Archive for May, 2013

Titan Attacks mobile – Developer Diary #5

Tuesday, May 21st, 2013

Basically I’ve mostly been doing one thing since the last update. It’s just that it’s quite a complicated thing 🙂

Here’s what I’ve done:

– Read in the xml animation file for Earth and got it working. The original game has a complex animation system that can handle way more than most normal animation systems. I’ve had to write code to read and interpret the xml file and make it work with my sprite engine. This was not easy and there’s still a lot to do.

– Read in the xml sprite files for Earth and got it working. Each sprite, which I’m calling a “game object”, can be made up of several animated sprites, or even several other game objects. This was also pretty complex especially when some parts of a game object control other parts of a game object!

– I made a test screen to show the animations and sprites that I’ve read in. This has proved very useful and I’ve made a video about it (see below).

– Finally I made code to create individual “instances” (that’s a programming term) of a game object using a template that has been read in from the sprite xml file. The in-game aliens are now instances based on a template and you can see that they animate and blink in the video I made.

Video!

This is my first developer video diary. In it I show of the game a little bit and then talk about the test screen I made to test animations and game objects (sprites).

I Hope you enjoy it!

Next up

– Keep going with the xml interpretation code. There’s still a lot to do such as making the aliens move around, making them fire, making the player ship animate as it moves, making particle effects for firing etc. All of this is controlled via the vast xml files that Cas and Chaz (the original developers) made. So I’ve got my work cut out for me!

Math Forever 2 – New Minigame

Tuesday, May 14th, 2013

For my January #onegameamonth I was making a game called Techno Zombies that turned out to be way too complex and I was rapidly running out of time to hit the Janurary deadline. So I decided to make an online version of my original Math Forever game instead.

The original Math Forever game was programmed in BlitzMax and is a downloadable executable for PC/Mac. People seemed to like it and so I thought it would be a good idea to bring it to a wider audience by making an online version. This time I used Monkey because it’s a cross-platform language that can output Flash builds, which is perfect for Math Forever 2.

Anyway you can play it here. Can you beat level 10? It gets pretty hard around that level.

Here’s a video of me losing on level 10: