Gaming

Twice each month, I interview independent developers in the gaming industry. I felt that there was a niche not being served, in that I wanted the inside scoop behind many of the developers I interact without over the years. This 30 minute show is a casual conversation between a developer and myself, where he or she illustrates how they got their start, what their current and previous projects are, and some of their favorite tools, languages, and frameworks are. ...

Charles Humprey (@NemoKrad) was kind enough to help me get his 2D side scrolling shooter sample working in C++ / DX 11 this morning. You can find the source code to the project here. He’s a fellow MVP who has been extremely active in the XNA community, and provided numerous samples in the past. You can find more of his work here. Requirements: DirectX SDK (June 2010) Visual Studio 2013 Windows 7 or 8 should work fine. I use Win 8.0 and he uses Windows 7, and the project works fine on both of our machines. I’m not sure if it is compatible with Visual Studio 2012, but I do not believe so. Regardless, the express version of 2013 is free. ...

Click here to play Super Rawr-Type Redux Source Code: https://github.com/DaveVoyles/Super-Rawr-Type-Redux I’ve spent the last 3 months working on the follow up to my previous game, Super Rawr-Type. It was a simple side scrolling 2D shmup, which I wrote in JavaScript and also ported to Windows 8. One bug prevents me from getting it into the store, and I’m not able to replicate it, so who knows if it will ever be released there. ...

10 months. 80 hours. That’s how long it took me to play through Persona 4, and with my severe video game ADHD, if I play anything for more than a night, then that’s an accomplishment. Well, it really took a bit more than that, because I earned all 3 endings and died a few times, but we’ll go with the official game time of 8o hours. The last time I put this much time into a game was Dragon Quest VIII on the PS2, and Final Fantasy VII on the PS1. ...

Yesterday’s E3 conference was perhaps the most interesting one I’ve seen since 1995’s Sega debacle, where they thrusted the Saturn out of the gate, 6 months ahead of schedule and unbeknownst to developers. Microsoft came out of the gate with a strong lineup, a solid piece of hardware, and certainly some clarification on their policies which people were understandably curious about. Yesterday evening however, Sony came out swinging, pulling the ole’ rope-a-dope: A tactic where a fighter sits back and takes punches until it’s finally their turn to shine. And that’s exactly what they did. ...

Loading Super Rawr-Type within the Win8 touch simulator For the last two weeks or so I’ve been working out bugs in Super Rawr-Type and integrating touch controls for the Windows 8 port. This is the first time I’ve ever created touch controls, so it took a bit to understand how they work, specifically with toggling the joystick for movement and stationary buttons for shooting, switching weapons, and activating powerups. What proved most difficult for me really was not having a machine to test my controls on. I’ve had to rely on the simulator thus far, which basically runs a virtual machine on your desktop, wrapped a shell that appears like a Win8 tablet. The buttons on the right hand side emulate figure gestures, so you can view and understand how your own touches will affect the game. ...

When building my Win8 port of Super Rawr-Type, I ran into all sorts of performance issues, due to lack of optimization. This was to be expected, as I on gave myself 1 month to complete the base game, then I would take the second and final month to port it to different platforms and worry about optimization. The design of my levels is where most of my issues came from. I explain it pretty well in this post here. The gist of it is this: When the map loads, it is filled with ~150 enemies, which are constantly being updated. Obviously this comes with quite a bit of overhead. The browser version played well, but on a dedicated OS it chugs. ...

[UPDATE] Clarified that I have two classes for my bullet. One which uses pooling, and another that does not use pooling. So my object pooling optimizations don’t seem to be working. I thought I would have seen some improvements in terms of my performance, but I’m just not seeing it. I think one issue is due to the fact that with more objects lying around, the garbage collector takes longer to run. Essentially, the pooling reduces how often the collector runs, but makes those runs more noticeable. ...

So I’m quickly progressing in my newest game, Super Rawr-Typeand am just about to put the finishing touches on it. I’ve given myself one month (30 days) to work on this bad boy. GDC and PAX took up quite a bit of time recently, so I’ve got a few days left to go. It’s far from perfect, but it’ll do. Next month, I’ll focus on publishing to The Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 Stores, as well as wrapping the code in the iOS wrapper. ...

My first book, UnrealScript Game Programming Cookbook has been published by Pakt Publishing today. It covers a variety of topics, from creating your own modular camera system, crafting AI, creating intelligent pathfinding for bots, and manipulating weapons. A free sample chapter is available as well, which covers creating a modular camera system, from beginning to end. It’s available in a number of formats, including a physical copy, as well as Kindle and .pdf formats. You can find the book here, or also at Amazon.com here.