This post is being published on my personal blog and the Geekwagon blog.
I’ve made many games for my own amusement, but now I want to build games you enjoy.
Video games are what got me into computers back in the 386/486 days. It’s the dream to make games for others. I’m not greedy, it doesn’t have to be Undertale or Stardew Valley. Just something that brings a little joy to a few people and–hopefully–puts food in my fridge.
I made Pac-Man, for reasons. There is also a Post Deadline Update below.
I’ve been inspired by a few indie game developers on the internet. In no particular order:
I’d like to give game development a serious go. I’ve made a lot of silly games no one should play. This one will be the same, but not without a goal. Which was to make something simple, complete, and on a deadline to learn more about what I’m getting myself into.
Adventure Communist is a game by Hyper Hippo, and by all accounts I shouldn’t know what it is. However, a few years ago, after testing positive for Covid (probable false positive) and stuck in a hotel room for 10 days with nothing but a phone, bad cable television, and no symptoms I started downloading any and every game that looks interesting.
After being released, I stopped playing them all… except Adventure Communist. What is it about making numbers bigger? Even after making a clone of the game, ¯\(ツ)/¯
The previous post is a fun and non-rigorous dive into automating the deployment of a Godot project to Itch.io from GitHub and GitLab. The obvious follow up question is: What about Gitea?
Everyone does… stop bragging. You can also deploy to Itch.io from a homelab.
GitLab can be fired up in a container, and it’s great! I took some time to check out Gitea as a light weight alternative, and I have to admit it has started to win me over. Why is a different blog post (don’t hold your breath).
I’d like to acknowledging a preference for GitLab over GitHub. Obviously GitHub is the popular choice, but I have a soft spot for the underdog… especially the open source optionally self-hosted underdog.
My evidence is anecdotal, but Github Actions is a gentle learning curve compared to GitLab’s CI. It could be because I learned GitLab first and had new concepts to wrap the ol brain round. The option to use other people’s reusable elements in GitHub is sweet.
I decided to dive into Phaser 3 and Tiled with my next game project. I was looking to make a room change similar to Link to the Past (the SNES Zelda). The implementation is simple and the result was pleasing so I wanted to share.
I’ve used Tiled a little in the past but this is the first excuse I’ve really had to dive in to it. If you’re not familiar with Tiled, there are a million ways to learn more.
A short post about a game I made about a year ago for a class at the University of North Texas, CSCE 4210: Game Programming 1. I took the class because I heard the professor, Dr. Ian Parberry, was good at teaching game design and was an interesting fellow (I heard right on both counts).
I cannot claim all credit for this game because I worked with a partner. He was awesome and the only reason I don’t mention him by name is because I didn’t tell him I uploaded this and no longer have his contact info. To my Viking Dungeon game programming 1 partner: if you want me to add your name to this post let me know.
I do love Sudoku, and I play it too much. Not long ago (before this semester started kicking my butt) there were two things I wanted to play with: Local Storage and a Sudoku library.
This is what I came up with: http://geekwagon.net/projects/sudoku/
I also play in pen because I’m a glutton for punishment.
I didn’t use a library for local storage, for some reason I wanted to do it the hard way. This project has only been tested in Chrome, so if you want to see the mess I put in local storage the developer tools (F12) has a tab named Resources.
Despite WildStar’s critical hit on my free time this past month, I’ve managed to code a little. Let me introduce both of my blog readers to the buggiest and most poorly coded version of Tetris they’ve ever seen.
http://geekwagon.net/projects/flipsy/
Someone sucks at Tetris
Don’t ask why it’s called Flipsy. That was just the name of the folder when I started and I didn’t bother to change it.
I did follow the Tetris guidelines to the best of my coding ability. The obvious things, like piece colors are there. With the exception of the square. One cube on the square red so I could see it was rotate. Less obvious Tetris familiarity is the piece randomness. There are a ton of guidelines I haven’t implemented yet.
In an effort to learn more about backbone.js I made a web application that is easily considered beautifully useless (beauty in the eye of the beholder, useless in the eye of everyone else). Really, this is probably one of the finest work of code writing I’ve accomplished to date and there are maybe ten people in the world who will use it.
There is plenty of room for improvements, but I’d like to write about it anyway.