I’ll do it on monday!

Okay now that i’ve got your attention. I just wanted to post another screenie. In this screen the catcher is extended (the yellow line is the tether, the redline is still there just hidden). I do have a problem now. It won’t wrap around until the white square wraps around because it’s position is linked to it. So how do I get the catcher to wrap around on it’s own in the correct position relative to the white square? That what i’m trying to figure out.

Screenshot awesomeness with the tether extended!

Okay you can see the tether extended in the previous image, now the problem of the catcher not wrapping around. –

Whoops, what’s going on here?

Essentially the wraparound function says “hey it’s off the screen let’s pop it back to the other side”. And then after it does this it goes “Hey wait a minute i’m still attached at the hip to that big white square let’s pop back over into position”. There’s a couple of possible solutions. One has to do with order of operations. Right now the wrap function is at the bottom of update, which means it’s called last. I could rearrange the order in hopes that I might get it to not update position until it has shown up, this doesn’t sound right, in fact it doesn’t sound like it should work at all. Another idea is to have the catcher “lead” which means technically the ship should follow, this might allow warping of the catcher, but then might have the reverse effect of the ship not wrapping until the catcher is over. Another solution might be just manually adjusting the catcher position to include wrapping, this requires me to know something about the length of the tether and it’s entry point on the otherside. I just thought of one other possibility, and that is I could make sure the catcher actually moves seperately from the ship. Essentially it would still be in the same position when it starts out, but I manually change it’s velocity to match that of the ship resulting in what appears to be two connected entities. It would have the advantage of the fact that it’s independantly moving. Then i’d just have to determine the point where the tether intersects the bounds and then draw a line from that point to the catcher. It has to be like a continuation of the previous line. I’m unsure how to do this. Anyone out there (who still actually reads this) give me any ideas?

Keith

Okay so my name’s not Jack, it just sounds so cool ;-)

In any case, i’m still working on that mysterious phone game and now a pc port of it, so whenever it gets released i’ll be posting info about it (hopefully soon but not at least for some other months).

I’m working on my own game called “Starcatcher”.

The premise is you’re chased by an evil alien race called the Kreig, and you only have enough fuel to jump into hyperspace, so you do that, but now you’re stuck in a worm hole.  You need to find a way to get some energy to convert to fuel, but where?  Lucky for you there are stars trapped in the wormhole with you.  These little balls of gas and fire are just bundles of energy.  So what you need is a starcatcher.  After converting a few things for energy collection you start.

The controls will be fairly easy, asteroids style.  Forward to thrust, left/right to rotate, back to break, and spacebar to fire.  But you’re not firing weapons you’re firing up the catcher. The catcher is tethered to your ship.  However once you create an electromagnetic field by starting up the catcher, the stars are attracted to it (Hey so what if this is pseudo-science, it just has to sound ok).  You must be sure not to get touched by a star otherwise you’re toast… literally!  Now you can collect as many stars as you like, but make sure your catcher doesn’t overload with energy causing a chain reaction destroying your ship. Sound like fine? great!

Well here’s a screenshot of the very pre-pre-pre-alpha nothing much to look at:

Well there you have it, amazing no?  Actually there’s not much to do here, and even less to see as you can plainly see.  Right now that white rectangle represents the ship.  That red line represents the angle.  That blue rectangle is it’s own worse entity (harhar, bad pun i know), i mean to say it’s its own entity.  Although it’s moving along with the ship.  This is because it will be starting out at the same location.  You’ll press a button and that blue block will come out.  And then all you have to do is maneuver to catch the stars.

I’m also thinking of full on mouse control, which may deprecate the keyboard controls, but we’ll wait and see.

If you’re wondering about Enchanted Lands or Hypno-Joe, i’ll be working on those shortly.  I’ve just been rather busy lately.  Hopefully I can make some decent progress soon.

Thanks,
Keith

I dunno, I haven’t had time for blogging.  Well not really at any rate.  I’ve been working on a phone game that I can’t say much about (as you’ve seen previously) and learning the popcap framework.

As far as the thousander club goes, i’m not totally out of it.  It’s just marking down my hours (although maybe productive to see how much time I do spend) for the club isn’t an accomplishment, at least for me.  I was talking to a friend about it an appearently he viewed the idea as a skill one would learn by tracking down the hours for it.  Say learning to draw, or improving one’s handwriting.  Since the original article (and I don’t remember where it is now) talked about how much time it took to master a subject (something like 10000 hours), writing down my hours about my work just isn’t doing anything.  Yeah i’m going to become a master at accomplishing my own work :-)  This is not to say that for some people there may be some merit.  As far as a thousand “things” (game ideas, free low-poly models, etc) that’s a good thing to shoot for so I wouldn’t say my comments have any bearing on that.  Because they’re setting goals for their specific things and it makes sense.  But me just including “all game development work” and the hours I take up doing that doesn’t really serve a purpose.

So i’m sort of on hiatus as far as that goes for now.  I have a job that’s going to take one possibly two months, so then after that I think i’ll return to the thousander club.  (I want to improve my handwriting, so i’m thinking 1000 hours to be expert at good handwriting is a good goal for the thousander club).

I was also working on a video project.  Wherein I was editing the Lord of the Rings (extended versions 12+ hours) into a single 2 hour movie.  Well i’ve made decent progress in this reguard, got about 50 minutes down to about 16-18 minutes (not exactly that but roughly a little better than 2-1 in time in minutes), however I have had to postpone that until I get this particular job done.  Considering there’s been a few others that have done Lord of the Rings edits and even one case of combining them into a single movie, I figure that i’m not going to be ahead of the game anyways.  Generally an editing project like this is for myself where I can learn the ins-and-outs  of movie editing.  If you can take a movie compress the time down into a fraction and then still have the whole movie read well (important parts still intact) then I figure you could become really good at movie editing.  And when you finally got to edit a real project you would have a good handle on what is superfluous and what is not.  (I’ve heard George Lucas was an editor-at-heart, he used to edit his first movies until he grew his empire and supposedly he learned in a documentary style and used images for alot of stuff — this is why his later works are so image heavy reguardless of what you think of his storytelling ability, but I digress)

Enchanted Lands is also put on hold.  When you’re trying to earn money it takes precedence over your own work sometimes, but i’m cool with that, EL will continue at a later date.  I suppose Hypno-Joe will too, i just haven’t disciplined myself to draw/animate while watching movies (and I know the answer would be not to watch anymore movies but I have my reasons and I don’t really care to expound on them - and I mean literally don’t care it would take too long and this post is just long enough as it is.)

Eventually i’ll too get back to blogging :-)  Until then one has to just wait, assuming there’s at least a single reader left :-)

Keith

So implementing lists isn’t so hard to do.  It’s not perfect but it works.  Each morning I modify my todo list based on the project and tasks lists, then when done for the day if there is no more steps I remove it from the todo, if there are more steps I just remove the step I did that day.  Once the project is finished, it goes off the projects list.  The tasks list should never be empty, but may change as my interests change.  We’ll see if this keeps me more organized and completing projects.
Welp I guess I can add 10 hours to my thousander club total.  Since i’ve been working on my Enchanted lands 100 hour challenge, i’m meeting the goals.  I haven’t really kept track on how many hours otherwise I spend.  So now we’re up to 160…

160/1000 hours for the thousander club.

Keith

Welp this is great. Okay i’ll reveal more of the characters and such in a later post.

Firstly i’m done with the character bios. I think i’ll need to return and do the NPC bios at one point (maybe not so lengthy though because they only serve the main characters and story). And i’m done with the major plot lines of the main playable characters (the good guys). To note though there’s a difference between regular npc’s and evil main character npc’s. Remember originally I was going to allow you to play the bad guys, but still the bad guys lose — You were just going to be able to interact with them. However I thought that possibly there would be no mystery left in the game and thus wouldn’t make for an interesting experience so I decided to not allow you to play the bad guys. But they will have their own plot lines like the major good characters. So if I say ENPC - evil non-player characters you’ll know what i’m talking about verses NPC’s.

Okay so essentially I did about 11 hours worth on the character bios - which left 8 and 4 hours on the plotlines. So far i’ve only scratched about 20 hours total. So it’s looking good, I may complete the challenge!
Previously: Enchanted Lands: 100 Hour Challenge Update #4

Keith

Well this is sort of an update to the challenge and to the whole progress thing. I hope I have some readers left that can give me some hints.

Firstly i’ve done 4 more hours on character bios, and I have only one character left, as far as writing it concerned.

Okay basically my Dad doesn’t think I should be posting everything in my story in my blog. There may be one of you that likes it, however it got me to thinking. In a book about writing screenplay’s I just read, it suggested not to discuss your screenplay in social settings. Reason being that someone may just pick up on the idea and not even remember where they heard it. I do realize people aren’t just going to pick up my good ideas to steal them, that’s not really how people act. However you ever “make up” a song only to find out you’ve been humming a tune you’ve been listening to all along? It’s sort of like that. If someone else likes the idea and incorperates it as their own then they’ve just stolen your idea, only problem is you can’t prove that in court, and they didn’t conciously steal it anyways. So it’s just your own nievety thinking that no one would use your idea.

So the question is, should I start being a little more tight-lipped about the details of my adventure game. If I spend a year making this thing, only to find someone else has done my exact idea and worse has done it better, then I just wasted a year and have nothing for my efforts. Or should I continue to spill my guts (not that I have at any rate)…

Previously: Enchanted Lands: 100 Hour Challenge Update #3

Keith

This is going to be brief. I managed 5 hours on the challange writing up bios for 6 of the main characters (good guys).

I’m thinking what i’ll do is limit each to the 19 hours — essentially I spent an extra hour one day catching up, so that’s 5 hours off the challenge, and 95 left, that’s 19 for 5 areas.

These areas are Characters, Stories, Maps, Puzzles, and Implementation.

So what I decided on is that i’d work till I was done or until 19 hours is up, whatever comes first. Then move on to the next thing. I’ll tally up the hours left (before implementation) that I didn’t use, and go back and try to finish up on the stuff I missed. Should work out I hope.

Previously: Enchanted Lands: Main Story

Keith

Welp, I managed to get about 5 hours done brining my total too hmm… 150 hours

I’m starting to semi-adapt the principles in David Allen’s, Getting Things Done with my todo lists.  Starting with writing everything I am working on.  And writing down next actionable steps.  However they’re not stuff that can necesserily be done in 2 minutes as stated in the book.  Not only that but I haven’t written down every single thing.

I plan to do 3 lists.  My todo list is things I need to work on every day, by doing one item from each project or area.  A daily task list would be needed for stuff I do every day that I need to remember to put on my todo list, like showering for instance - and no I don’t forget to shower, however, in an effort to stay organized going to put down stuff I do every day so I can put it on my list.  Final list should be my projects list.  These are the major projects (like a game i’m doing or whatever) and I probably won’t put steps on it because that’s supposed to happen in my daily to-do.  In fact each morning i’m supposed to get up and work on arranging my lists.  The three lists should be sufficient.

For stuff like a project i’m going to do every day until something major stops it, i think i’ll add it to my daily task list.  Such as Cleaning.  I have the apartment seperated into areas which I need to tick off my todo list, but then once it’s done i need to do it again.  So it probably needs to be on my daily tasks.

So for thousander club members

150/1000

Keith

Sorry I haven’t posted in around a month.  But I get busy with other things.  One of which is a video project that i’m doing at night.  I won’t say much more until i’ve actually made some progress.

Okay this time I really do have struggles.  I decided not to continue on with the 9-5 experiment as I just can’t seem to do it.  My new schedule will be slightly different.  Only 6 hours a day, yep you heard that right 6.  Why did I choose 6?  Well for one thing, one of the statistics for actual amount of work a person really gets done at the office is about 5 hours, the rest is socializing, going to the bathroom, etc.  However for me 5 is a little too little.  6 hours allows me to work on a few or many things, and if i’m doing a solid 6 hours of work then i’m sitting pretty.  It also gives me about 2 hours before my Dad gets home so I can do stuff like take a walk, or do some house cleaning, play my guitar or just generally forums, blogging, whatever.  I’m also including breaks which works.

I’m going to be regularly posting in my blog again starting monday I think, so stay tuned.

And for the record, i’ve gotten in about 12 hours so that’s 145 hours out of 1000.

145/1000 hours

Keith

Okay like I promised months ago, i’m going to post the main story.

First a summary then the plot points. Keep in mind that this is a work in progress. Also keep in mind I tried to be as general as I could in describing the story, so it may seem incomplete. Essentially the main story parallels the first player character’s story ie our main character John Thomas (but more about him later). In later posts when I start detailing the characters you’ll see how it all fits together. Each player will have a main plot and a subplot usually the main plot will reinforce the story’s main plot. The subplot will be just for the characters, but reinforcing their own main plot. For instance, the main story plot is to defeat the bad guy (classic stuff, read clische, I know but I like this stuff). The main character’s main plot involves figuring out why he’s not having a rockin’ magical vacation. his subplot revolves around rescuing a princess. How do they link? The princess is like a total babe, obviously John wants to rescue this hottie and perhaps win her heart. She in turn has information which helps them all understand why the resort has been run into the ground. This helps solve for John’s own main plot which is why he isn’t having a good time. This also serves the main plot because she fills in the details about this bad guy and what he’s doing.

Okay I want to put in a caveat here, I may have not remembered exactly what the plots and subplots were, according to how I was envisioning them or wrote them down. What i’m going to write in the following posts is going to be the actual story, that above was mainly an example of how these individual things support each other. Also i’m assuming anyone who reads this is not worried about getting spoilers of the story. This is primarily a development blog, so naturally most who read this should be developers. However I don’t mind that someone just happens to stumble on my blog. But now i’m getting off topic.

In an effort to keep this short, i’m going to put up the summery here, and put up the plot points in the next post.

So here it is - The summery:

Enchanted Lands is a magical vacation getaway. Situated in the lovely sunny nexus between worlds. Here the rediculously wealthy can indulge thier fantasies (get your mind out of the gutter, fairy tale type of fantasies, and get those naked faries out of your head this is going to be a family game). A true to life magic kingdom who makes it’s money on tourism has fallen on hard times. The story follows a band of adventurers as they restore peace to the kingdom as well as a positive cash flow.

Okay so maybe it’s not so great, but I like it.

In the next post i’ll be outlining the plot points of the overal story. Then in the future i’ll add the character descriptions.

Previously: Enchanted Lands: 100 Hour Challenge Update #2

Keith