Another Game Nearing Completion – Development Details

Happy Saturday everyone. I hope you all had a merry Christmas!

I managed to put in five hours of frequently disrupted development and research time after work today. I feel very productive even if life won’t let me focus. The major stress of having a physical fitness test the day before Christmas has passed, and since then, I have been able to drill down to the important things. Today I want to talk about the details of developing this latest game: Snake Clone. It is a very original name, I know.

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Technical Development Details

As I said before I was finished with the core gameplay a couple weeks ago, but there were a number of things that needed additional attention, and a few more touches still need to be done before I can call the game finished. I want to cover some of the changes and improvements that I have made as we near the deadline for December’s OneGameAMonth entry. The last hurdle to releasing the game has been setting up a functional user interface.

Universal Input – I wanted players to be able to use both of the major keyboard input formats, “WASD” and the arrow keys. This area of coding was relatively simple. It just involved separating the code that handles grabbing the user input and the code that updates the states of the object that needs to be moved. The benefit of the separation is that I can also add controller support without changing much, if any, of the base code of the game as well as using the same input code in future games.

Title Screen and Pause Menu – The rules for OneGameAMonth are that the game needs to be fully playable with a beginning, middle, and end. A beginning in this case would be a functional title screen. The main issue with the title screen was attention to detail with both making and placing those sprites. Along with that, most games are expected to have pause functionality of some sort. Thankfully GameMaker: Studio has a tutorial that goes into setting up a pause screen which I modified to work for this game.

High Score – Today, I set up an external file that will keep track of the local top high score. This aspect of programming gets into file handling and encoding. Since this game is so simple, I probably won’t extend that functionality to track multiple high scores, but depending on how the data is structured, that functionality can be put into the next game with relative ease.

The game still needs basic sounds, an options menu, a game over screen, an icon, and credits. All of these are minor tasks that will just take time to implement. The game will be complete by Dec 31st and next Saturday I will make sure to post a link to it.

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Non-technical Development Details

Because I am already going kind of long with today’s post I will keep this section short and expand on it another week. Today I went around to the various game development circles that I was interested in and established some sort of presence there. I want to start getting to know other developers/artists and getting my name out there a little bit better to potential readers/future players. Check out my updated About page for links to the other places I will be sharing content. So far only the Twitter and OneGameAMonth accounts have anything to look at, but that will be changing shortly.

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Thank you for spending this time with me and feel free to leave any comments you might have about what I’m doing or the structure of these posts.

See you next Saturday!

Some Sickness and Success

Happy Saturday!

I am still trying to figure out the general size and format of these posts. So I will likely be trying different approaches over the next number of them before I settle on a standard that I like. Today let’s break things up into sections.

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On Life

The family has been sick for at least a week now. Overall, it is minor, but it drains a lot of energy when combined with working full time on my part and mothering a 15 month old full time for Becca. We have difficulty getting moving physically even though we are motivated to get many things accomplished like cleaning the house before we have a holiday cookie baking party. I’ll just be there to eat cookies since I am not good at the cooking or decorating parts.

My wife and I have enrolled in Liberty University Online. She is going for an associate’s degree in accounting which would put her in a good place to manage the finances of the game studio I am planning to start in the future. I’ll be working to finish a Bachelor’s Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies within the next three years since I have credits across various fields already.

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On Game Development

Last week, I completed my second game for the OneGameAMonth challenge. It is just a simple clone of the classic Pong.since using GameMaker: Studio. It is a simple exe file that just runs the game. Because I know people are hesitant to use exe files from random people, I am also planning to convert my simple games into HTML5 to be played in a browser without needing to download any files. So far the game file has been added to my public games folder on google drive where I will continue to place my completed free and demo games until I have a better solution setup.

For my month two game streak, I am making a Snake clone. Again it is a simple clone of a classic game. In fact, I am finished with the core gameplay and just have to put the closing touches on the game to make it acceptable like menus and a game over screen. With how close the game is to complete already, I will most likely make it public by next Saturday and move to working on another classic game this month.

I got the idea to do a progressive development challenge from an article on gamedev.net: “Your First Step to Game Development Starts Here“. The plan is to get a number of small games under the belt while learning new techniques with each game that can be used for future projects. While I do have ideas and plans for original games of all types and sizes, starting small and actually finishing what I can do just beyond my current ability each time will eventually get me to a place that I can feel confident in working on a more ambitious game for the market.

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That is all for this week. Next time we will probably talk about some of the games I’ve been getting into lately. See you next Saturday!

A Return from the Shadows

I am sorry. I have falied in the area of good second impressions by committing to a weekly blog and immediately disappearing after the first post. My wife and I have been struggling with depression silently for years and have just recently managed to work our way beyond that through lifestyle changes and support from friends and family. That depression was a huge strain on our marriage and our situation to where I ended up losing sight of my goals in life and runnning on autopilot.

The past year and a half has been eventful and stressful, and I want to give a brief overview of that period of silence. Our son Hezekiah was born in September last year. I was selected to serve in Korea for a year without my family. Soon after getting stable in Korea I was sent on a no-notice three-week training exercise where it was very difficult to communicate with anyone. Just after that exercise I was sponsored to have my family with me in Korea, and had to move out of the dorm, fly back to the states, move the family out of the house we had lived in for four years, and return to Korea within the span of three weeks. My wife and son returned to the States for a first birthday visit with family, and during that time some friends gave birth to their daughter. We have had a whirlwind of changes happen over the past two years and, looking back at it all now, we are able to see that it has been a positive outcome.

The future for our family is wide open. As it stands now, I will be looking to go into independent game development once I separate from the military in a few years. Over the past two months my focus has been on learning as much as I can about game design and the business of the gaming industry. I have started using GameMaker: Studio as my primary development platform to build up a portfolio of small complete games to gain experience. To accomplish this long term goal, I am committing to the OneGameAMonth challenge and recommitting to this weekly (at minimum) blog to remain accountable and get in touch with the community of gamers.

Who I am hasn’t changed at the core and I still want to bring joy through games to those that I can. I am looking forward to what the future holds. See you next Saturday!

Who am I?

2 Sa 7:18 Then David the king went in and sat before the LORD, and he said, “Who am I, O Lord GOD, and what is my house, that You have brought me this far?

New American Standard Bible: 1995 update.

LaHabra, CA: The Lockman Foundation.

After the prophet Nathan shared the words of God with King David declaring that his kingdom would last forever through his descendants, David’s humble nature immediately brought him to give thanks for all that God had done. A man at the heights of human power still acknowledged God as the source of all accomplishment made me realize just how much more I can grow in my own relationship with God. I have no delusions that I will become some great warrior for God, but I do desire that people will be reached through my life, faith, and actions, perhaps strengthening or awakening their own walk by faith.

For my first post I felt that it would only be natural to answer that question of who I am and look at my purpose. I’m a Christian, family-man, gamer, and member of the USAF learning about life, game programming, and business. The early years of my life, before I found my focus and faith, were largely spent without goals or dreams worth pursuing; however, I did meet the lady that would later become my wife during those years. Once I realized that my purpose was to serve, I joined the military to serve my country. After a few years I felt a greater call and invited God into my life. It has been a blast serving Him and I want to share that joy. This is my purpose behind game programming: to create games that are friendly to the Christian worldview and explore areas of the faith in new ways.

In the future my posts will be a weekly journal sharing my experiences, thoughts, accomplishments, and failures. I will discuss some of my goals and the plans to move towards those goals. I also hope have a conversation with you, the reader, about enjoying life through God, managing money, learning to program, love, and anything else that happens to come up that week. I look forward to hearing from you, and will have another post for you next Saturday.