Blog for David Cobb at GarageGames.com

Back in the Lab

David Cobb — 2007-06-19T00:16:57+00:00

I'm back. Still using TGB. A hard drive crash took down my scratch-built game engine (and 3 game prototypes in progress) so I'm really glad I picked up TGB! :D

Felix Crocker, Gentleman Rocker was safe on my other hard drive, but I've decided to throw it on a back burner. The animation was killing me dead. That and a couple collision problems I was having made the decision for me. I'll be continuing to kick it around whenever I feel like making some more pixel animations, but for now it's on hiatus.

The good news is that I've been working on a top-down space shooter game. Picture Escape Velocity, but with all that silly politics and trading excised, new combat controls...

...and with a hip-hop soundtrack.

"Lame! Where are the screenshots?"

I'm trying this time to not throw a bunch of art and things out there before I have them in a functioning game. I'm plugging away on the prototype (currently refactoring the first iteration) and I should have some pics and maybe a video to post later this month. With this being my first real project commitment since completing work on my first professional game (Saints Row), I'm quite excited with how it's shaping up.

Oddly Satisfying

David Cobb — 2006-08-31T19:27:06+00:00

Never has my name in 2pt font ever represented so much.

Fruits

David Cobb — 2006-08-29T14:29:52+00:00

The first batch of sprites for the game...

I thought I posted this already, but I guess I didn't.

Anyway, this animation stuff is taking a long time. I'm getting really good results from my new process of roughing in the shapes for each frame separately and minimal copying pixels directly from frame to frame. I'm still clinging to the copy + move + fix mode though for some reason. Hopefully I can break myself of that habit.

Anybody know any tips to speed up the creation of animated sprites? ;)

Well, as I'm getting tired of animating and have enough basic stuff to start coding, the next post will be gameplay-oriented and will see things running around in TGB. I already have my tileset imported and some maps laid out, I've also got all my animations and sprites in there. Easy stuff, that was. Now I'll just be running through some tutorials.

Animation sucks

David Cobb — 2006-08-25T21:08:10+00:00

Felix run cycle rough: Done
Final detailing: 5% complete
Time spent: 2 days

This is the first thing I've animated in quite a while. I'm basically learning a whole other way of doing it which is paying off in the quality department. I'm getting a lot faster as I go, but the large amount of time this takes will probably show when it comes to a reduced number of frames/animations/behaviors for other characters (heheheh...and other characters for that matter). I'll probably post a couple animations, screenshots, or concept art next time. Some visual representation of something will be going up, so look forward to that.

Here are some links to some pages that helped me figure out how to get going with this animation stuff...
Couple of Traditional Animation Tutorials
8 frame pixel run cycle

Torque Game Builder FTW

David Cobb — 2006-08-22T04:52:31+00:00

I've been cranking out graphics for my little zombie game for a couple days and I haven't really bothered to think about how it'll all make it into a game. Since I've got Torque Game Builder Pro and my other engine (along with two games I was working on in it: Field Crumpets and a light saber game ripoff) went down with my old hard drive, I just assumed I'd be using that. I'm not really super keen to write another engine from scratch and TGB is working out quite well so far.

In 15 minutes I had imported what little bit I have done so far graphics-wise and set up some animations. Then I spent about 10 minutes figuring out the tilemap editor and I've roughed out a level a little bit after that. Now I've been messing around with the system as a whole and it's pretty sweet. I've got a test level and some pretty pretty water animations going in engine without having to touch a line of code or script.

Did I mention the super sweet water animations? Rad.

I hadn't played with this since it was called Torque 2D and I gotta say, it's like night and day. I can see the continuity between them, but it's just come so far since that first release. I'm definitely looking forward to getting further into this game.

Hey, maybe I'll finish something before another dead hard drive wipes me out. :)

Friday Oct 21 21:05

David Cobb — 2005-10-21T21:05:11+00:00

Field Crumpets Reloaded

So, after about three fourths of a year as a professional game developer I'm finally getting back into the swing of my own project at home. No one on this site would be familiar with it, so I'll just give a brief description.

It's a game based on a field sport that a few groups of my friends made up and play. www.fieldcrumpets.com To sum the game up, players chase the crumpet (a ball) around a field (similar to soccer) with crumpet sticks (husky hitter whiffle ball bats). No hands, no feet. Pushing and tripping are legal. All disputes are solved by farkling (rock, paper, scissors). It's full-contact, great exercise, and a blast to play.

I started this game as a summer project not last year, but the year before that. It was part of my "I'm going to finish a game damnit" initiative. In the end it became a demo on my job application. After I started work, I just didn't have the time or inclination to work on it. Now that I've got this college to work transition pretty much sorted, I'm getting that itch again. The siren song of lone wolf/indie game development.

I'm finding that this time spent as a professional programmer has immensely increased my productivity. My task velocity (time spent / time estimated) is around .68 for tasks estimated before I stopped working on it. For those unaquainted with the concept of task velocity it is simply a measure of the time it actually takes you to do something versus the time you think it would ideally take. In general the average is assumed to be around 3. These are all just estimates that I'm beating, but I really do think it would've taken me that long before to do some of these things.
Even though I've only really been back at it this week (last month I got the project set back up and got source control back online), I've made progress that I was worried wouldn't ever get made. Instead of the game taking a dismal year and a half to be even playable (according to my initial estimates), it's looking more in 3-6 month range for something significantly further along than I was thinking. Let's hear a round of applause for practice.

I'd finish this post with some screenshots, but I'm posting this remotely and to be quite honest, the graphics are pretty rough/temporary anyway. I'm going to be tinkering around with some improved graphics this weekend and if that pans out then I'll post them here. I'd post a demo but there are still gameplay bugs of doom that render the game almost pointless.

Oh and if anyone cares, this is not using Torque2D, but my own engine built on top of a number of libraries. I'll resume my playing around with Torque2D at some later time. Heh, might even post some screenshots from that instead. I like T2D, but TorqueScript isn't my favorite thing ever and I don't want to spent time porting something from a perfectly-capable engine to something else. Networking is really the main bullet on my list of things I want before I'll do any serious work with the engine.

Sunday Mar 6 10:07

David Cobb — 2005-03-06T10:07:32+00:00

I hate Torque2D

Yeah, that's right, you heard me. I hate Torque2D, but it's not like you're thinking. Now that I've got access to a pretty cool 2D engine (T2D) I'm finding it hard to decide what to actually make. I'm stuck in what you might call analysis paralysis. I've got a number of ideas, but none of them seem to be "the one." I can't make my mind up on which one to try and hack together a prototype for first. Either they're too small, too derivative, or too big. Mostly, I can't seem to get excited about any of them. I'm excited about particle effects, I'm excited about AI, I'm excited about pretty graphics...I'm just not into any of the ideas I've come up with so far.

I made the decision to just cut/paste/change the tutorial...that was 3 hours ago. I can't bring myself to remake what has already been made. It's crazy, I've almost forgotten everything I used to love about making or playing games. Heh, I guess that might be part of finally getting that real game job. Having your day job be making games just kinda sucks it out of you. Barely a professional and already sick of it.

I always assumed I would be a good game designer. I've got a couple good ideas for 2D games, but they're both dauntingly complex for a first project in an engine. Now i'm trying to come up with the smallest measurable unit of fun and I've got nothing. "Oooh, put the player in...a spaceship...with guns...and enemies...yeah." That's the best I've got and it's demotivating. I can't think of a single sufficiently simple hook for a tiny game. I believe the marketeers refer to that as a USP (unique selling point). Everything I can think of comes directly from some previous game that I either enjoyed or heard about. Nothing is new under the sun.

So I guess I hate Torque2D because it gives me the world and all I can give it is yet another shmup.

*goes to make a last ditch attempt to come up with some original ideas before sleep*