DevLog: June 02009

(most recent stuff at the top)

June 24, 02009

Construct continues to impress, but tonight I hit a lot of stuff that sure looked like it should have worked but failed in extremely unobvious ways. Didn't actually accomplish much today because I started messing with the particle spray some more. I can get distracted by particles for hours and hours. I think it looks neat though: download here

June 23, 02009

Continued messing around in Construct.

It's pretty great! It takes some going through tutorials before you understand where to look for everything, but once you have that it is surprisingly straightforward to make most anything happen (well, most any 2d, sprite-based game idea you have).

I'm really really happy with the fact that a friend of mine who can't program is finally becoming able to make a game.

June 22, 02009

Finally learned some socket programming and made a half-assed chat program. Not sure why it took me so long to get around to learning it.

June 21, 02009

Made something quick in Construct. Hoping to get a thing going where me and some friends take turns adding things to the game. It could be really awesome... if it even gets off the ground.

June 20, 02009

Unity

I've been messing with Unity a lot now. I like it much better than XNA, but I'm still still much much much slower in Unity than in Flash. I think the thing that will actually make me give up on Unity is this bug.

Today's results can be seen here, but there's not much to see.

Klik of the Month Klub

I made a really bad game for KotMK! It only took two and a half hour to learn Klik 'n' Play and make a game with it! The downside is that KNP is REALLY limited and you are stuck with its bugs, but I think that's part of the charm of the KotMK.

(Get it here)

June 03, 02009

Unity

Finally began actually working in Unity. So far I really hate it. It seems like a great level editor, but the scripting really seems half-assed. Blurst's UnityDevelop mitigates the problem somewhat, but my main gripe is that it seems Unity wants you to write scripts as though your code will be stuck into the middle of some class definition.

But I do have a Unity thing up on the web now. And it works. It's pretty unimpressive. Click here to see teh lameness.

Boo

The IDE, SharpDevelop, crashes a lot. The fancy features require that you have multiple files, but I failed to figure out how to import things from one into the other. Well, I'm sure I could have written a build script that told the compiler to use both files or something, but I was hoping for Python-like behavior where if the file is right next to it, it's easily importable.

It sure sounded promising, but it really seems like Boo isn't mature enough for general use. I had much better luck in my short time messing with IronPython, which I should revisit.

June 02, 02009

Trying to spend some time learning Unity and the Boo programming language, but then my friends start up some Left 4 Dead versus mode. What an awesome problem to have.

June 01, 02009

More or less decided that online multiplayer is Where It's At, so I revisited some old networking code I have in c++. Of course that painfully reminded me how much more work it was to build anything in c++ (at least with my barely-there-yet framework) as opposed to Flash or PyGame. So then I downloaded the trial for Unity.

First impressions:

• It's a very nice level editor
• It looks like the code writing in Unity is hidden off in a corner somewhere while the scene editor gets all the attention. :(
• Seems pretty FPS-centric :(