Sneak peek
It isn’t working like I want, but at least it’s starting to look better.
A simple room
libellen’s framebuffer subsystem seems to be working fine, needs a lot of work, though.
What I’ve been up to
See? I told you this thing was alive.
Besides work, where I’m probably tackling the most challenging task of my career (sorry, can’t give any details), I’ve started investigating the DS homebrew scene. A few years ago I got myself a DS Phat mostly because it was a fun toy to hack on and, truth be told, I never got around to do it. There was a reason, though: Most DS emulators sucked and copying stuff to the flashcart every freaking time was tiring and cumbersome. Moreover, writing DS code at work and home was a bit too much. Oh, most DS emulators still suck balls.
But since I’m working on a different platform now (and a fairly tricky one, by the way) I started messing with my DS again. For those not in touch with it, let me tell you that the DS homebrew is a very healthy one, probably because flashcarts are dirt cheap right now, it doesn’t require any kind of hardware modding and the development tools are in fairly good shape.
The compiler (devkitARM) and the low level library (libnds) are quite good, but if you don’t feel like writing your own high level library there is pretty much only one option: PAlib. And here is where things get messy. It’s very easy to use (that’s why it’s so popular among the sceners), but it’s huge, messy and poorly mantained. Looking at their community forums, it looks like a few coders stepped up to clean it up, but it doesn’t look like it’s getting much better.
To make a long story short, I ended up using another, much smaller and tidy library: libellen by LiraNuna. It only handled sprites and backgrounds, but it was a much saner start point than PAlib. Eventually, I grew tired of the little project I had started (yet another top-down shooter, nothing fancy) and decided to re-implement another nice toy I coded a few months ago (a Wolf3D-style raycaster). Unfortunately, implementing such a thing using palettized tiles is kinda tricky so I decided to add direct framebuffer drawing routines to libellen. LiraNuna was kind enough to give me commit permission to his SVN repository and I’m now commiting the first bits to my own libellen branch.
I went as far as actually implementing a very basic, brute-forced raycaster, but it’s not ready for public consumption yet. I need to sort out some fixed-point math stuff first. Also, I need to add double-buffering to libellen. I’m a little short on time, as always, so please bear with me. Yes, the random image links are back :)
It’s alive!
I can’t help it, the blog is back. After a short manteinance, cryodreams is sporting a new fancy look. YES, I know the logo has a rogue white pixel that shouldn’t be there. Blame The Gimp.
EVA was a blast
Yeah it’s late. A few moments ago I got back from the Argentinian Videogames Expo. As many other things here in Argentina, the event was made true thanks to the huge effort of the guys from ADVA, the Argentinian Game Developers Asociation. You guys fucking rock.
This is pretty much all I wanted to say. I guess I’ll write a more lenghty post about the expo later when I’m a little less sleepy and less tired, this year there was a lot to see :)
Deployment, community
It's finaly here
So, it finally happened: Yesterday the first batch of Atmosphir closed beta invites went down the tubes to some lucky people who get to play the game before anyone else. If you received your invite then congratulations, and if you didn’t, don’t panic! There’s enough game for everyone, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time :)
Just like any other developer, I’m very happy to see this project finally getting to the players. It’s just the begginning, but knowing that there’s a bunch of people having fun with something you worked on feels just great. On a sidenote, Mazes of Fate DS is also waiting for you in the shelves, so if you want to make me feel even happier you can also give that a try.
But, as always, I digress. Today’s topic is about a few bumps I ran into while putting together the GNU/Linux binaries/installer of this game, an EPIC FAIL and how the community came to my rescue.
Hit the jump for the details.
Silence
Yes, it’s been pretty quiet around here lately. I’ve been talking with my non-rounded mollusk friend about a possibly blog merger, so we can both abandon a single blog (a rather pragmatic approach, indeed). There, that’s today’s excuse. Also, Disgaea DS (I find the lack of japanese voice track mildly dissapointing, though).
Oh, and my colleague Daniel Benmergui goes to Japan. Must be something about some kickass games he made or something. A recurring visitor once told me that Japan doesn’t actually exist, that it’s just a myth. Sounds like a cool myth though.
Today’s all about links. Farewell.
On Sega, birthdays and hedgehogs
9/9/99 was a special day for any western Sega fan: The Dreamcast was launched in the states. After four years of development and many obstacles left behind Sega was starting its comeback, putting their hopes on a new console and, while at it, starting the 128 bits era.
As probably most of you already know, the Dreamcast wasn’t as successful as Sega expected (mostly due to their own screw ups) and the white fun machine would be pulled off production just two years after (screwing the fans once more).
Fortunately for me, I had a Dreamcast while it lasted, so I was able to enjoy classics like Soul Calibur, Power Stone, Shenmue, Sonic Adventure, Phantasy Star Online, Ikaruga and many more firsthand. Heck, now that I think of it, I was playing online games in a home console back in the year 2000. One day I’ll talk about this console, I have very fond memories of it.
For the time being, Happy Birthday to you Dreamcast! :D
In other, pseudo-related news, Sega and BioWare have published a developer diary video about Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. Yes, BioWare. Yes, Sonic. And yes, a RPG for the Nintendo DS. Here’s the video for those who haven’t seen it yet:
In my humble opinion, it looks good. As a few colleagues already pointed out, it remains to be seen how the Sonic character cast and story plot fare for a role-playing game, but I’ll give them the benefit of doubt at least.
Regarding the video, the fact that one of the developers states that the game is pretty much finished but not yet up to BioWare’s standards talks quite some about who’s the project boss, doesn’t it?
Only time will tell I guess, September 30 isn’t that far away.
Japan is not the problem
I recently found this post at Kotaku, with an interview with Ryan Payton of Metal Gear Solid 4 fame. I’ve been reading about this guy for the last few months, mostly because of the MGS hype, I he seems to be quite cool and honest. I hope him the best with his new life, by the way.
But I digress. In that specific article I’m pointing you to, Ryan states that, while Japan might be the center of the gaming world money-wise, it’s certainly no longer in the development front. As basis of that statement is the apparent disinterest in HD gaming shown by the japanese gamers. Again, the base behind this statement is the less than impressive hardware sales for the Xbox360 and PlayStation 3 consoles.
If we read a little further, we find the following quote:
“It’s not about the tech in Japan, it’s about the games, it’s about nostalgia.”
On exploration, and stuff
<offtopic>
Ok, I’m hereby officially stepping down from the One Screen RPG Compo. As poignant as this is, I just don’t have the time to submit something I’d feel comfortable with. Anyway, I hope Lys can someday see the light of the day (kudos for those who get the pun, norwegians excluded), but I won’t make any promises.
This has been a pretty rough week at work and, in fact, I was going to talk a little about that project (based on already public information), but today I learned that everything went zomgconfidentialohnoes!!1shift!1, so I can’t tell you anything. However, if I were you, I’d sign up for the launch.
Without further ado, let’s get to business.
</offtopic>
So, this time I want to talk a little about one gameplay component often misused but (In my humble opinion) fairly interesting: exploration. There are many, many games that feature some kind of exploration activities in their gameplay: from the classic dungeon-crawlers to those shiny new 3D platformers today’s kids like so much, there have been many ways to encourage the player to sometimes step down the path we made for them and take a little trip to the unknown.
State of affairs
So here I am, failing to deliver what I promised (more frequent updates). But guess what? Yes! Excuses! I’ve been busting my rear end coding to be able to send something to CODEAR’s Single Screen RPG compo.
I have the idea and the coding is coming as good as my little free time permits. One thing’s for sure, I will send something, no matter what. At least as a proof of concept with little content, I want to keep my brain working so new ideas arise from the dark abyss of my psique.
Anyway, even though I have worked in RPGs before, it never ceases to amaze me how much work these games actually require. The main character, skills, spells, NPCs, dialog lines, it’s a lot of work, no matter how hard you try to simplify stuff. And when you’re done coding all that stuff, you still have a lot of content to add.
Regarding the code itself, I’m trying to keep it fun. How’s this? I’m trying to implement stuff as I see fit, even if it isn’t necessarily in the most academic way, just for the fun of it. Lua is great for this stuff, for most times it’ll work no matter how crazy it seems at first. And thinks are always easier if you put some LÖVE into the mix.
By the way, I’m working in two more “serious” posts: One regarding the exploration component in gameplay and another examining how much did things change in MMORPGs between classics like Everquest and more modern stuff. I still have a few things to say that you might find interesting, don’t give up on me yet :)
Revision 10 commited, Ren logging off
