them so basically I had to make a simple ray tracer and optimize a lot of things in the intersection code.

Anyway, not much added to the actual game, but it was fun working at and visually I think it really pays off I hope you like it.

Oh... there is a slight game-play change, when you spawn you keep your jumping velocity though it is reversed. Jumping of the level and pressing "space" to respawn can give an interesting experience...

Finally iteration 2 of Project L has been released for download on hUb. This has been a tough iteration for me personally with a lot of stuff going on irl.

Some things from the previous iteration has been addressed such as the addition of a small menu where you can flip the mouse axis and actually quit the game Albeit there is not much actual gameplay as of yet I feel that progress is being made and that I'm growing more and more fond of this project, especially the kind of ancient civilization ruins theme that seem to have been evolving

The biggest gameplay additions are the ability to jump (use rmb for this) and the spawn and exit points.

I would appreciate any feedback, comments, encouragements or bashing.