BLaTTiX is released! After two weeks of crunch, the game finally came together. Fifteen levels spread across five planets, with eight enemy types. Not too shabby! Reckon I spent around 350 hours on this, spread across 129 calendar days. And now I’m learning to market something I’ve made. Sales are trickling in, and I’m planning to write and post about the project in the hope of capturing an audience. But, soon, it will be on to something else.
Well, here we are in mid-July; kids about to return to school after two weeks off. We spent some time down in Bunbury, which was nice.
I can see the finish line for Blattix; I have a small list of work to complete over the next ten days, and expect to entirely wrap it up by the end of the month. I also released a starter kit for using Raylib+Flecs, and I plan to use this as the framework for my Deminer and Noid experiments.
Been somewhat distracted by the NSW lockdown, but deliberately weaning myself off the doomscrolling and the live press conferences. Must focus on productivity.
Will dust off Punk / Gumshoe / Hacktile later this week. Also plan to do some MegaHAL work so I can get a monkey off my back; a MegaHAL fan has asked that the new implementation be able to load brainfiles generated by the old 1990s version, and I reckon I can bust that out too.
Wish me luck!
Well, we’re in lockdown yet again and BLaTTiX is getting close to beta release. As we go into July I expect the following will happen:
All in all that’s a lot! Together with RnDB, which has already been completed, that makes 10 projects for the year. And we’re only just halfway through. Wow!
Long time! You should probably note that all BLaTTiX talk has moved over to the Itch Page. With only a month of development left, the game is really coming together. Looking forward to starting a new project soon!
The lockdown gamejam went swimmingly; I finished all of the gameplay work that I intended to do, and I shipped the game to alpha testers on Itch, adding both Windows and Mac builds. Feedback has been positive so far.
More recently, I’ve refactored the code to integrate Flecs, an entity-component system, which has helped to clean up the codebase enormously, and which will make it easier to build more complicated game systems.
I also lost a day to Linux in an attempt to get a build out; I’ve installed Debian 7 on two VMs (32-bit and 64-bit) and have a binary built, but the VMs won’t run the game due to a lack of support for the GL calls I’m making, so I’ll need to test that by installing a more modern Linux on my PC. But with installing Linux, programming in vanilla C and re-watching Serial Experiments Lain, it’s like I’ve been transported back to the year 2000.
Speaking of, I’ve been learning a bit about “Modern C”, and the differences between C11, C99 and ANSI C, which is what I learned back in the nineties. Most notable are three features that I’ve come to rely on:
I’ll also make sure to use inline functions where it makes sense to do so. And
the other C99 features, such as single-line comments and a proper boolean type,
are hardly worth mentioning.
Another change to how I used to write C is a preference for pass-by-value and return-by-value instead of by reference. Which means fewer pointers and less manual memory allocation. These days it can be faster to use immediate values than references for small structures, and compilers will copy the data into registers. Nice!
Well, it’s been a while.
The Punk Collective met last Wednesday in the city. Burgers for lunch, following an impromtu tour of a nearby co-working space. Really conveniently located; accessible directly from the main underground train station, and just a 10-minute journey from my local train station. Seriously considering a membership; it’s around $150/mo for five days access per month, which is around what I think I need (basically get out of the house and meet up with other solo developers once a week or so).
Apart from that, have been working on Blattix! I’ve added walls, collisions, shooting, sound effects and music (purchasing ten punk rock tracks for unrestricted commercial use for $99). Controls feel tight, and it’s fast.
Next steps are to get a simple game loop happening (I’ll just make Asteroids for now) and get builds shipped out to the other punks. This will mark the end of the first month of development, and we’re limiting ourselves to just three months. In the second month, I will focus on refactoring and fleshing out the gameplay, adding waves of different enemy types, progression through levels, boss battles and so on. The final month will be bugfixing, polish and optimisation.
Remember that I’m trying to limit myself to spending just a third of my time on this particular project, so next month I plan to make some room to continue work on Gumshoe and HackTile. Busy times.
Unfortunately we’ve gone into a snap lockdown due to some community transmission in Perth. I’m focusing on a three-day gamejam to distract me from those concerns, and things will hopefully be back to normal soon…
Sidetracked by our Punk Collective commitment to build a game each in the next quarter. The other three punks have been super productive with their games, and so I spend the week working on something myself… Blattix!
This will be a retro-style shooter with multiple waves of enemies, going for high replayability rather than depth of content. I’ve drawn inspiration from Encounter, Cosmic Causeway, BallBlazer and Vaxine.
It’s been an excuse to learn some shader programming, and to brush up on my linear algebra. I’m not using a 3D game engine at all, it’s just rendering sprites and doing a bit of tricky jiggery-pokery. Next I will move on to building a simple physics engine, which will allow collisions between objects, enabling some shoot-em-up gameplay.
Lots of fun!