Mini Ludum Dare 8

I’m dedicating this weekend to participating in minild8. It’s been a little while since I participated last (eventually I’ll post my only entry in the Ludum Dare competitions). I hope I can come up with something a little more interesting this time around.

Tools I’ll be using partially, wholly, or not at all:

blecki’s jileed (mapping)
http://jemgine.omnisu.com/

drpetter’s sfxr (sound effects)
http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/project_sfxr.html

drpetter’s musagi (music)
http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/project_musagi.html

keeyai’s chronolapse (timelapse)
http://keeyai.com/projects-and-releases/chronolapse/

someone else’s paint.net (image editing)
http://www.getpaint.net/index.html

Almost caught up!

The only thing I have left to do is get the townsfolk back in. After that, it’s back to actual work. Lots to do!

ActionRPG update

Items are back. Gotta get that HUD back up now. I think I’m almost caught up now.

Japanese Learning Tool

Well I’m not sure exactly how relevant this may be to Game Development on the whole, but I don’t really have anywhere else to post useful things. Warning preamble out of the way now.

I’ve been off-and-on learning the Japanese language since my teens; I’ve been interested in manga/anime, and Japanese games since I started playing them on my NES (I knew I could tie it back to games somehow). Of course, back then I didn’t know that the games I enjoyed most were originally Japanese. When I learned this, I immediately started doing research into this fact – and discovered a myriad of games I may never have known about otherwise. It’s a fact that there are many games I would love to play, had I a proper grasp on Japanese, that I’m not likely going to without it.

In my recent Japanese learning, I’ve come across a very useful online tool that I’ve been using extensively over the last couple of weeks. With it, you’re randomly given a Japanese character and you have to guess what the romanized version of it is. That is, any given “kana” (simple Japanese symbol) can be written out with English letters and still be understood. When presented with a Japanese kana, you’re prompted to give the “romaji” for it. It’s basically a computerized flashcard system.

With the turmoil that suddenly presents itself in my life, I suddenly worried that I might not have access to the internet, or I might not be able to pay the site I use anymore, or some other of the 1,000,000 reasons I’ll come up with if given the chance.  So why not “borrow” the format and build my own? To be honest, I’m not sure where the line is between “borrowing” and “stealing” when you’re considering designs.. but that’s a topic for another discussion.

After about a day’s worth of work, I present my Japanese Kana Recognition Practice app!

Download JapaneseKanaRecognition.zip (17.5 KB)
Requirements: .NET 3.5 and Japanese Language Support

I think I’ve covered all possible issues, but I might have messed up somewhere; if anyone has any problems with it, feel free to drop me a comment.

Big Night O’ Codin’

Holy man did I ever do a bunch of stuff tonight. The problem is that when I’ve coded a bunch, I can’t normally show off much about it. Tonight was one such night. So what did I do? Well..

JileEd testing

I did some user testing on JileEd with Blecki and requested some useful features. It already has more things in it that I can make good use of than Mappy did – not to mention the file format is easily-read XML. I look forward to more good things out of this package – I definitely recommend it for your tilemap editing needs.

Tilesheet rearrangement tool

After playing with JileEd for a bit, I was reminded of how awful my Final Fantasy Adventure tilesheet was laid out. Have a look at what I had to go digging for tiles with:

JileEd screenshot

The tileset selection is a mess! It’s because I didn’t try to do any ordering of the tiles when I ripped them, I just wanted a complete set. Well I had enough of that and built a quick-n-dirty tilesheet tile swapper! The tool itself only took a little while, but I spent probably 3 or 4 hours swapping tiles until I wound up with:

FFA Tileset rearranged

Sweet. I can find everything now! Yes I have alot of empty space, and no I’m not going to leave all of those almost-but-not-quite-repeating water tiles like that. I’ll clean that all up before I use it again. I’ll probably wind up being able to cut the texture size in half.

I’m not going to bother showing the swapper tool, its just a window with a picture of the tilesheet in it, and you click on two tiles and they switch places! Not very exciting, see? Anyways, I’m not a lazy bum; I worked my butt off tonight. I’ll be adding in support for JileEd maps just as soon as I’m happy with the reduction in water tiles and the subsequent realignment of tile groups. I’ll need to redo the town map since my tileset indices will be all different.

ActionRPG//Diablo//2009 progress begun

Quick blurb:  I finally got started converting ActionRPG, and my god is XNA ever making it easy. Not only am I winding up with cleaner code, I’m actually removing big blocks of now useless code. I’m more than pleased with it.

On the other hand, my source code from two years ago is incredibly bad. I’m shocked at the things I was doing; and I refuse to settle with copying some of it. You’d be sickened by the number of times I’ve used the keyword static – and how I decided to get around class scoping rules. It’s better if I not go into any detail. Shameful, shameful code. I’m bitter.

Which path to take?

Well I don’t have anything really worth posting about aside from what I’ve been doing lately. As far as projects go, I haven’t done a whole lot of anything. I’ve been soaking up some knowledge about XNA – I joined the XNA Creator’s Club and did the 2D and 3D newbie tutorials.

I’m set to start learning more about specific tasks I’ll need to accomplish my goals, but.. What are those goals again? Restart and finish ActionRPG? Start something more 3D Zelda-ish? Something completely different? I was thinking I should pick up Blender and start learning it better, but unless I need it to do the Project I’m Working On, it’s wasting time, isn’t it?

It seems like whenever I take a break, I come back and have no idea what my goals were. I’ll have to get digging.

Still Alive II

It’s been what, 9 months since I last posted? I’ve been thinking for a while that I’d like to get coding again, it’s been a long time.

For anyone wondering what I’ve been doing in that whole time: I’ve been watching ALOT of anime. I don’t think I’ve got much in the way of recommendations though, the kind of anime I enjoy most isn’t exactly mainstream (do not misread that as “hentai”!). I’ve recently been trying to catch up on well-known shows I haven’t caught yet, like Cowboy Bebop and Ah! My Goddess.

Besides anime, I found myself hooked on Final Fantasy XI (aka Final Fantasy Online) for about 3 months. I learned quite a bit about the MMO community. When I quit, I found I was so disgusted with people that I just couldn’t continue on. I’ve mellowed out about that since then and have rejoined as a casual player; I only play once or twice a week now.

To help in getting back into the swing of things, I figured it would be a good idea to play some of those old games that inspired me before. I took a quick 4 hour jaunt through Dragon Warrior I, start to finish, and thought I’d amuse myself by carrying the princess everywhere. Here’s a couple of screenshots I took:

“Don’t tell your dad, or we’re gonna get in big trouble!”

“Break out the beers, it’s party time at the DragonLord’s hizouse!”

And yes, we cleaned the floor with that dork.

Life Quest XII

Even I don’t know what the title of this post means.. *shrugs* Just a few words to start this post:

IT’S THE JOURNEY

NOT THE DESTINATION.

I’ve been thinking alot about where I’ve been headed with gaming, coding, and just life in general – and I think I’ve finally settled my focus on this Old Man on the Mountain type quote. I erased my whiteboard and wrote it in big block letters. I figured this would be a good place to put it too, as another reminder.

Spring has sprung!

And with that, there’s a whole bunch of junk I have to report. Actually, I haven’t updated this blog in an awfully long time. Let’s find out why!

I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so
Among the most exciting things I’ve been doing lately is that I’ve been learning Japanese! I’ve bought a few tapes in the past but it never really worked out too well. I recently got a 3-month subscription to Rosetta Stone and it’s just awesome. Look out Japan, I’m one step closer to invading!
Actually as a result of this, I’m probably going to be playing alot more games in their original japanese forms, and ideally I’ll be playing more games because they don’t bring everything over here. IdolM@ster is one that we won’t be getting for sure, although there’s a pretty big demand from those that know about it. I’m in love with the blue-haired chick. her voice friggin melts me.

starchat.net irc channel Takeover
If you know me at all, you know I’m addicted to Internet Relay Chat. I’ve recently wrested control of the channel I frequent most, #GameDevelopers, from Uhfgood. Actually.. it was a friendly transferral. I can’t lie. Anyhow, join us with your favorite irc client, or this javachat thinger. I’ll have a rules page up after I post this.

LD11 compo this weekend
That’s right, Ludum Dare 11 is this weekend! Ludum Dare is a 48 hour game competition. There may not be any cash prizes, but the experience is well worth it. No really! Some of the guys have come up with some pretty cool games. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be prepared for it, but I plan on throwing my hat in again this time around.

WoW Card Game get!
I’ve been playing a bit of Magic: The Gathering lately, but it seems the hottest new trend is World of Warcraft. I picked up a couple of starters and it looks like it’s going to be alot of fun to play. I’ll know more this weekend, when I finally sit down and play some at GameZilla. It looks like they’ve simplified the resources and put a focus on the Hero/Ally aspect.

Lots of anime.
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is out on DVD in english already, I see. I wasn’t even aware until I got on my recent anime kick. I’ll be grabbing that asap. Lucky Star is coming out on my birthday, May 6th, and you can bet I’ll be grabbing that one too. Oddly enough, fan subtitling is better than the “official” ones, so I’ll be keeping my downloaded versions too. The same thing happened with Advent Children.
I’ve been checking out a bunch of different anime – some is good, some isn’t so good.. just as with anything else. When I come across anything really good, I’ll probably post about it. Anime is a big influence on me, and you’re going to see it in any of my creative works I drop in here. Good stuff!

youtube madness
found a crapload of good stuff on youtube recently. here’s a couple of ‘em. hopefully the links’ll stick around for a while.
Code Monkey AMV
DrumMaster – AIR OP – Crazy speed player
Phoenix Wright – Boot to the Head
Phoenix Wrong