Number two DeVlog has a lot to say apparently. I was shooting for a 3 – 5 minute video and ended up with 12 minutes of footage that I cut down to 8… That’s a lot of talking.
The DeVlog Number 2
Well it’s here and we need to talk about a few things.
- Minor updates in the Time Assassin engine
- More Haxe action with a new SciFi project
- I like adding a ‘y’ at the end of words apparently
Sticking with the plan, I’ve uploaded a video of the DeVlog to YouTube and you should totally watch it… or not. You could just read it
The Time Assassin Engine
When I first started pounding out that Java code for the engine, I pretty much did what I always do for movement and just had the player image update it’s position if a key was being pressed.
Well, dammit, this is the boring way to make an assassin move. We’re gonna use PHYSICS!
Since LibGDX already has support for Box2D, adding in some physics for movement and collision should be easy right? Well, I thought it would be super easy, but it turns out it’s not super easy, just kinda easy.
I’m using the Tiled Map Editor for creating my tile maps and setting up the static bodies for each tile is proving to be a pain in my butt. There is a tool out there that I’m trying to use but I’ve done something wrong and I keep getting errors… fail.
Either way, I get to avoid programming physicsy stuff and the collision will take care of itself once I get this tiled/box2d tool working. It will be glorious, don’t you worry.
Oh, and I forgot to mention this in the video, but when you work with Box2D you need to scale your objects down. This is because the engine is optimized for working in meters and having a 32 pixel sprite act like it’s 32 meters wide is ridiculous.
It took me a little bit to convert everything over with a constant value for scaling, but it’s all ironed out and lookin’ pretty. My assassin moves with physics!
LibGDX Animation Handling
This section should be short, but I definitely wanted to point out how easy LibGDX makes animating sprites from a spritesheet. I half expected to write my own Spritesheet class but it’s all taken care of with the framework.
You can be sure that I let out a beautiful sigh of relief when I figured it all out and saw my little gray assassin dancing on the screen. Mmmmm, beautiful grayscale pixels.
Holy Buckets! Another Gamedev Project
Yeah yeah yeah, I’ve started another project and it’s gonna drive me bananas because I have so much programming to do, but you know what overly judgmental reader… I’m gonna do it anyway.
My original plan was to make one game per month so doing two at once isn’t that bad… right?
My yet-to-be-named SciFi project will be a game about aliens (duh!) and you will view the world through a scope. Scroll around the screen observing the evil aliens working on their spaceship and take them out one by one.
The idea is that you don’t want to alert the rest of the crew because they will sound the alarm and start looking for you and your nasty rifle. Take out aliens alone in a room on the ship and pop off any other aliens who get a glimpse of their crew’s corpses so they don’t set off the alarm.
Scoping aliens sounds like fun if you ask me. What do you think?
Next Week I Want Big Changes!
Awww yeeeeah, I’m shooting for big changes this coming week and I really want something playable for you guys to sink your teeth into. Actually, try not to bite your keyboard, and definitely not your monitor, because you might have to deal with a scary dental bill.
That’s about it, other than the fact that if you aren’t using Git then you are missing out on a whole lot of awesomesauce. Source control is your friend. Invite him over for dinner sometime.
As always interwebs, you stay classy and I’ll catchya later.