First Steps

Happy Saturday everyone!

This week I’m bursting with a father’s pride. Our son has been taking his first steps on his own. It has been amazing to watch him grow and learn. He has been really getting good with some baby sign language and is able to communicate fairly effectively in his own way now. He loves being read to and even flipping through his books on his own. I am so glad that I can see his growth like this. He’s definitely got his own little personality (that reminds me more and more of his mother, haha), and I can’t wait to see what he will learn and start doing next.

I’ve been fairly busy myself learning new things. I’ve wanted to learn about procedural content generation a lot lately, and this past week I have been working on a project that will help me get started on really understanding how to make game systems with it. I have also been working on developing my coding style to be cleaner, more descriptive, and more portable, which will help me grow a code base to work from as I continue making more games. Slowly but surely my coding and designing skills are getting closer to where I need them to be to make the games that are constantly floating in my mind.

For anyone looking for video tutorials on GameMaker: Studio, there are a number of really good ones out there. If you want a tutorial that gets into the nuts and bolts of every function of the software without being game specific, Let’s Learn GameMaker: Studio is pretty much the only one out there, but his videos are outstanding and detailed. If you want some tutorials that walk you through specific basic games then Shaun Spalding, HeartBeast, rm2kdev, SlasherXGAMES, and RealTutsGML are the best ones to check out currently. There are a number of new channels that have started within the last 4-5 months about this same topic but they don’t have much content yet.

That is it for this week’s update. I hope you all have had a great start to 2015 so far and see you next Saturday!

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!

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.