Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Current Optimisation targets

Posted on May 26, 2009

Stuff that is currently slow in really hectic games:

  • The ‘smart’ sprite texture for the shield impact sprite gets created and destroyed a lot at runtime
  • The sound engine spends a lot of time looking for free sound channels or cached sounds
  • Drawing of blast textures for bullet turrets is slow somehow. Lots of small 2-primitive draws I suppose.
  • Drawing Missiles and missile glares and trails
  • Drawing debris

I love optimising, and the frame rate isn’t too shabby even with all hell breaking loose, but it would be cool to get it much better in the hope of adding some really gratuitous extra effects later on for fast cards.

Space Hulk particle test video

Posted on May 25, 2009

Now that the hull editor for the game actually does something, I managed to put it to the test by adding some particle emitters to the drifting ‘hulk’ from one of the federation cruisers. This short youtube video shows the ship being destroyed, and then you can just about make out the flickering particles on the damaged hulk. It look much better not in crappy youtube resolution.

Right now they all flicker off at a fixed LOD, but I’ll sort that out so it’s less obvious, then I can add them to all of the ships. I’m aiming for a look where people can zoom in during a battle and be impressed with the amount of silly detail I went to in order to make it all look cool.

This is fun bank-holiday-weekedn stuff. Tomorrow it’s back to php and MySQL. bah!

Making actual tools

Posted on May 24, 2009

I know that editors and level tools are part-and-parcel of most game development processes. Most games companies have at least one full-time tools programmer, who will work 8 hours a day for a year designing, coding and supporting the tools made to build the game. However, when you are a one-man-band, dedicating that amount of time to tools just isn’t viable.

There are several solutions. You can try and hit the happy medium where you spend enough time to get usable tools, but don’t let it eat too much into your schedule. You can produce really good quality tools that make game production a breeze, then realise you have not got close to finishing a game and you have to go get a day job again… Or you can just hack everything in manually using notepad and excel and worry about it later.

I’ve traditionally chosen the last option. I hate MFC, which is the ‘language’ that tools used to be built in, and I’ve never learned java or C#, which is what people often use now. That means that when I coded the few tools I use (like my particle-engine tool), I hand code them in C++ just like the games GUI. This takes ages.

Until now, I’ve been manually editing text files for the spaceship data. I have a master spreadsheet with lots of the data in, to make balancing easier, but there is a lot of manual staring at paintshop pro and memorizing pixel positions to type into notepad. Clearly this is mental.

So this weekend I made my very first steps towards a proper ‘spaceship-hull-editor’ for the game. This is still a makeshift hacked tool which won’t ship in the game, it’s just a quick tool to make it easier for me to tweak some of the graphics data, such as placing particle emitters for burning ship hulks. It’s a small step in the right direction I guess.

In non-tools news, I’ve been fixing a lot of very minor graphics glitches, the odd disappearing piece of debris or mis-aligned laser blast, or slightly crappy looking tractor beam graphic. The game is looking quite nice. Next week will be geared towards some online-integration, and some general gameplay code.

BBC interview

Posted on May 21, 2009

I had two people from the Spanish BBC website at my house this morning to interview me for a thing on digital piracy. It’s pretty cool to be interviewed at all, but it’s unfortunate that it’s about piracy. It all comes from the ‘talking with pirates’ blog event from last year. I don’t really want to be seen as ‘the piracy guy’. I’d much rather talk about game design, or other issues within the industry. They filmed an interview with me, and took some shaky cam footage of GSB. If it goes on-line I’ll post a link here. Maybe I’ll be dubbed in Spanish?

I saw the new star trek film 2 nights ago, and it was weird seeing tons of spaceship debris and escape pods. it’s like they have been playing my game :D Yet more inspiration to make the GSB visuals look good…

Cat Rescue

Posted on May 20, 2009

On Friday we noticed our youngest (3 years) cat had stopped eating and was subdued. Jack ALWAYS wants to eat, so this was very weird. He didn’t show any interest even in cat treats. Throughout Saturday and Sunday we got more and more worried because he had eaten almost nothing and didn’t seem to want to move. He also wanted to sit outside in the rain.

Monday morning he went straight to the vets. He had a high temperature and an eye infection, which they gave him injections and eye drops for. On Tuesday, he went back to the vets after nothing much had changed (eyes were better but he still wouldn’t eat). They admitted him to a proper Rolf-Harris style pet hospital. There was talk of x-rays and blood tests and more.

The vets couldn’t take a blood test,a s they encountered heavy resistance from jacks claws, so they put him out for an x ray and took it while his shields were down. The results were grim, because he had serious liver and kidney problems somehow. I still suspect he has eaten something out in the garden that was a mistake.

Anyway, they kept him in overnight and put him on a drip, and did some other technical things that I don’t understand, but which make for a long and expensive price list.

This morning he is all better, he is eating, and I just picked him up and bought him home. he meowed all the way home but jumped straight out of his box and landed right by his food bowl, so he is back to normal :D

It’s great to have Jack back. The only problem is the fact that his Vet bill is a collosal chunk of this months games revenue. We need a national health service for cats :D