Developing Upwards

I've been working on a problem that's bugged me for about as long as I've used Python and I want to announce my stab at a solution, finally! I've been working on the problem of "How do i get this little thing I made to my friend so they can try it out?" Python is great. Python is especially a great language to get started in, when you don't know a lot about software development, and probably don't even know a lot about computers in general. Yes, Python has a lot of options for tackling some of these distribution problems for games and apps. Py2EXE was an early option, PyInstaller is very popular now, and PyOxide is an interesting recent entry. These can be great options, but they didn't fit the kind of use case and experience that made sense to me. I'd never really been about to put my finger on it, until earlier this year: Python needs LÖVE . LÖVE, also known as "Love 2D", is a game engine that makes it super easy to build ...

I made the unexpected move with a string of recent projects to drop Git to sync between my different computers in favor of OneDrive, the file sync offering from Microsoft. Its like Dropbox, but "enterprise." Feeling a little ashamed at what I previously would have scoffed at should I hear of it from another developer, I felt a little write up of the why and the experience could be a good idea. Now, I should emphasize that I'm not dropping Git for all my projects, just specific kinds of projects. I've been making this change in habit for projects that are just for me, not shared with anyone else. It has been especially helpful in projects I work on sporadically. More on why a little later. So, what drove me away from Git, exactly? On the smallest projects, like game jam hacks, I just wanted to code. I didn't want to think about revisions and commit messages. I didn't need branching or merges. I didn't even need to rollback to another version, ever. I...

I've done my first Ludum Dare Jam now, and actually my first game jam of any kind. Wow! I am so happy to have finally done this. It was a super rewarding experience and I want to share that, and my game, with as many people as will listen. My game is Patient Out Of Time . It is an apocalyptic moody shooter about a doctor salvaging power sources from robots in the wasteland to keep the life support of his last patient running as long as possible. The hospital staff have all left, and they are the only two survivors. Keeping this man alive is all this one doctor has to keep him going. It is a sad game, but it was also a lot of fun to make. Here are some things I learned this time. I hope to learn more things the next Ludum Dare. Little Steps Make Safe Steps I didn't have time for broken builds or half-built code I needed to fight my way back out of just to get the game running again. Every change I made had to be broken down into tiny, discrete non-breaking changes....

Game development is hard . I mean, really hard and everyone knows it. You probably won’t finish your game. You probably didn’t finish several games before it. You’ll probably start some more games you’ll never finish. The thing is, not finishing the games isn’t the only reason game development is hard. Let’s learn from some of my failures so far. Taking Time From Your Family is Hard Putting it like this sounds kind of distasteful. Yeah, if you’re working on your game in the time you aren’t at your day job, there’s a good chance you’re taking time away from precious family time. You’re missing evenings with your wife. You’re skipping days with your kids growing up. If you don’t have a family in your life, you’re opting out of time with friends, watching movies and reading books, or even just playing games, the same medium you obviously care a lot about. Making games takes a lot of time. You think you know that, but it takes more time than you already fear. Double that numbe...

Off And On Again is a series of light puzzles. You must turn all the lights on, but you must do so by flipping them in patterns. If you turn one light on or off, you'll be flipping lights around it, too. If you can find the right combination, you'll brighten up the board and move on to the next challenge. This was more than just a game. This was a public project in putting light on the hobbyist game development experience. Created over 25 hours, every single minute of the development of Off And On Again is available as part of a YouTube series Let's Make A Game . If you're interested in learning from this process and seeing what came out of it, you can watch the entire creation of Off And On Again and then play the game for yourself. The Series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlFKDVs9l3Q&list=PLg8XhO9Ilwl9Bw9h5wimuRgx5VrK3D-Kb The Game: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stonebirdgames.OffAndOnAgain

For a few weeks now I've been posting new episodes of a YouTube series I've been doing this month called Let's Make A Game . Now that I'm most of the way through the project, I wanted to think a bit about why I'm doing this, what I think people might get out of the videos, and what I hope to get out of it for myself. The best way I know to do that reflection is to write about it, and to share those thoughts. So, Why am I YouTubing an entire game development project?  Why would I put myself out there so publicly for anyone and everyone to look over my shoulder for twenty-five straight hours as I stumble, typo, and mistake my way through a skill I'm still learning and still very green on? And, why exactly would I think anyone  cares enough to watch me code, mostly in silence, for twenty-five hours? Why would anyone care to watch? The truth is, I don't really expect anyone to. And that's okay. Part of this project required  that I be okay with my own ...

Interested in my process for making a monthly game? I've got two  new episodes up of my series  Let's Make A Game!  for a total of eight episodes to enjoy, so far. The project should include a total of 25 episodes by the end of the month. Let's Make A Game! Off And On Again Episode 12   Let's Make A Game! Off And On Again Episode 13 If you want to start from the beginning, you can find a  playlist of all the current episodes  with all the future episodes added when they're available. Of course, you could also subscribe to my  Stonebird Games  YouTube channel.

Interested in my process for making a monthly game? I've got three new episodes up of my series  Let's Make A Game!  for a total of eight episodes to enjoy, so far. The project should include a total of 25 episodes by the end of the month. Let's Make A Game! Off And On Again Episode 9 Let's Make A Game! Off And On Again Episode 10 Let's Make A Game! Off And On Again: Episode 11 If you want to start from the beginning, you can find a  playlist of all the current episodes  with all the future episodes added when they're available. Of course, you could also subscribe to my  Stonebird Games  YouTube channel.

Interested in my process for making a monthly game? I've got two new episodes up of my series Let's Make A Game!  for a total of eight episodes to enjoy, so far. The project should include a total of 25 episodes by the end of the month. Lets Make A Game! Off And On Again: Episode 7 Let's Make A Game! Off And On Again: Episode 8 If you want to start from the beginning, you can find a playlist of all the current episodes with all the future episodes added when they're available. Of course, you could also subscribe to my Stonebird Games YouTube channel.

My game development video project, Let's Make A Game , is still underway. There are three more episodes available, for a total of six episodes released so far. Let's Make A Game! Off And On Again: Episode 4 Lets Make A Game! Off And On Again: Episode 5 Let's Make A Game! Off And On Again: Episode 6 The game is shaping up well, and I'm getting a better handle on how to put together the videos. At the end of this project, I expect to have two useful results: Primarily, a finished game that's actually going to be fun to play. Secondly, but actually more  important for me,  I'm hoping that the structure and transparency of building the entire game while recording will help me learn to better focus, budget, and scope my game development projects. From here on out I'll continue to post a weekly update of the new videos to this blog, but you can subscribe to my channel if you'd like to see the videos sooner.

Let's Make A Game! I've been making games to one degree or another for a few years, and I've really gotten into a rhythm in the last few months . This month I'm trying a new experiment and posting the entire process of building the month's game development project. I'll be publishing a stream of every single step I take in the process, broken down into 25 one hour episodes. I'm doing this for a few reasons. Firstly, I'm doing this for myself. The one hour sessions and the focus recording gives me on the task at hand are helpful. I think this is an interesting way to go about a project. I'd also like the strict schedule to help me study and learn more about the aspects of budgeting and scoping game projects that I have too little experience to be very good at. Secondly, I'm hoping someone out there gets some value out of this. My skill level as a game developer is still pretty low, but maybe its helpful for someone to see how someone learns ...

I was really excited about the One Game A Month challenge as soon as I heard about it. For about two years I've struggled in fits and starts to make my way into game development. This hasn't been productive in any of the ways I hoped when I started. Its really difficult to be fairly experienced as a developer, which I believe I am in my day job as a web developer, while struggling really hard at an area in which your experience just doesn't exist. Its like being a pilot who doesn't know how to drive. But this challenge provided a new breath to this little hobby of mine. It gave me a scaffolding to experiment, to learn, to reflect on finished projects. I had spent far too much time on game projects that stretched on far past their exciting phases, bogged down by bad decisions and regret. And it has worked. I have a lot to learn. I have a lot of experience to gain through trial and error and mistake and discovery. I have a lot of fun...

Handmade hero looks like an amazing project. If you're a long time game developer, new to it, or develop in some other discipline I think you have to respect the goals Casey has laid out for himself here. Developing an old style game from scratch live every weeknight is both a wonderful personal project and a beautiful piece of art. Check it out!

From the OctoJam page: Chip8 is a language that let programmers write portable games for 8-bit home computers in the 1970s. Today, Chip8 lives on in the form of emulators.   Octo  is a tool that makes it easy to write and share Chip8 programs. Roll up your sleeves and join us for a retro game-jam celebrating Chip8! And the gamejam rans through October. I love me a long-running gamejam, because I don't have time to devote an entire weekend to these things. What will you build using this (emulated) old hardware?

I'm playing with some game dev fun on the side, and as part of motivating myself I hope to have something to post to /r/GameDev's Screenshot Saturday event every weekend. This quickly got me wanting to show off something other than a still image, so I went looking for how people produce the animated screenshot GIFs I see developers posting of their games all over. Here's what I found: Step 1: CamStudio This open source screencast recorder is very simple, very light, free, and does a good job of recording a basic AVI screencast of a portion of your screen. You can set it to record just the part of your screen where your game is running, so you don't need to worry with post-processing crop. I tried a few other tools before this, and all of them had more up-front configuration and none of them really worked well. Either they only recorded black, or they had awful framerates, or they made my whole system crawl. Just get CamStudio . Step 2: VirtualDub Maybe there i...

Now we're demonstrating how fun interfaces can be built without the use of Flash. This is a growing importance, as open web technologies like HTML5 and CSS3 become more supported and capable, and as devices like Android phones and Apple iPads are more widespread, where Flash is un- or under-supported and web technologies are increasingly useful for performance. The prototype of Paper Rock Scissors worked, but we need something that actually looks nice. This is what I came up with a couple hours of messy around. It doesn't take much to clean up a web game, though it can take a lot more to make it really polish and appear shiny. That is true of any design. The theme has a few threads that tie it together. Your are represented by a blue glow, on your score and on your selections. The enemy is represented by a red glow, so the progress of the game is clear without overloading it with any textual messages or any heavy graphics. I've notched the selections, like ...

Yesterday I wrote about the little tech-demo Paper Rock Scissors game I prototyped in the morning. Today, I've replaced its crude AJAX polling with a comet solution, cleaned up the UI, and added a real-time chat for the players, in about two hours this afternoon. You can try it out with the other readers of the blog right now. Give it a try, if anyone else is around. Very simple. Nothing flashy. The point was to show off how comet can improve a project that needs it. The prototype yesterday had a 500ms interval updating the game state, so twice a second it would ask the server if the score changed, if the other player made a move yet, etc. This is a terrible way to make multi-user interactions! The server would quickly get bogged down by all that polling and anything other than Paper Rock Scissors would take a lot more fine-grained polling than 500ms, increasing the load a lot. The solution, in HTTP land, is that we replace several polls per second with a single poll th...

I’m building a Facebook game. Now, don’t worry, you haven’t lost me to the giant beast, my friends. No, I’m just doing a little project, for fun, to both test and demonstrate a number of technologies. I figured something really simple, like Paper Rock Scissors, would be the perfect target. I have the game playable in about three hours this morning. I have more work to do. The point of this is to demonstrate a number of technologies I am trying to push as an expertise, because they are all things we know well and which I think are ready to have their day in the sun, so I can see a lot of need for this coming in. Even such a simple game is demonstrating all of these things. A comet server to push events to the game client in the browser HTML5 to build a game UI that is flashy, but without Flash Housing a web app as a Facebook app, for promotion and integration purposes Utilizing HTML5 for mobile gaming platforms Today, I have a playable prototype that matches up players, updat...

I've been putting a lot of though to my ongoing desire to write something in the way of a video game. This was my original foray into programming and I just didn't stick with it. Turns out I am such a geek that I actually found database design and protocols more interesting than first-person shooters. Go figure. Still, the old dream burns inside me. I've spoken with a few people here and there that could gain interest if I started something, and I'm thinking the time is arriving that I buckle down into the nights and see what I can do. I've been looking pygame versus pyglet and hoping to find a ready-to-use accelerated sprite library. Although I really want to write a straight Python, installable game, the lure of the web is strong. There are a lot of fun ideas I could try there, and probably a much larger audience I would reach. Of course, there are pros and cons to both. Web-Based Installable Pros Zero installation Higher number of users One target platform (for t...