It's my Birthday, and I'll code if I want too ...

Ok ... as the title implies, it's my birthday today, I'm now 27 years old -- not old enough to whine about my age, but old enough to worry about getting any older :)

The rest of the title ... well, here's what I've been up too lately;

I started writing a TDN Article yesterday, titled "Moving Along a Tile Map, Tile by Tile", which features some code and logic on how to get movable objects to move along a t2dTileLayer "tile by tile" (sort of like how Pac-Man moves, or how the objects move in Magic Pearls) -- It does not use any collision information, and works soley on Tile Custom Data. NOTE: This Article is still a WIP, should be usable in a day or two.

I am also working on writing "Lady Bug Run" (title is for prototyping purposes only at the moment), which, for those who have stopped by ArtPakz.com and looked at (and possibly purchased?) the Lady Bug Run content pack, will know is a 'pacman-like' game, using a Lady Bug as the main character, and fly's for ghosts.

I was intending on writing some sort of pacman-like clone, and when I saw Artgirl post her forum message about Artpakz, I just said "OK -- I'm sold, gotta buy it and work on that code".

Why would I make a pacman clone? Simple, I enjoyed the game, and I'm still learning to code in TGB -- I'm thoroughly enjoying some of the odd issues I'm running into, specifically implementing intelligent AI at the moment.

I struggled with movement for an hour or two, whipped together the demo level in about five minutes (it's literally a copy of the sample board that Artgirl provides with the pack) and have been spending the past few days, here and there, randomly experimenting with different ways to implement AI.

I used Phil Shenk's A* Resource for TGB, compiled it into the engine, made some customizations to force '4-way logic' (it currently supports 8-way movement -- if your interested in the code, check out Phil's Resource page, my modifications are posted at the bottom for those who wish to check them out).

I also released a 'beta' of a Memory Card game, I made it for my son (he loves Dinosaurs) and it's title (for prototyping purposes, again) "DinoMemory" (Thanks goto Rob from Urban Games for making the OSX Build). The current artwork provided is for testing purposes only, and will be replaced before a 'final' release is made -- currently, the artwork within the archive is technically owned by someone else, but I can't seem to track them down ... so I'm working on finding another artist who can provide replacement art for the cards (Dinosaurs are not necessary, just need a nice set of 'themed' cards). DinoMemory currently has 322 'cards' which is randomly sifts through before it generates a card-layout for the level -- it supports two game modes 'Easy' and 'Hard', and has some fairly interesting card layouts for a 'memory' game (helps add to the confusion of where your cards are). Due to the large number of cards it has access too currently, the game is not as simple as most Memory games since your eyes can really adjust to the image and simple store the position anymore, you've got to remember both the image and the position now (some of the images are similar looking too, which doesn't help much, haha).

Oh and, let's not forget the super secret project that Gear Worx Productions is working on, I'm currently Lead Developer on that as well, well, only developer for the time being. I'd go into more detail about this one, but hey, it's more fun to let everyone guess ... Free copy to the first person who guesses right, and no Steve, your guess does not count.

And ... aside from that, I've also been working on some rather unique modifications to Community Server for my employer (when the sites released, I'll post a link for those who are interested)

And, for my .plan image, me, riding a dinosaur ...




Upcoming AZ Gamers and Game Developers Meeting
Arizona Gamers and Game Developers second 'meet and greet' is this Sunday, at 2pm. Directions and Map links can be found on the groups GGE Page. Hope to see some local AZ GG'ers there, enjoy.