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Visual Studio Woes

Jesse — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:00:53 +0000

I’ve been struggling with something lately, and I find it annoying.

Back in Visual C++ 2008 (and earlier), there was a feature that let you set up the include and library files that would be used by every project on your computer. Using this requiree that everyone on your team go through and set these paths up once, and then they were good to go. The benefit here is that if I install an external library at “C:\ExternalLibrary\includes” and my team member installs it at “C:\Libraries\ExternalLibrary\includes” it works just fine.

In Visual C++ 2010, that feature was taken out, and now you need to set up your external paths in the project settings. Unfortunately, the project file is something you’d include in version control. That means that when I set the path to my path of “C:\ExternalLibrary\includes” it’s going to break compilation for my team member when he grabs the latest version from version control.

I’ve done a lot of searching, and I can’t figure out a good solution in Visual Studio for this problem.

The best I’ve come up with is to handle this outside of Visual Studio with environment variables. I’ll add an environment variable like ExternalLibraryPath, set to “C:\ExternalLibrary”. And then in the project settings, I’ll add “$(ExternalLibraryPath)\includes” to the additional include directories. It works, but it forces all of my team members to set up an environment variable outside of Visual Studio, which feels a little dirty.

Anyone have a better solution?

Demina documentation

Jesse — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 20:36:05 +0000

It took me entirely too long to finally get around to it, but I’ve written some documentation for Demina.

Over on the Demina documentation page you can now find guides on how to rig a character, create a walk cycle, and import and render that character in an XNA 4.0 game.

If anybody finds this useful and creates something with Demina, I’d love to hear about it!

Platformers

Jesse — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:57:51 +0000

I haven’t been doing much real game development work lately. I wrote a prototype for a puzzle game, but it was a failure. While I might revisit it someday, it’s certainly not my next game. Instead, I’ve started work on my next platformer. I don’t need to prototype that, because Being was the prototype.

But instead of working, I’ve been playing other platformers.

Cave Story

One of the big success stories for what’s possible as an independent developer. It really is an amazing game, and news of its upcoming WiiWare release made me nostalgic, and I had to play it again.

Within a Deep Forest

While Knytt Stories is the game I’ve read more about, WaDF is my favorite of the games from Nifflas. I’ve played all the way through twice. It’s surprising how attached I got to a little ball.

An Untitled Story

I really enjoy the boss fights in this game. This game makes me giddy with all the exploration you can do. I have to admit that it can get pretty frustrating trying to get through some of the difficult areas. How crazy is it that I went grinding for money so I could furnish an apartment for my little guy?

Treasure Hunter Man

This is a new one from Bernie, who has a bunch of freeware indie games to his credit. I had alot of fun with this game, and played until I’d collected all of the items and achieved both endings. I feel a need to play his other games now.

All of these games are free to download and play, and I highly recommend them.

Dream Build Play entries

Jesse — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:54:16 +0000

Looking at the gallery page there’s over 280 submitted entries. That’s insane! I knew going in that I didn’t stand a chance to win anything, and that I was only entering because it’s fun to participate, but I’ve been really blown away the the quality of some of these games. (Note: The gallery page seems to have disappeared, so I removed the link to it, but the rest of this post should be fine.)

I present some of my favorites, in no particular order.

First up is Bloc from Metacreature Games. It looks similar to a dual-stick shooter, like Geometry Wars, but it plays quite a bit differently. I enjoy this game a great deal, but I have to admit that I’m completely terrible at it.

Next up is Zeit². This game marries a side-scrolling space shooter with a time rewind ability similar to what’s in Braid. Instead of undoing your mistakes, though, you use this to take out more enemies and getting special attacks by shooting at the previous version of yourself.

This next one is An Awesome Game Where You Shoot Stuff And It Blows Up And You Win The Game. (An Awesome Game for short.) It’s a Metroidvania game (a term used to describe games that combine elements from the 2D Metroid and Castlevania games), with tons of clear influence from other games. This trailer is insane. (The game is nuts too. In a good way.)

And finally, here’s Battle Tennis. I don’t really need to say much about this one, the video speaks volumes.

New web host

Jesse — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:56:31 +0000

I had a bit of downtime here for the last couple of days. I’ve been moving the site over to a new host, and things didn’t happen invisibly behind the scenes like I’d hoped they would. (My mistake, not the fault of the new host.) Whoops!

This is a much newer version of WordPress than I had on the old server. If things looks odd, that’s probably why, but I’m working on it.

Help the homeless ninjas!

Jesse — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 02:48:05 +0000

A good buddy of mine is making a movie. Check it out:

If you dig the video, please take a second to digg it and help him get more exposure.

Animation Editor

Jesse — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 21:31:04 +0000

So, I’m getting started on a 4E6 entry. My biggest gripe (and it’s minor) with XNA as it exists now is the difficulty in working with the standard .Net Framework to build tools. Apparently this will all be cleaned up with XNA Game Studio Express 2.0, but it’s somewhat annoying now.

However, while you can’t yet drop an XNA game window onto a .Net form, you can create one separately. So that’s what I’m doing.

That’s my dead simple animation editor. You draw boxes around each frame you want, and then set the frame’s origin. (In this case, I mean pivot point for rotation.) This information will be saved out into an xml layout that I’ve already built into the content pipeline. I’ll be building a simple sprite editor next, then follow that up with a level editor.

Four Elements

Jesse — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:29:06 +0000

Another six months of silence. I’m an excellent blogger, huh?

Soon after writing that last entry (the mammoth one that I just modified to prevent it from taking up the whole front page), I got a job offer to return to a company I had worked for previously. I’d regretted leaving the job almost immediately after I did, so going back was pretty much a no brainer. So once again I work for Veil Interactive, which is a branch of the Koplar Communications tree. The reason this might be of interest to anyone reading this blog is that World Events Productions is another branch. (A sibling company, I suppose.) They’re the company responsible for Voltron, and they work upstairs from me. That’s pretty neat, in my opinion. I’m not sure what the blog policy is around here, though, so I probably won’t be writing about work very often.

So, once again my game development time got swept away while I was busy worrying about life.

And while I don’t have a ton of free time now, I do want to continue working toward someday finishing something. Anything would be nice. Lucky then, that new motivation has come along. GameDev’s 6th annual Four Elements contest.

I get to pick three of the four elements, explosions, crystals, ponies, and accountants, and create a game using them. My current thought is to build a game similar to Galaga, set underwater. After destroying (explosions) the enemy seahorses (ponies) you can collect the treasures (crystals) they leave behind to purchase upgrades. Something like Titan Attacks would be amazing, but I think I’ll target something that requires quite a bit less work.

Finally, I should mention that I wrote a few entries in to my dev-journal on GameDev, about the development I’ve done recently. I’ll probably mirror them here at some point.

Fun design work

Jesse — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 19:19:34 +0000

Game design was never more fun for me than when I was in elementary school. My friends and I would constantly pass back and forth our level designs for Ghosts ‘N Goblins and Castlevania. (I’m sure our teachers found it quite annoying.) It’s hard for me to imagine the huge number of hours we spent on those drawings. My friend’s mom even helped us find mailing addresses for Capcom and Konami in our Nintendo game manuals, and we mailed our levels off to the companies. It seems most likely to me that they were just quickly discarded, but it’s nice to think that they might have been forwarded on to the original Japanese developers along with other fan mail. Those were fun times.

And I got a small taste of that feeling again a few days ago. I’ve been mulling ideas for what kind of game I could write to enter the MyDreamRPG contest and I think I’ve come up with something pretty neat. It’s a platformer with lots of rpg elements. And just like twenty years ago, I’ve gotten swept away doodling up maps, writing stories, and coming up with special powers for my imaginary heroes.

Here’s the basic story:

The player (Michael, a young boy) starts out in a very small farming village, called Littlefield. It’s a quiet, peaceful place, but strange things have started happening in the area recently. (Cattle vanishing in the night, strange shadows seen moving around in the nearby forest, etc.) When Michael ventures into a cave at the edge of town, he finds a wounded knight. The knight was wounded in battle, and is near death. He tells Michael a story about a necklace amulet that has belongs to the royal family, and has been passed down from one king to another.

He then tells Michael of the king’s caravan being ambushed. When it seemed that they might be captured, the king sent the knight off with the amulet, to prevent it from ending up in the wrong hands. He was attacked, and gravely wounded. And now the knight is dying, and the only person around is Michael. He gives him the amulet, asking him to protect it. Then he dies.

Michael puts on the necklace. Immediately he hears the voice of the knight. It turns out that the amulet is very powerful indeed. It allows a nearby spirit to stay in this world, instead of passing into the afterlife. The spirit is able to live on for a time in the amulet. This explains the king having access to knowledge from kings who have come before. Other than the knight, however, the amulet seems empty. Now that Michael is able to access the knight’s fighting ability, they agree to venture forth and see if the king still lives.

During their travels, three other spirits will move into the amulet. A wizard, a priest, and a rogue. Each will have special abilities, and the player can switch between them easily.

Some gameplay info:

My initial design will be for the XBox 360 gamepad, as I’m planning to use Torque X as the underlying engine/framework. I’ll have to find input mappings that make sense for a keyboard (and possibly mouse too), but I’m ignoring them for now. (Platformers are pretty difficult to play without a gamepad, anyway.)

Controls:
Character movement is based on the left analog stick or d-pad.
Character selection is done by holding the right shoulder trigger, which will pause the gameplay, then you pick one of the four characters by pressing up, left, right, or down, and the releasing the right trigger.
Basic actions and special abilities can be mapped to any of the buttons A, B, X, or Y. Additionally, holding the left shoulder trigger and pressing A, B, X, or Y, will give a second bank of abilities for a total of eight immediately accessible abilities.
Each character can gain a special ability that is used while in midair. (Either by jumping from the ground, or falling from a platform.) While in midair pressing jump will activate the special ability. While you can only use each special ability once during a jump, you can switch characters in midair and chain each of the four characters special jump abilities, if you’ve unlocked them.

From a menu, the player will be able to travel instantly to any city they’ve visited. A wizard spell can allow them to teleport directly to other places.

The player will have both a health bar, and an energy bar. Taking damage reduces the health bar, and when it is empty, the player dies. (Either they’ll appear at a visited city, perhaps with a penalty of some sort, or they’ll have to load a saved game.) The energy bar is used for special abilities. All the characters share the health and energy bars.

The player will also have an experience bar. When you’ve killed enemies or finished quests, you’ll gain experience points that fill the bar. When the bar is full, you’ll gain a level that you can assign to any character. (Only the ones you’ve have at that point, however.) My current thinking is that you’ll gain a special ability with every two levels in each class, though I’m not entirely sure about that yet. You’ll start off with one ability, just by having that character around. All of the special jump abilities will be the first ability gained after that.

There will be a simple stat system, with the player able to gain strength, stamina, speed, and focus. (Those map to melee damage, health points, movement and attack speed, and energy points.) All of the characters will share the same stats. The player gets points each level to customize the character however they want.

Class special abilities:

Knight
0 – Energy strike – Use energy to perform a powerful sword strike.
1 – Air Drop – Drop from above to stun nearby enemies, and break through damaged floors. (No energy cost.)
2 – Charge – Rush forward, damaging enemies.
3 – Blood Rage – Convert some health into energy. (But not at a very good exchange rate.)
4 – Bestial Roar – Intimidate (stun) all nearby enemies for a short time, or until they take damage
5 – Obliterate – Converts all energy into a very damaging strike. (Uses no energy on a missed attack.)

Priest
0 – Heal – Use energy to heal.
1 – Levitate – Float at the same elevation until releasing the jump button. (You can walk while floating.)
2 – Energy Guard – Lose energy instead of health upon taking damage.
3 – Haste – Movement and attack speed greatly increased, for a short time.
4 – Regenerate – Regenerate hit points over time for a short duration.
5 – Holy Mark – Temporary invulnerability (very high energy cost)

Wizard
0 – Blast – Low damage energy projectile
1 – Slow Fall – Fall more gracefully down, while holding the jump button.
2 – Fireball – Explosive area of effect energy projectile.
3 – Snow Blast – Damage a single target, but causes many enemies in the area to be move slowly.
4 – Teleport – Teleport immediately to any known area.
5 – Poison – High damage over time to enemies near the player. (Moderately high energy cost.)

Rogue
0 – Hide – Blend into the surrounding environment. Move slowly while hiding. Can only be done when not seen by a hostile enemy.
1 – Double jump – Can jump a second time while in midair.
2 – Disguise – Wear a disguise that will fool enemies. Uses energy until disabled.
3 – Lock pick – Can pick door and chest locks.
4 – Smoke bomb – Vanish from view, even when seen by hostile enemies. (Moderately high energy cost.)
5 – Assassinate – Massive damage dagger strike, must be hiding to use. (High energy cost.)

Still alive

Jesse — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 16:50:54 +0000

I apologize for the lack of development updates or new game reviews. My day job has gone into crazy crunch mode and I haven’t had much free time to write or play games lately. This project (at least the part of it that’s causing all the overtime) is scheduled to wrap up in three weeks, so expect things to go back to normal around then.