I’ll do it on monday!

okay okay, but seriously. Second version. I won’t get lengthy with this explanation, but it’s been retooled. Now all you have to do is move your ship around and hit stars. It’s as simple as that. You get energy when you tag or “collect” stars. You have one shield per level and per life. So if that gets tagged then you have no protection other than making it to the next level. The shooting stars now blink when they’re about ready to move toward you, but you still have to be careful. I have touble getting past level 5, let’s see if YOU can do better.

Click the image below to download. Play it at your own risk. While all attempts have been made to assure that this software is safe, don’t ever assume so. Please virus check any and all new programs you download.

enjoy.

Keith

UPDATE:  I just fixed a few things.  Now you can hit stars when in invincible mode, without harming you, but clearing your way.  The time for invincible period is shorter as well.  I also rewrote the shooting star code, so instead of using one of the drifting stars, it is it’s own star, but most players will not recognize as it will be using the same sprite graphics.  I decided not to write a new post about this because it’s not a major change, just a little update on how it works.

Okay just kidding.  It’s going public-alpha — that’s right PUBLIC-ALPHA a term I coin for most of my projects.  Essentially I only have myself to test my games, so I get some of my programming buddies to test out the game in the early stages.  Most notably without any real graphics.  So it’s called public alpha because some of the public can play it in it’s early alpha type stages.  But still not released to the general public.  Anyhoo, it is FINALLY a game. :-)

Only time will tell if people find it fun, or frustrating.  Things to note, it’s keyboard only at the moment, although mouse support is planned for in the near future.  Basically you need to move your small craft (okay big white block) around the screen, using left and right arrows to rotate.  You need to capture stars (smaller colored blocks), by releasing the catcher with the left ctrl key (a little light blue box will come out, this is the catcher).  You can essentially just leave it open, and touch the stars with the catcher.  But beware, some stars are attracted to the energy your ship emenates and will move towards you like really fast and stuff.  Also your fuel will be used up whenever you thrust (up arrow) or whenever the catcher is open.  If it dips below 50% then the fuel will replenish from your star energy.  So that’s it, you’re essentially trying to get 100% energy to get to the next level.  Potential energy is shown to guage your progress.  So you know if you need anymore stars.  Scoring is handled this wise, 2 points for every star in the catcher, 100 bonus points for catching shooting stars in mid-air.  You also get bonus points depending on how many stars you managed to capture… number of stars times 10.  Well I think that’s about it.  When you hit one star with the catcher, a new one will be generated elsewhere, so watch out for rogue stars that seem to pop in from nowhere.

Umm that’s about it.  Please let me know about the gameplay — NOT ABOUT THE GRAPHICS — this is purposely left as is, because I want to get the gameplay solid.  Is it fun?  Is it too hard?  Is there not enough to keep your interest.  What would? (and don’t say cool graphics :-)

Click on the screenshot to download the game.  Please note zipped up it’s 1 meg, and unzipped it’s more like 5, but this is because I am using the popcap opensource framework  on debug mode (btw I have nothing to do with Popcap, but this is their opensource framework).

While I strive to make sure my system is virus free, I would like to advise you to run a virus scanner on anything you download be it from my page or any place else.  You are using this program at your own risk — I will try to resolve problems but I can’t guarantee anything.

Click to download:

Please test it, and if the graphics are just too minimal for your tastes, then just don’t download it.

Keith

I’m trying to reasses a few things.  Mostly I want to manage my time better, and I want to learn a few things.

I’m thinking of dropping my Lord of the Rings editing project.  I actually started it well before I first posted about it on here (like one post but still).  It’s probably not a good use of my time.  This is sort of making me feel guilty though, like i’m doing it because I just can’t cut it.  If you don’t know I was working editing the 3 extended versions of Lord of the Rings into a single 2 hour movie, with the plot wholly intact.  But i’ve been busy with work and haven’t had time to work on it.  Not to mention that eventually the movie wears out (for you to watch, that is eventually you don’t care anymore), and those are good movies that maybe I don’t want to wear out.  Also i’m figuring that my time could be better spent.  Like putting those home videos of the past 5-6 years onto dvd.  And other various things.  In any case i’ll keep you posted.  If for some strange reason, I started getting inundated with emails saying I shouldn’t quit the project, I might change my mind again but right now I shouldn’t bother with it.

I’m also wanting to get back into game playing.  For fun, yes, but also to increase hand-eye coordination, to see what works and what doesn’t, and just to keep my “mind in the game” pardon the pun.  I make games, and I probably should lay them every once in a while.  I was also contemplating how to go about playing them.  Should I master one and then go on to the next.  Should I play a whole bunch and just change them out frequently.  Is it better to Master a few, or to try alot?  Someone suggested I try a few, but then attempt to master my favorite ones, and this seems like a good idea, so I might take it.

As far as my schedule, i need to wake up at a regular time, go to “work” (that is start working early) and then get off at a regular time.  So far I figured i’d wake up at 6, read my bible, shower, drink coffee, then “go to work” at 7, work all the way till 3, and then at 3 I can get in some kind of exercise.  The 5-9 would be tv, and then 9-11 would be spent on the “special” projects.  Writing — I just get ideas all the time, ideas for movies, for games, for tv shows, or books, or what have you, so i really need to start writing.  And when I start on it I don’t stop, you can tell I type too much when i’m actually posting.  Then we have Drawing — I used to draw disney cartoon characters all the time, and then in later years just stopped.  Now I want to learn drawing again, because I do my own artwork in my games and what not and I want to get good.  Music — well making you rown games requires music as well and my musical arts are about is good as my programmer art.  I have an electronic keyboad and that would be a good place to start.  I also got free “tracking” software to make my own tracks.  Programming — well I am a programmer.  But I find it’s hard to do anything.  I need to learn alot of things before i’m a master of programming.  But if I do this and work on something fun it should make it easier to learn.  Only downside is I program every day for my contract work, so I don’t know how this will play out.  Finally there’s video editing.  I love movies so I wanted to learn video editing by my Lord of the Rings Project.  But instead I have to take care of a few personal things, like home videos.  I should be a little less selfish and instead help my family out.  Plus we can get rid of those tapes.

As far as playing games I figure I can do that on the weekends.  What better things to d on a saturday night than play games.  Also reading.  I want to increase my reading speed and my reading of fictional material.  So I can expand my brain a little.

Well after i’ve bored you to tears, I can honestly say that’s all follks.  (All two of you).  I just need to get a handle on this schedule stuff.  Hard for me, but hopefully worth it in the end.

Keith

I know i’ve not been updating the blog much.  Starcatcher is on hold while I continue to work out unnamed contract job.  Gotta figure out pathfinding, which is a pain.  In the meanwhile I have an interesting thing to tell.  I’m related to Johnny Knoxville.  Yep that’s right, something like my Mom’s cousin’s son or something like that.  Cousin twice removed, or some such.  No I never met him, and likely never will.  But my Grandmother on my Mom’s side (My Mom’s Mom) had her picture taken with “P.J.” which is what they called Johnny Knoxville (i’m guessing this is a “stage” name or whatever - Johnny because it’s probably the J in his name and Knoxville because of Knoxville, Tennessee where he was born (at least I think that’s where he was born)).  In any case I just thought it was funny to note.  To show you i’m telling the truth I’m going to post the picture here.  And then if you don’t believe that, i’ll post a picture with me and my grandmother in it later (when we get them, we got them taken at wallmart so the prints should be here soon).  Of course I don’t have a picture with Johnny Knoxville myself, as I said above i’ll probably never meet him, but it’s cool to say i’m related :-)

Picture isn’t that great but there it is.  Possible I could enhance with a better scan and the gimp but I already played with the levels a bit.  Flash was a bit bright I think.  Anyways enjoy!

Keith

Okay, so i’ve been wracking my brain about collision detection with wrapped objects. Eventually mrfun aka Seth Robinson helped me out, and now the game is going to go on as usual. The rest of the game shouldn’t take too long… it should take a few days maybe till next friday (not tommorow which is the 11th) before I have a fully playable, unpolished game, but still fully playable.

Now essentially you will use your “catcher” to catch the stars. You can only open the catcher up for however long you have fuel for, but once you catch one star or more then you only have a short time before it overloads completely destroying the catcher and your ship. Not to mention now with the energy output and forces inside the wormhole cause the stars to start speeding towards the source of said energy which means your ship blows up if a star crashes into your ship.

Okay so the next task I have to work on is using the catcher to catch the stars. There are two ways to do this: A) I can have the stars attach to the catcher, and disappear once “inside” the ship. Or maybe just inside the catcher. I have code to check to see if an entity is completely enclosed in another’s bounding box, so I could simply have it move to the center of the catcher, and when the rect is completely inside it stops. B) The stars can move toward the center of the catcher like in the first one, only they stop when centered and then disappear in which case i’ll draw something over the catcher to indicate energy absorbed and building. This might be looking like a star expanding or some such.
I’m inclined to do method B because it seems a bit less tricky and because all those stars won’t really fit on the catcher anyways. Also with B I only need an extra sprite which is a drawable object only.

An entity is one that can move autonomously, usually has things like friction, velocity, position, etc. So an entity is essentially a physics object (ie an object that has a physical presence in the world). A sprite on the other hand is just a drawable object. It doesn’t have position or anything to move it. All it does is contain info on how to draw itself. This in the future will also include animation data, and various properties like maybe rotation, and translucency, and anything else I want to include in it. A sprite, however, is not an image or sequence of images, that would be an image resource. A resource is any content, be it image, image sequence, sound, or music. The sprite only contains a pointer to an image resource. If there’s no resource assigned to it, then a sprite draws colored rects. This allows me to be able to make and play with my game before committing any assets to it.

Well I guess that’s it. Just so you don’t get bored i’ll post a screenshot of the current version. Notice the crosshairs and display info are removed, and that all the stars are of an orange color. The stars are of the same color because they’re using the same “sprite” which happen to use the orange color.

Keith

Well since my thousander club progress is revolving around this editing stuff I decided to put it into both video projects and time management catagories.

I have to say getting back on the horse after months of inactivity on the project makes things a little rocky to start.  I didn’t remember where I was, or what I had done (there are a few edits that are seamless enough that I couldn’t remember) So I started on another segment a little further up.

So far i’ve gotten about an hour crunched down to about 25 minutes (give or take), of course this wasn’t all tonight.  In fact tonight all I got was crunching down 2 minutes down to about a minute and a half.  Not really that great for progress.  I was having trouble with my video editing software, it keeps crashing (now more than ever).  I don’t know why, it’s either junk I installed since then or it’s the registry change I made (Yes I know you shouldn’t just mess with the registry, but it’s a small change and shouldn’t be a problem to change back).  In any case I need to change that back to see if it had any impact.  If not then I guess it will just crash alot.  An interesting thing happens though, I can still edit video stuff when it has crashed (well when the error window pops up), and it saves and everything, so I don’t know what the problem is.

I’m using Ulead’s Media Studio Pro 7 with mpeg2 editing and all.  Of course the file itself is just in divx not in mpeg2 — This was to keep the size managable.  Although now the first part i’m working on is in a large divx file, might should have split them up, and might still do later.

As far as 1000′er club status, I have to say, I was a little late, I was supposed to start at 9pm and end at 11pm for 2 hours.  Well me and my dad managed to watch an episode of an old 60’s tv series called “The Time Tunnel” and it went over 9, so I instead focused on continuing with my game programming (starcatcher).  Then I started at 10, then it started crashing on me, and then finally towards 11, I started gettin some work done, finally ending at around 11:30 or so.  So with all the trouble this has caused me, I think i’ll go ahead and cheat a little and give myself 2 hours.

2 / 1000 video editing hours.  that’s .002%

Keith

Okay really i’m kidding, i’m just talking about the Thousander Club.  Since I sort of quit, I decided to re-affirm my goals with relation to this.  I said sometime back, that after talking with a friend, really the thousander club should be about getting good at something specific.  You know all that stuff, like 100 hours you’re fairly expert, and 1000 hours you’re an experienced expert, and 10k you’re a master.  That stuff about practice, that to become that you need to practice it this many times.  I thought of that, and I thought well what do I want to really get good at?

Well I have a number of things, one of them has to do with movies.  I’ve been in love with movies ever since I was 10 and got to see the original “Back to the Future” - I’ve been wanting to do stuff having to do with making movies, but it’s never quite worked out (for a number of reasons I won’t go into here).  Now that we have the computer technology to make movies ourselves, I thought what a great way to build experience in say editing, is to take a favorite movie and compress it’s time, and still keep all the major plotlines and keep out plot holes.  I mean you could figure out what really needs to be in there to tell a story within the given time frame.

Originally I had wanted to take a 2 hour movie and compress it to about 12-15 minutes.  Of course it would be a challenge.  Then ever since the Lord of the Rings movies came out, I wanted to see if you could take the extended versions and compress them into a 2 hour movie.  Sure a daunting challenge, but what a challenge, I mean if you could actually pull it off.  And thus I had started already.  So I figure 1000 hours of this (editing i mean) would make me somewhat experienced on movie editing.

So now back to the thousander club.  I figure this would be great because it’s learning something specific - how to edit movies.  Of course I wouldn’t be able to get to 1000 hours immediately, but then again these are lifelong endevours, however, I would probably do something else once that 1000 hours was up.  So that’s it, video editing, 1000 hours worth, and I won’t count anything i’ve done previously towards my hours.  In fact i’m onlyh planning on getting 10 hours a week done, that’s 40 hours a month.  That’s only 480 hours for a year.  Two years = 960 awful close to 1000.  I think I could squeeze in a few extra hours for an even 1000, but this doesn’t matter.  2 years at 2 hours a night 5 days a week should do nicely.  Then if I feel I have extra time or want to put in extra hours I can do so.

So that’s the gist of it, 2 hours a night starting tonight of video editing.  By the time my 1000 hours are up I should be well on my way to being expert!

Keith

Check this out… I got STARS now! see those multi-colored squares, those will hopefully be the prelude to the stars. After finally getting the tether drawing with wrapparound perfectly (there were still a few issues last time but now I fixed them). Also notice how increased the catcher’s size. That’s because you’ll be doing alot of stars at one time. All those little guys drift around, and then you can catch stars only with the tether fully extended. Then those little guys start getting attracted to you. This is both a blessing and a curse as you need to avoid being hit while at the same time maximize your star combo. Anyhoo, here it is:

Lovely don’t you think?  Next up… umm… catching mechanism.

Keith

Okay not much to report here, essentially, i’ve been racking my brain trying to make a framework from which to make my games more generic. Otherwise i’ve been working on drawing the tether wrapped (as well as the angle line, which is generally only temporary, however I can’t see a rotation in action if the angle line isn’t there). But finally after much consternation, constipation, and copypasting, i’ve finally got it to the point where it wraps around all edges and corners. I was talking with Seth Robinson, you know “Mr. Fun” himself, and according to him the original asteroids didn’t do “true” wrapping (it would just jump to the other side instead of moving off and then on again). So then I felt I did alot of work for nothing, but he reminded me that it gave it, it’s own look. So here’s to it’s own look.

And how about YOU look here (by the way you can view the fullsize image by right clicking and selecting “view image”):

See Mr. Winky there? Oh please! you know what I mean!

And now it’s FULLY EXTENDED! Yes you heard that right, and it whips around too!

Okay how about one more lovely screeny:

Check it out! Is on the right side or left or is it in an alternate universe?

YOU DECIDE!

Okay so how awesome am I? too awesome. Next we move on to adding stars (or rather other little blocks floating around the screen).

Keith

Okay this is cool, after much wrangling, finally got the wrapping working fine, and got the catcher itself to wrap correctly. And it’s connected to the tether. The only other issue is the visible tether and the line representing angle isn’t visible on the wrapped entities - that is not until the actual entity comes into full view. This is just a minor consideration though since I don’t know how the tether will look in the final version. this is mostly place holder stuff. The next big challenge after getting the star entities running on screen will be to get the collision working right with the catcher and stars and stars with the player. This will be a big deal. Since 3 of them are going to be “ghost” entities at any one time. Anyways here’s a screenie of the wrapping in action:

Notice how part of the white and part of the blue is now in all 4 corners (well not in the lower right because it was too far over) This is lovely wrapping in action. Now only if I could wrap presents as good. Okay and now how about that with the catcher extended.

See that on the lower left out a ways from the corner of the white square, that’s the catcher, however the tether isn’t showing up because i only have line drawing for one line. I’m not really sure how i’ll add the tether. I’m thinking the idea is that it’s an energy tether, so it will be drawn after the fact, and probably not put in until i have the game mostly done.

Hopefully this game will turn out very cool, fun and addicting!

Keith