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Announcing Pretty GameCast

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Mark and I are almost live with Pretty GameCast. We’re just waiting for iTunes to finish their review.

Pretty GameCast is a podcast about videogames. Our main segment is taking a game each week and talking critically about its successes and failures. One way to interact with Pretty GameCast is to treat it like the videogame equivalent of a book-club. To that effect, the game for our first episode is

Rogue Survivor, by Roguedjack

I’ll update with the link to the audio and podcast subscription link when it’s ready to go!

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Tiny Tyranny Progress 9-6-10

Monday, September 6th, 2010

This weekend I fixed up some various bugs and did a lot of work on ranged weapons. They pretty much work now. Characters can be equipped with weapons and tend to use them relatively correctly.

There are two more major outstanding things to be done before the next release: Adding the ai selection buttons (should be easy, a couple of hours at most) and adding faction generation code, so new factions come into play if old ones get eliminated (a little trickier, this means taking out some assumptions that live in the code).

Anyway, I think I’m basically on schedule for the 9-15 alpha.

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Bug of the Day (Months): PyGame Rects Are Ints

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

Gah! I should have realized this sooner.

The internal representation for PyGame’s rects are integers. This is why characters in TinyTyranny either moved strongly in one direction or not at all! I think this is also why Run! Jump! Forever! (windows version) had some time dependencies on jump height. Python was casting my floating point positions to ints whenever I put them into a Rect. So frustrating!

After the jump, the alternative FloatRect I wrote. I didn’t bother to include all the functionality of PyGame rects, but just picked out the functions I actually use. (more…)

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Tiny Tyranny Progress

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

I made a lot of Tiny Tyranny progress this weekend. The faction management code is almost complete, meaning that the game can actually provide a challenge now, as well as presenting some interesting choices for when and who you choose to pillage. One design problem came up during this: what’s to stop the player from just sitting around and doing nothing?

The solution to this is to add factions like the bandits shown above. These guys represent groups that think you’re the weak link. Their hostility counter grows each turn whether you attack them or not, causing them to attack every so often.

I also fixed up the resource code, so now it’s possible to gather wood, stone, gold, gems, food, and corpses. I also added wooden walls and fixed the costs of the structures that I have so far.

In short you can build your kingdom, but you still have no chance of survival.

So that’s the next step. I think the main thing is adding the weapons and inventories. Once ranged weapons are added to the game it will be a lot easier to defend yourself. I want to do weapons in a really solid, data-driven way, so it can handle melee weapons, ranged weapons, and spells. Also it needs to be moddable so people can add in new stuff.

One more thing I did this week was change the way the water tile looks, which makes me incredibly happy for reasons unknown.

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Tags: choice, Design, tiny tyranny
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Data Driven Random Name Generation In Python

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

In Tiny Tyranny, one of my goals is to cultivate attachment between players and their characters. One way to do this is to individualize the characters by providing names for them. This helps elevate them from throwaway troops to something memorable. (Letting players name characters themselves can help generate this effect too – see XCOM).

Another goal for Tiny Tyranny is to let players mod all aspects of it. This includes letting modders add new characters, monsters, places, and factions. Therefore, the name generators need to be moddable too.

I just finished coding the way data driven name generators work in Tiny Tyranny.

After the jump, my code and sample name generator file for human male fighter characters, like the lovely human captain (shown above) . (more…)

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Tiny Tyranny Alpha 1

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

So here it is – the first alpha of Tiny Tyranny.

This game is not enjoyable at this stage. If you decide to try it out, please let me know if it crashes or you get any bugs along those lines. To run it, all you have to do is extract the zip and then run tinyTyranny.exe located in the src folder.

Soon I’ll decide what the goals are for the next version, which I’ll release on September 19th.

Tiny Tyranny Begin

Saturday, August 14th, 2010

Wow. It’s been a long time since I last posted here. I’ve been working on a couple of games lately, but most recently I’ve been working on a concept called Tiny Tyranny. Tiny Tyranny is a strategy game that combines city building, tower defense, and RPG elements. Basically you create a tyrant and then build up your Tyranny: pillaging factions for supplies, managing your followers, and defending yourself.

Tiny Tyranny Battle

So far I’ve completed the basic game loop. Starting a game, scouting, attack factions, defending yourself, but nothing else though. Also, the map editor is done. I plan on releasing this basic 0.1 version tomorrow. I’ve created a list of goals that I want to address before version 1.0. I plan on releasing a new version every month until all of the goals are complete.

Check in tomorrow for version 0.1 of Tiny Tyranny.

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Run Forever! Jumpfinity! Lite

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

You can now get the lite version of Run Forever! Jumpfinity! for the great price of free. Check it out!

Also, if you don’t have an iPhone, no worries:

Play Run! Jump! Forever! on your Windows PC. Just extract the zip and double click on runJumpForever.exe! Playing is easy. Start a game with enter, arrow keys move, x runs, and z jumps!