Setting up some smarter ogmo layers so editing lights and foreground elements will be easier. Hooked up the lights to the levers/circuitry system. It’s awesome.

http://www.thevillageblacksmith.net/that-game-im-working-on-development-preview/

For now it's being referred to as 'That Game'

I’ve been massaging Nape into the gameplay, and I’ve been throwing in different things like enemies and cutscenes.

Our helpful scientist extends our enemy class. TAKE THAT!

Been doing a lot of talking on G+. It has completely replaced my Facebook and Twitter, although I’ll check those occasionally. It’s just a better tool. There’s no other way to explain it.

I find that it’s a great place to find an audience and start a conversation. If you like my blog, than you should probably add me on G+. Add me to your circles, +1 some posts, whatever!

https://plus.google.com/108066971690388849562/

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3AFBEA39AD842E60

If you want to watch my time lapse videos of my Cube2D engine being constructed, check out my Youtube channel. I’ve been uploading videos all day!

It was harder than I thought it would be!

I didn’t really care for haXe, and I ran back to AS3 as it is much more familiar. Sorry deltaluca. I’m apparently dumb.

While we were staying at David’s place, we adopted a kitten from his aunt. It made being stranded in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma much more enjoyable.

His name is Flexo (yeah, from Futurama). I'm sure Jennifer loves him more than me!

David already has a cat named Simon, so getting a kitten was possibly a bit rude, but eventually Flexo and Simon ended up being friends.

Jennifer really enjoys dressing up cats. Cats don't generally enjoy wearing clothes, so it's pretty funny to watch.

Around this time the starter on our car begins to fail. As the days went on, starting the car went from turning the key, waiting, and trying again, to hitting the starter with a lead pipe and a hammer. Finally the starter decided to crap out on us, and we had to get money together for a new starter. We had to rely on Jennifer’s mom and some meditation CD projects she wanted to get our car going. I ended up burning around 600 CDs, and I killed David’s burner. We got the money every 100 discs, but we had to help David pay for some electricity, and the gas to keep going back and forth to her moms house left us with nothing extra. Eventually we were able to buy the starter, and some new brakes, as they were getting pretty noisy too. Seems like everything tried to blow up on us at once, and it sucked.

With our car fixed, we were finally able to go home to Missouri. 3 hours into our trip going home, the tie-rod bolt pops out when I’m going around 80MPH. Both tires point INWARDS for a very abrupt and scary stop. It’s a miracle that we didn’t get into a horrible accident. I really wish I had my camera charged for that. We had to wait for Jennifer’s dad to save our ass with a box of bolts he happened to be collecting. He found a matching bolt, and we were back on the road. The alignment is a bit off now, and the car is suffering from ‘speed wobbles’. I’m sure the joints and tires are boned, but hey, it got us home.

This is apparently my 'NO INTERNET' face.

When I got into my house, I instantly jumped on the computer, expecting to make this post. Unfortunately, the internet was down. I’m on satellite internet, which is a complete pain in the ass. I could rant on about how much satellite internet is a rip-off, but it’s the only way to get internet in a rural area.

Explosions, chain reactions, and tons of Nape objects! Beautiful!

I started working on my FlashPunk + Nape version of Dynamite Max, which I’ll refer to as my NapePunk project from now on. I stopped focusing on things like components, and found that inheritance seems to be much easier/faster.

Here’s another time lapse SpeedCoding video.

I figured that components would be the fastest way to do things, but inheritance is so basic and simple that I’m surprised how quickly I was able to put together my prototype.

The CPU usage is amazing! CopyPixels is great, but ugly.

I used the PreRotation image class that comes with FlashPunk for all of my objects. It bakes the rotations so you can use CopyPixels for your drawing, as it is much faster. The problem is that my game design needs to get away from CopyPixels, as I have a moving camera, and CopyPixels snaps pixels and causes a bit of jitter. I did some experiments with Draw, and looked as simply using the regular DisplayList, but performance started to go out the window.

Testing DisplayList performance

If I’m going to be wasting CPU cycles on drawing, why not use my modified Papervision renderer? The problem is that when I use fake lighting in my scenes, I can only push about 600 triangles before I see poor performance. I seem to be simplifying everything I can, but lighting is essential to my gameplay design.

Cubes and lighting? Hah, Flash can't do that! Not smoothly anyway.

So instead of cutting lighting, I’m cutting down on triangles. I’ve decided to try and keep my blocky art-style, so I’m keeping things rectangular, but I’m getting rid of cubes! Instead of 6 planes for an object, I’ll only be using 1 plane. This will allow the 600 triangle limit to be used by drawing 300 quads, or planes. 300 objects on screen is a pretty decent amount, and is enough to watch Nape start to choke. I figure if my rendering and my physics bottleneck on about the same number of objects, I have a pretty stable limit in place.

Lighting, lots of objects, and splitscreen!

When I started working with Papervision, I felt a lot more comfortable. I started working with things like multiple viewports and a 2 player splitscreen system. Perspective, scaling, tiling and a lot of other things are handled automatically with Papervision. ViewportLayers and many other things make Papervision excellent for 2D/3D drawing. Best of all, I get 60FPS in fullscreen 1680×1050. Quite impressive.

Pretend that this image is animated at 60FPS.

Anyway, I’m trying to push out this new engine as fast as I can. It is heavily influenced by FlashPunk, which is perfect as it allows for very rapid prototyping. Neat huh?

View the SpeedCoding playlist here: (First 2 videos are FlashPunk, the rest are Cube2D)
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3AFBEA39AD842E60

At least the 7 hour drive was fun.

My wife and I left to visit family in Oklahoma in late May. We were given the gas money to get there, but once we got there, family drama, apartment fires, car problems, and other crap ended up leaving us broke at a friends house.

I don't even remember this picture. Laughed hard when I found it on my camera!

The first thing to blow up our faces was staying with family. We had planned to stay only a week or so, but this wonderful fire ended up leaving us stranded. A neighbor disposed of their cigarettes in a bucket, and the bucket full of cotton filters went up in flames. Luckily my friend David was cool enough to let us stay with him.

Isn't it just wonderful?

David’s place had internet when we got there, and I downloaded my game files through Dropbox. I talked to him about basic programming, and downloaded FlashPunk to show how easy it is to get started. I downloaded Nape to show him how I could easily add physics, and because FlashPunk with basic inheritance makes prototyping a breeze, I had recreated my platformer in about 3 days.

FlashPunk'n my butt off!

I recorded a little time lapse of the process. Unfortunately Sony Vegas added some sort of motion blur, but it looks cool anyway.

More of the story soon!
EDIT: I’ve changed the site a bit. Looks shiny huh?

Came across the BulletFlash project, which doesn’t have a lot of talk around it yet. The project is an alchemy port of the Bullet Physics engine. After looking at the trunk on their googlecode project page, I found a working build!

The performance with stacking seems to surpass JigLibFlash, so maybe it’s possible to see some decent physics in Flash!

It’s been a fun experience and the guys at Envato are very nice/helpful. Now that the tutorial is online, I’ll be getting paid once I send in an invoice. Too bad I don’t have any office tools on my machine!

http://active.tutsplus.com/tutorials/games/introducing-blend-modes-in-flash/

2 Boxes running in parallel

I sat through a lengthy checkdisk and then I was greeted with my mom’s desktop. I started digging through my files, and saw that my video files and game files were intact, so I quickly moved them over to her hard drive. After a day of searching through my unorganized mess of files, I found that I could not recover any of my recent downloads, or any of my notes/pictures on game development that I’ve collected for a year or so. Very depressing, but at least my game files and video tutorial were safe.

I reinstalled Windows, got updated drivers and updates for all of my development programs, and now my machine is back in business. I shot off some emails and got my video tutorial submitted, which is good news for me, because my internet would have been cut off if I didn’t come up with some quick money. Let this be a lesson for any readers here…

Back up your files frequently!

I’ve always felt that I’ve kept decent backups before. I have an external hard drive where I’ll often toss a copy of my current development folder to. However, once I had lost my data, I realized that these half-ass’d backups weren’t enough. I’m looking at an applicated called Acronis True Image, but I’m open to any suggestions if you have any. Just leave a comment!