I'll be there, just as an attendee (well, my employer is showing off some stuff, but I'm not personally). Not going to PAX Dev this year, but maybe next year if I hear good things about this one.

Worked on HUD and combat today. There's no player death yet, but enemies can attack now.

Made some tech changes to better support multi-color textures without artifacts (no more DXT1 compression) and without sacrificing file size. Also added proper chroma keying. Now I'm wondering whether I should maintain a really lo-fi one-bit art style or go for something a little more like this:


They have a cave troll!

Right now, I'm leaning more towards maintaining the existing look for simplicity and because I have a pretty clear vision of where it can go in the future, but I'm curious to hear what you guys think.

Yeah, I've been wondering about that, too. I haven't really gotten around to thinking about implementing separate UI screens yet, but I'm pretty sure I'll want to do that for the world map at least, so it might make sense to do the same for the level map.

[reader submissions of computer programs written in the BASIC computer language]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-2-1_Contact#The_magazine

Three months before the show premiered, a print magazine of the same name that also focused on science was released. In 1985, the magazine absorbed some of the content of sibling publication Enter (which went out of print that same year), including reader submissions of computer programs written in the BASIC computer language as well as reviews of popular computer programs. A new feature called "The Slipped Disk Show" appeared in mid-1985, starring a fictional disc jockey who answered computer-related questions submitted by readers.

I mean, I had wanted to make games ever since I played Super Mario Bros. in the arcade back in like '87 or '88, but it was reading 3-2-1 Contact and discovering that my family PC had GW-BASIC on it that got me into development.

The barrier to entry was so low back in the day. Open BASIC, type a couple of lines, hit F5, and BAM, game. Sure it was a slow, fixed-memory, interpreted language, but it was so easy to use and it shipped with DOS.

It was too distracting that way. I found myself paying more attention to the map than the environment.

I might add the option to toggle between an overlay and a minimap, though. Not sure yet. Depends on how easily I can maintain both.

Quick test of lower-left map before I go to bed (not patched in yet):



Not totally sold on the map placement yet (I'm thinking lower-left needs to be reserved for health, a la Doom), but it does feel way more natural to put the HUD bar on the bottom. I don't get the false impression that part of my view is being obscured like I do when it's at the top.

Oh also I changed the map rotation to be absolute instead of player relative. I may end up making this a user setting, but I think it makes it easier to maintain your orientation in the level this way.

Though I tend to feel like the upper right hand corner is the appropriate place for a minimap...

Lower left works extremely well too. Balances with your sword, too; makes both sides of the screen 'occupied'.

Good point. I'm not really sure what the rest of the HUD is going to look like yet, but it does feel pretty right-heavy at the moment.

Not sure I'm going to stick with this, since it feels a little weird for an first-person view to not be centered on the screen, but at least for now, I've added a big mostly-blank bar for the HUD, and I've moved the map up there.



I was starting to feel like the map was valuable enough that I never want to hide it, but having it as a fullscreen overlay all the time was distracting. So I went with this for now.

Also it was an excuse to add support for viewports to my engine.

This is kind of what I had in mind:





I suppose it might also be reasonable to leave the first-person view full-screen and turn the HUD elements into transparent overlays.

Reserving a portion of the screen exclusively for the HUD sort of has a retro first-person RPG feel, though, which I like. Maybe not quite as drastic as this, but I think it sort of evokes the same:





I guess it might also be reasonable to put the HUD at the bottom of the screen:





Though I tend to feel like the upper right hand corner is the appropriate place for a minimap...

Iced chai tea lattes. Best way to combat this 100+ °F weather.

Started stubbing out a couple new enemy types. They all have the same AI at the moment (run directly at the player if they have line of sight, otherwise pathfind until bored), but eventually they'll have unique rules.

make games not money

 

Lots more tools work over the last two days. I've reduced my patching process down to a single command line tool. All I have to do is type in the patch notes. Everything else is automated. Whatever the local version on my hard drive looks like is what everyone else sees.

I would argue good software engineering is an art. That's not to say that systems should be written flawlessly on the first try or not written at all -- we wouldn't have phrases like "KISS", "YAGNI", or "Early optimization is the root of all evil" if that were the case -- but if you don't put some time and effort into engineering things well, you risk coding yourself into a corner in which making any significant change requires a disproportionate amount of work. Iteration should be an accepted and expected part of the development process. Make it work. Then make it clean. Then make it fast.

A few years back, when I wrote Arc Aether Anomalies, I just hacked out whatever would get me to my goal with no concern for future flexibility. It might've been the right decision for the time; it was important to me then to get something playable out there and not overthink it. But since then, I've made two failed attempts to develop a second part to that game and have been foiled both times by horribly stupid things I did in the code. In particular, both the main game loop and the asset initialization steps were these ridiculous, hardcoded, thousands-of-lines-long blocks of copy/paste code, because I never took the time to factor out common patterns. In light of core engine changes I've made since then, those functions no longer compile, and they're so massive and unwieldy that refactoring them now just seems futile. At this point, I think it would honestly be easier to scrap everything and start over from scratch than to try to salvage anything I wrote in the past.

By contrast, my core engine, where I am dedicated to refactoring and optimizing and maintaining good practices, has served me well for years and continues to improve. And what I've been noticing recently (and this is exciting because it tells me I'm doing something right) is that I very rarely have to make changes to my engine anymore; mostly it does everything I need it to and I can focus on developing game systems. And yeah, I guess you could argue that it cost me a lot of time to get it to that point, but...well, I've already said how I feel about that in the engine development thread.

[The Understory]

New name get! Had to go with my gut on this one. The Understory just felt right.

Renaming the executable is unfortunate because my patcher doesn't have a way to update shortcuts, so I've just had to add a message stating that the old Spectre.exe is deprecated in favor of Understory.exe. Should be a one-time thing, though, so...not too bad, I guess.

Built a new installer, though existing builds will still continue to work as long as the new executable is used.
http://www.j-kyle.com/understory/Understory_Install_2011-08-04_01-06.exe

Refactored a lot of physics and collision stuff. Not much to show for it at this point except that doors now have flat collision just like walls, instead of being cylinders like other objects.

Been doing some tools and engine work. Patches should be more automated and less error-prone now. So that's cool.

I made dozens of terrible BASIC games as a kid. Not sure what I'd say my first good game was, though. My first two C++ games were competent enough, but they were both smaller in scope than I wanted them to be since I had to make cuts to meet deadlines, and I've mostly just been doing tiny little compo games since then. I'm hoping to be able to take my time with my next game and make it something really enjoyable.

It won't help in your case, Player 3, since the executable has already been nuked, but I've added a simple checksum verification to the patcher so in the future, it won't overwrite any files unless all the requested files are downloaded completely and verified intact.

I'll probably also be putting together a fresh installer in the next week or so once I pick a new name, since my patcher doesn't support renaming executables or updating shortcuts.

And this update keeps erasing the Spectre Shock from the drive.

Yikes. Never seen that one before. I'm not doing any verification or error checking after the new version gets downloaded, so I have occasionally run into problems where the executable will contain error text ("404 Not Found", etc.) if I messed up the URL or something, but to complete erase it? No idea what's happening there. 

It's just no longer a valid Win32 application, according to the thing.

Ah, that sounds like it is the same problem I've seen, then. I'll bet if you were to open it up in a hex editor, it would contain the text of an error message instead of binary data.

I guess I should add a checksum and an option to retry on failure...

And this update keeps erasing the Spectre Shock from the drive.

Yikes. Never seen that one before. I'm not doing any verification or error checking after the new version gets downloaded, so I have occasionally run into problems where the executable will contain error text ("404 Not Found", etc.) if I messed up the URL or something, but to complete erase it? No idea what's happening there. 

Took me a while to get around to patching in the last change I mentioned (map revealing) because I kept finding bugs in the implementation. But it's finally in! Plus a few other things:

July 30 Update:
 - Adjusted dungeon size based on number of adjacent dungeons
 - Added map revealing
 - Added start location (no more starting outside the level)
 - Fixed a memory leak on shutdown
 - Added option to upload anonymous stats on every session, not only the first one
 - Added a hashed computer name to stats logging (allows me to identify multiple logs from the same users without compromising anonymity)