DXGames Blog

Well things are going slow since we lost power yesterday. On Monday the Ascension Games group met and we got alot of planning done for the next quarter. So I was happy about that.

The Dexterity forum has a posting of people wanting to meet up this weekend in Woodinville, WA to discuss Indie development. I wish I could go but I'm double booked that night already. Should be a good time though.

I was just reading the book "Hackers". I'm reading about Ken Williams and Sierra. It's very interesting to see how they got their start and how tenatious they were in getting off the ground. It seems harder to get your games out there now and no one is going to give you 30% royalties like their programmers got back then. Nowdays the marketing, and everything else eats all the royalties up. It's kinda sad.

Hope to have more to report later in the week.

Not much work this week. I'm going to begin work again tonight. I'm starting with a project plan so I can see what needs to be done and keep on a schedule. Once I'm coding I'm fine, it's just tought getting started. If I stop watching TV I should be OK. I"m also reading the book "Hackers". Great book about the advent of the modern computer. I even talked with a guy I work with about the DEC PDP computers. He worked on one many years back. We've come such a long way in a short period of time.

I've added another combo piece for my puzzle. Not much of an accomplishment, but I'm pleased that it's working as well as it is. The pieces are correctly registering collisions and continuing down until they collide with the ground.

I'm spending some of my nighttime playing Dungeon Siege Legends of Aranna. It's just like the first Dungeon Siege, just more of it. I'm kind of in a love/hate situation with the game. I like the game play but it also becomes tedious. ie. Move forward, battle, collect items, equip party, heal, continue forward. Very linear. And the spell system doesn't work well for me. I just stick to the standard spells and don't every use the cooler one. I wish there was a better way of using them. If you liked the first one, then this is more of the same. The question I have is why it took so long to come out when it didn't change that much in game play. I don't see any valid excuses for this.

Hope everyone had a great holiday! I got a USB SanDisk Drive on sale after Christmas. Those portable ones that you can wear around your neck. I think they will eventually replace pocket protectors for identifying us geeks. :)

Anyway, I've fixed the collision detection stuff on my games, so now a complex piece falls and then when it detects a collision, it spawns the separate pieces. Then these pieces behave based on their collisions with other objects. It's starting to come together nicely.

With the holday season approaching, its tough to find the time to work on games, but I've found a little bit of time. I now have the blocks coming down the screen and I can detect when they colide and when the reach the bottom of the screen. Also when the pile up to the top it resets the game. Game maker appears to be very solid for this. I'm going to work tonight to figure out how to do combo pieces falling then when they collide with other pieces to break apart and continue falling.

Not much going on here. I spent a couple hours this weekend working on my puzzle game in Game Maker. I'm going through a process of puting a feature in, working out all the bugs with the feature, and then moving onto the next one. I don't let issues go unaddressed. Therefore I hope they won't bite me in the end.

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I'm starting this blog to discuss game programming issues. Stay tuned for updates.