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January 19, 2005

text=play

Shifting the Generic Game Engine from a tool to allow developers to create games to a tool that allows users to drag and drop text files to create games has not been a light one, however the project is on course and will be completed fairly soon.

From a developers tool to a game in of itself the evolution of the Generic Game Engine to what I now call Aristotle's game (Although feel free to suggest better titles) has taken some time however the hardest parts of the process are now behind me.

Text Parsing: The entire text parsing engine is complete(for now). The game will now parse out any .txt file and can create a game from it. .rtf and .doc support to come later.

Visual Engine: The game draws the background map based on the text, the hero, and the enemies to the screen. The hero can walk around and in a zelda-esque style move from one 8x8 section of a text file to the next. One of the hardest parts of the game engine is, because the game will have no preset size for any given game, making sure that the visual engine could handle sizes that didn't nicely fit to an 8x8 grid, say, 62x62. Also the I have begun coding the behaviors and movement characteristics for all of the different possible enemies in the game.

All the small stuff: I have begun developing the AI for the enemies in the game as well as some of the bosses of the game. I have also started to conceptualize how the visual engine will make connections between different things, for example if a bunch of water tiles are shifted all within a tile of each other, but not connected I want the engine to connect them into one larger water body, thus giving a smooth feel to the game(But then again, maybe I should leave it rough)

Stuff to come: NPC's will spout off sections of text from the text file given "To be or not to be...", and tooltips(small popup boxes) will appear as the mouse rolls over tiles and enemies to give you a glimpse of where each tile belongs in the overall text file.

So all in all, a lot of progress has been made on the game, but there is still a lot to do. I, however, have full confidence that the game-engine-something will be created soon.

Posted by SWEAT at 02:20 PM | Comments (2)

January 18, 2005

Ryan goes for the Next Level!!!

Collaborator Ryan Molloy is starting a provocative new journal that will focus on non-client based, research-oriented, "critical" graphic design! The critique will be visual as well as conceptual in nature, according to the call for entries. Ryan is currently a professor of design at Eastern Michigan University. We will let you know as soon as the first issue hits the newstand.

Posted by SWEAT at 08:30 AM | Comments (0)