RandomGuy

Whoops – Genesis Theme Update

Sorry about the layout issues. New version of Genesis stuffed things up. Will fix.

Goodbye Dart…

Its been a long time between posts, and whilst I have been distracted by trying to earn a living, Google’s decision to abandon the Dart Virtual Machine has effectively killed Dart’s chances of widespread adoption. Others seem to agree with me. So, goodbye Dart. Crap. Now what? I will continue, but am switching to using mobile clients (iOS first) instead. I will need to change things on the blog…

A Monster Sprite Odyssey – Part 1

After getting familiar with the Spine tool I decided it’s time to create my first monster. No more relying on freebee sprite sheets off the web.

For my first effort, I decided to go for a bipedal reptilian look, for no particular reason. I fired up Pixelmator and started trying to create a grey, scaly leg. After about ten minutes, my efforts were not going well. Time to change tack. So I thought,…

Spine – Skeletal Animation for the Masses

Just when I thought everyone was only interested in 3D graphics and 2D was so last century, I was recently, and pleasantly, surprised by something new. That something is meet little application called Spine (http://esotericsoftware.com/). This is a skeletal animation tool aimed at HTML5 and mobile game developers, and seems to take its inspiration from high-end movie animation techniques.…

My First Game Loop and Other Bits

After a lot of work, the next version of WebDungeon has been deployed here. Whilst to my disappointment it looks too much like the old version, under the hood it is radically different – it’s running a real game engine. So what’s new under the hood?

A proper game loop with a fixed number of frames per second

Dedicated collision detection

Dedicated rendering and movement modules

Scrolling when the…

It has been a long time since my last post. Life stuff beckoned and demanded my attention. Finally, I have delivered something beyond excuses. It’s not much – a simple WebSocket server that responds to requests to fetch dungeon data – but I am pleased. Dungeon data are stored on files on the server. So it’s really a small, slightly crappy excuse for a web server. The Game Server. So I am now the…

Thoughts on Game AI

I have not posted anything over the last few weeks, as I have been busy writing the WebSocket server (what gamers would call ‘the game server’) to load and save the game data. This requires a lot of rather boring work saving and writing files as JSON. Oh, and writing unit tests. Writing unit tests for a hobby project seems like overkill, but my scars from previous misadventures compelled my…

Some Design Would Be Nice

After some feverish activity on the dungeon editor and game engine, my thoughts have returned to the more sedate realm of design and architecture. No smoking jackets or pipes required, just thinking time.

So far, I have a few pieces of work that could be added to the game, but things are a bit all over the place. Tyrus or Rikulo, which does what, do I need two servers… All these questions need to…

Designing a Game Combat Engine – Part 2

Continuing on from part 1, I will talk about about what are known in gaming as ‘modifiers’ . They are known by various names like weapon modifiers, armour bonuses, to-hit bonuses, weight penalty, and so on.

Game mechanics, under the hood of most role playing games, involves around defining the ‘final value’ of some object or action. This ‘final value’ is often based on a ‘base value’ which is…

Designing a Game Combat Engine

I’m taking a break from the technical stuff for a while and taking a look at game mechanics and the game combat engine. The fun stuff. After some spreadsheet jiu-jitsu, I came up with a basic combat model, which I think is feasible as a ‘version one’ effort. It is based on the following assumptions:

Only two combatants

Close quarters combat

One combatant attacks first

Combat rounds

Combat stops…

A Simple Application with Rikulo Stream

This is a very simple example on how to use Controller classes using Rikulo Stream, as a lot of the samples of the web tend to use anonymous functions to do everything in a single file. This is good for getting started, but not so good for a real project. I use Intellij instead of the Dart Editor, but the project layout is identical.

First things first, so I’ll  start with the key parts of the…