Category: Game development
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A few new sprites
I’ve been doing some edits to Quale’s Scroll-o-Sprites to create some new creatures, I’m particularly pleased with the cat wizard and horse soldier. The bear-man is also kind of interesting; it makes me wonder if I could eventually come up with something to represent an owlbear. I’m thinking of chopping the sprite sheet up further…
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Upcoming game jams
There are two game jam events coming up in the next couple of months that are of distinct interest to me. Next month, the Mud Coder’s Guild are holding a month-long jam in association with the folks at Written Realms, the first National Mud Building Month (or namubumo, if you’d rather). NaMuBuMo challenges you to…
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Pathfinding, redux
This evening I got pathfinding working around a larger, scrolling map. I thought this would be best demonstrated in motion, so here’s a little YouTube video of it in action: I had to turn the sprites down to 32×32 from 64×64, as the view seemed too claustrophobic that zoomed in. This has some unfortunate knock-on…
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What makes “Clicker Games” good?
Here’s a nice little YouTube video from RealityEscape on what makes a clicker game good: Just in case the name didn’t give it away, Bones of the Idle has a strong idle/clicker component. When you’re gathering materials There’s a few points raised that I want to briefly talk about in the context of Bones‘ design:…
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Point of view
Last night was the inaugural meeting of my new after school study club, and it was a very cosy, pleasant experience. We went around the table and talked about our various works-in-progress, discussed the merits of various database/model frameworks, and eventually settled down to work on our individual projects. I spent the time getting field-of-view…
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Aesthetics
I spent a bit of time last night working on the new look for Bones of the Idle. I’ve been on a bit of a lo-fi vaporwave kick at the moment, and seeing how much of the game is supposed to evoke a kind of wistful nostalgia for late 80s/early 90s BBS door games like…
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There be dragons: Entity Component Systems for roguelikes
A really great talk from the 2018 Roguelike Celebration discussing the use of ECS in roguelikes. I used this talk (and a little bit of extra research) to create this really simple implementation in Javascript, which is probably entirely too proof-of-concept to be of any real practical use, but it was a fun little exercise.
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What happened to June?
Here we are in the middle of July, and there’s a conspicuous lack of changelog notes for June. So what happened? Most of June was spent in an existential funk as the project floundered a bit and I found it hard to keep working on it. Some of code was getting a bit smelly, particularly…
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Changelog, 2019-05
May was a huge month for Bones of the Idle. For one thing, it got named and stopped being “that browser game project”. But it also got pixel art sprites, maps you can wander around (with A* pathfinding), crafting, and skill-based combat. It really went from being a proof-of-concept to being an actual game. Environment…
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Pathfinding for robots
Bones of the Idle is the result of multiple separate coding projects coming together over the course of six months or so. I made each of them with the intention of learning something new, then in typical fashion abandonded them once I was happy with the fundamentals. What’s been gratifying to see is how each…