Blog for Glen C at GarageGames.com

Moving ever forward.

Glen C — 2006-10-02T09:24:48+00:00

Howdy folks,
Just wanted to pop my head in and note that I'm still alive and kicking. I kept scratching the shmup itch for a while and found pathed cameras to be nice and neat, although I'm yet to come across a graceful way of changing the speed of an object following a path. My framework handles spawning events and foes from trigger tiles, and a basic omni-mook entity can be customised via appearance and attached brain & weapon(s) to quickly produce a variety of bad guys, so if I ever actually want to make a shump, it's largely ready to go.

Next, I briefly flirted with the beginnings of support for a Cabal-style game, then snapped back into top-down, which I've decided will be the nature of my next project, The Complete Game!
I'm finding working with Torque 2D to be not at all unpleasent, and my framework is feeling pretty comfortable, so I'm looking forward now to completing something worthwhile with them. Returning to my top-down sandbox, I hope to blend a few different influences and end up with something uncomplicated but fun.
First, though, it's time for a code review! I've learnt plenty since I started this iteration of my framework, and I'm now in the process of poring over printouts finding places things could flow with a little more harmony. Once that's settled, I want to iterate my biped entity once more, and Murphy willing, it should be smooth sailing from there. :)

Hope you're all having fun,
Glen C.

Sandboxes, Shmups & Tilemaps

Glen C — 2006-08-10T07:21:00+00:00

Hiya folks,
I've been head down, playing furiously, and want to share what I've been up to.
First, for my sandbox, I gave entities the ability to grab and drop movable parts of the environment:

It's basic functionality that I've wanted for a while, and it's always heartening to see it finally play out on screen the same way it does in the notebooks.

From there, I tangented and had to scratch a shmup itch. Working as always within my framework, I made myself a new entity subclass with appropriate shmup functionality (support for 'roll' animation on movement, mostly), and extended my camera to support roving shmup behavior. I fired up the tile map tool for the first time in a long time, and hacked out a new level with the default tileset. A new portal in my portal room and I have the core of shmump functionality covered.

For this test, the camera dummy was free-floating, and speed and direction are controlled by trigger tiles in the tilemap. That's a little rough for my liking, and for my next attempt, I want to try mounting the dummy to a path, which I expect should work rather more neatly.

Yesterday I wanted to play with tile mapping some more, so after work I tried my hand at a tileset to use, and last night, I threw together this level base. I was originally intending to make something long and shmuppy, but when I saw the big square tilegrid, I couldn't help myself. The result reminds me of the C64 sprawlers, bless 'em. I'm pleased to have learnt a few things making the tileset that'll be handy for the next one I try.

The long view:

Some 1:1 screens:

Now, the new TGB release is here to play with! It all looks very exciting, I'm looking forward to exploring the new possibilities. Of course, the new integrated tile editor has arrived at a good time, but if the per-layer y-sorting works as hoped, that just makes things even groovier. Too many potential paths, too little time!

Ah well, I'm still having fun, hope y'all are too.
Cheers,
Glen C.

Endless War

Glen C — 2006-07-25T14:34:55+00:00

I've got a few new bits of happy functionality in place since my last post. Biped2, a new
core entity, is running around with (top-down) torso, head and arms. It can pickup & wield weapons and accessories, pose as needed, change colors and trigger interactions with the environment.

(Biped2 replaces Biped as Entity of choice.)

I've put together a default brain for Biped2-derived entities called the Omniped, which is capable of hunting for & tracking foes, seeking allies, and moving between key target locations.

I've made some new levels to play in and a portal-room to connect them. The new levels are each the size of a 4' square table, assuming the Biped2-scaled entities are the size of a typical 30mm miniature. I like picturing it as a virtual tabletop - the battlefield images from White Dwarf battle reports come to life. :D

(Bluecoats)

I've made a Foe Factory prop which continually generates Biped2 Entities from a random table of options and teleports them onto the battlefield:

Bluecoats start with Pistols, have improved vision, and spawn in pairs.
Redcoats start with Pistols, are generally weaker, but spawn in triplets.
Black Knights start with Pistols, and are slow and tough.
White Knights start with Chainguns, have poor health, but move pretty fast.
Finally, Independants are randomly colored, have Chainguns, are generally tougher and faster, but regard each other as enemies also.

(Skirmish)

By tweaking the various stats and capabilities of each faction, I've gotten them to a balanced (stalemate?) state, where none is strong enough to dominate forever, and the action rolls back and forth endlessly. If I get bored with passive participation or don't like the way things are playing out, I can possess any of the participants and change the course as I see fit. The Omniped brain gives priority to a possessed ally when seeking friendlies nearby to assist, following the lead of the possessed avatar as their new champion.

(Guiding allies)

Next, I'll probably add some more weapons. I'll put together a Pickup Factory to teleport weapons, health, etc, into the field to mix things up and add some more interest. Beyond that, there's so many things I've got in mind that I could try that I've likely no idea what I'll manage to settle on. I do want to make a new pilotable vehicle (I'm thinking a mini-tank) for the Biped2 to pilot at some point sooner, to get the extra level of scale happening, and that begs other mecha, and...and...there's not enough hours in the day!

Cheers folks!
Glen C.

Hitting the road.

Glen C — 2006-07-17T07:53:18+00:00

Howdy folks,
Been up to a bit since my last entry, so here's a bunch of what's happened in roughly chronological order:

With the kind guidance of Torqued from the #tgb irc channel, I've added mouse-wheel zooming which is just overall nifty. Being able to 'step back' and view the random chaos, and then zoom in, possess an Avatar and orchestrate it is keen.

I've implimented two core functionality features I've had in mind - Levl transitions and Entity mounting. The transitions are mostly just about making sure the old is cleaned up before the new is begun, and that all seems to be moving smoothly. Entity mounting is currently prototyped with my test car and Rufus, who can mount, drive & unmount the vehicle. More than just being about adding one sprite to another, it also meant things like adding cutscene functionlity to Entities in general, so that they can be moved into the correct positions on mounting and dismounting.

Shortly after this, I encountered my first major hiccup. Items in-world that can be triggered by Avatars can also be enabled for triggering via mouse click, in Sandbox mode. To my horror, triggering level transitions via mouse seemed to apparently cause random crashes. They didn't always happen, and when they did, there was no obvious cause. I suspect the level transition was pulling the rug out from beneath something related to mouse handling, and was happy to discover that delaying the triggering of the clicked on object by a hundredth of a second was a workaround that seemed to prevent the crashes altogether. I've since clicked through 50 level changes in a row without any problems, just to make sure it was all behaving, and also cleaning up properly on level transition, which appears so.

While working on resolving that issue, I discovered that Gyhart actually works fine when triggered from within the TGB Level Builder tool. Will have to bear that in mind, might be able to make some things a little quicker to put together.

Next, I set out to add a simple solid object to block movement, something I thought would be quick and simple.

Heh.

Several days, a redesign and a signal/sensor system rewrite later, and my sensors were no longer causing unwanted physics reactions. The day that I come to be an understanding user of the physics/collision systems will be a very happy day for me.

Now, I'm working on my first non-test entity, Biped2, which will handle inputs differently (closer to Alien Shooter than GTA2), and hopefully form the base for many of my future toys.

While playing about on the way, I put together graphics for testing a quad-tracked tank in a style which I don't expect I'll be using, so I'm offering them here for anyone that wants some coder graphics to play with. The graphics are .png with alpha channels for a tank and 3 turret variations, one of which is animatable, wrapped in a .zip file.

quad_tank.zip

Hope you're all having fun!

Weekend Warriors

Glen C — 2006-07-10T07:30:25+00:00

After a weekend of scrounged coding time, the Entities in my sandbox have been introduced to the concept of violent death. Spawning on demand now from a teleport platform, they run around shooting (very) crude Projectiles at each other. They have Hearts with health levels that take damage from the projectiles. When they're hurt, they flash and bleed Decals, and when they die, their corpse hangs about a while before fading out. Avatars can also interact with the environment as well, now. When they sense there is something they can do, it is reflected in a GUI and the player can trigger the available action. In the first image below, the control panel for the teleport platform enables the active Avatar to Spawn a new Rufus Entity.

What's next?
Environmental interactivity leads on to things like triggered doors, remote weapons, and so on. Life & death is a basic for most action, and distincting Weapons are a next step down that path. Level transitions still need to be done some point soon, too, and I've got some sandbox interface improvements in mind, such as mouse zoom and scrolling. Vehicle mounting is most likely next, though, since it's something I've thought about plenty, but not actually tried before, and is also vaguely complex, so I'm interested to see how that progresses.

Sandboxing

Glen C — 2006-07-06T13:40:58+00:00

Okay, I know I said I was going to make Paratrooper, and what I'm playing with now isn't Paratrooper. I spec'd out a complete clone of Paratrooper and figured on about 6 weeks of dull work, at least, and for what? I've got nothing to prove, I'm supposed to be having fun! So instead, I've jumped straight into my original intent: A top-down sandbox, a neat little virtual playground that I can entertain myself with.

With the Gyhart framework already existing, I was able to quickly add a new Play module for the sandbox logic and then get down to customising some Entities to start with. In the Gyhart framework, an Entity is just about anything that can do something, anything that can move and interact with the world, as opposed to passive elements like terrain and decals. Entities that Players control are Avatars. Entities controlled by the CPU are NPCs. Entities are also broken down into broad types according to how they behave - so far, I've got Biped and Car entities implimented in some form. (The recent TDN mini-tutorial on car physics was much appreciated!)

For convenience, I've added an option to allow Player 1 to take control of (possess) any Entity by clicking on it with the mouse, which makes it easy to switch between different Avatars at this early stage. Entities also have default crude movement capabilities so that anything can move in some form, if needed. They can also tint or flash any color.

I've thrown together some quicky graphics for some test Entities using assets from my library - my first Biped is Rufus:

He handles in a manner not unlike the avatar from GTA2, and when not possessed by a Player, currently wanders about under the control of a rudimentry Brain object. The Brains trigger the inputs of their host Entities the same way a Player does, and so should be pretty flexible. To test that idea just now, I plugged the same brain I use to make Rufus wander about into the test car, and it started driving about as expected. Keen!

Here's some snapshots from the sandbox at present:

From here, there's a lot still to do - I've got more basic functionality to add to Entities, as well as Level shifting and so on. Once the fundamentals are sorted and I can start experimenting, I do believe I'm going to enjoy myself even more.

Take care & have fun, folks.

Gyhart Framework Design

Glen C — 2006-07-05T07:54:39+00:00

Hi folks,
Hazel expressed interest in the ideas behind my framework/modules, so I'm going to have a quick ramble and see what I can do to explain them. "Gyhart" is the working name of my framework.

The purpose of Gyhart: To streamline game/game content creation, so that I can optimise what I can do with my available hobby time. I've identified patterns a level above "every game has moving images", over a broad range of (2d) game styles, and designed a system that I hope is sufficiently flexible and modular and can support many game styles and elements, whilst not hampering T2D's potential. In reality, it's all nothing more than a layer of basic OO design principles intended to provide a more stable and coherant application structure than TGB comes with out of the box, whilst ensuring I don't have to code any aspect more than once. By making everything self-contained & reusable, the various elements come to feel like "building blocks" that can then just be assembled into the right shape.
For example: Modules of functionality are implimented through classed scriptObjects. 'slide_show' and 'menu' are two basic modules which can be quickly extended/customised to provide specific slide shows, opening titles, credits, simple cutscenes and GUI features within whatever I'm working on.
Having designed this system to suit my natural ways of thinking, things work the way I expect them to, and I know that when the time next comes to throw up a menu or open a minigame or change to a different game play style or whatever, it's just a matter of pushing the right module into action and letting it take care of itself from there.

Caveat: The Gyhart design is not drop & run compatible with the Torque Game Builder / Level Editor; I've not even tried to make it so. I use the TGB tools seperately to build content (and they're extremely handy for it), but my 'home' for implimenting most of this is a code editor, not a level builder.

My apologies to anyone for whom this explaination was too dry or obvious or vague, I'm hoping to explain things better as I have more time and flesh out further aspects of the framework.

First framework milestones reached.

Glen C — 2006-07-01T19:56:26+00:00

The framework I'm working on to streamline game building within the TGB system is coming along pleasingly. The base structure is in place and working in a neat and controlled manner, the modules of functionality are behaving as planned. Splash screens are handled by a slide_show module, game menus by a menu module. A menu option triggers the opening screens of the WhackAMole game, which has been implimented in the framework as a minigame module. Start to finish, there's support for a complete path, good to build upon.

My next task is to plan out my first complete game, a paratrooper clone. Each time I've come to a newer version of T2D/TGB, a paratrooper clone has been one of the first things I've played around with, since it's a fairly simple action game that can be enjoyable to play if done well. I've yet to fully complete one, so this is proving time for me and the framework design.

I've been very energised by the folks in the community here, particularly through the IRC channels - it's great to deal with others whose passion for what they're doing is so obvious. I hope you're all having a great time!

Ready for ignition.

Glen C — 2006-06-26T15:19:25+00:00

I've cleaned up my work desk and organised my reference shelves. I've got a neato new printer/scanner that will enable me to easily generate reference material and scan anything useful. I've got a ream of paper, a pack of index cards, sketchbooks in several sizes, and behind it all, I've got a burning urge to make something fun to play with. Only the new hardware is recently aquired, but having it all neat and ready to go just makes the area feel fresh and new and bristle with earnest potential.

I've got my engine structure planned out, and the paths to the first milestones are clearly mapped. My overall intent is to create a modular environment that will allow me to more efficiently impliment various types of game within the TGB/T2D system. Efficiency is going to be important if I'm going to achieve my ambitions with just my own self at my disposal. My eventual goal is a top-down (GTA2-esque) sandbox that I can progressively expand with new features and capabilities. To get there, I'm intended to iterate through a series of smaller sub-projects, with each one driving expansion of the engine to support required features. Initial sub-projects will be based on clones of various games I enjoyed during the C64 days, excepting the first, which will be an integration of the WhackAMole tutorial game to test the framework early.

Tomorrow, I get to hit "New Project" and set the whole pattern in motion, and I reckon I'm going to have a ball!

Brief Introduction

Glen C — 2006-06-22T08:59:10+00:00

Howdy folks,
My name's Glen, I'm from down under, and I've enjoyed programming since I picked up the spiral-bound C64 manual at 6. I work full time developing and supporting ISP B2B software, and in my spare time I've been playing with Torque for a while now, first briefly with the 3d engine, and then more often with the T2D releases, since 2d is a lot more practical for me as a hobbiest. With the latest TGB release, I'm blown away by how convenient several of the aspects have been made, and am enjoying playing with it all the more. The people behind it have done fantastic work.
The hobby project I plan to undertake with the new TGB release is a 2d game/logic engine within the TGB framework that supports a healthy variety of styles and capabilities, within a hopefully neat modular framework. With that as a foundation, I look forward to then seeing what kinds of game I can make. While I work through the design of that project, I'm getting familiar with the new tools, brushing up with the tutorials and generally enjoying myself.
Below are grabs from some of my earlier tests with Torque 2D.

The graphics used in the first image, suitable for a paratrooper clone (assuming the 'troopers' are sidling robots), are freely available for those with a use for them:

Cheers,
Glen.